Articles: Relationship Marketing, Customer Loyalty, and Retention

Fresh Customer Marketing Articles

Two resources here:

1. The functionality of this page has been taken over by the blog; check out the blog here. Below is the pre-blog archive of the best Marketing Productivity, CRM, Customer Retention, and Relationship Marketing articles published all over the web from 2000 - 2006.

2. Blog topics generating high interest among subscribers fuel more detailed articles on the topic in the e-mail newsletter format; a list of all articles on the site can be found here.

***** Mining for Creative Ideas
December 21, 2006 Target Marketing
“Doing something” with the data seems to be the place everybody gets stuck. They can run reports, create segments and so forth, but then get bogged down with what to do next. This article talks about how the behavior you see in the database can be converted to creative execution for both B2B and B2C.

*** The New World of Sophistication
December 12, 2006 CRM Magazine
Article speaks to all the CRM activity focused on “improving the customer experience” in 2006. This is a fine (if not obvious) goal but I hope people are going to drop the silos and get cross-functional attitudes and analytics. The gnarliest customer experience problems are often cross-functional in nature because they don’t have an identifiable champion, so are allowed to fester and grow. This means solving these problems often generates the highest ROI of any customer-centric project being considered.

****Whose Business is Business
Process Improvement Anyway?
November 7, 2006 CIO Magazine
Companies again see business process management (BPM)—the practice of continually optimizing business processes through analysis, modeling and monitoring—as a systematic approach for solving business problems and helping them meet their financial goals. But who should be in charge, IT or the functional business managers?

***You Can Get to Know Your Guest
November 23, 2006 CRMGuru.com
Wide-ranging interview with Jim VonDerheide of Hilton Hotels covers increasing marketing productivity in a service business as well as the interface between marketing and IT.

***** Is Marketing ROI Dead?
October 26, 2006 Chief Marketer
No, it's not dead, but the focus of it is shifting from "Campaign ROI" to "Customer ROI" because the increase in profitability is so huge. Retention marketing finally comes of age.

**** Marketing Budgets: Zero Sum Wins
October 17, 2006 Chief Marketer
Marketing is finally being represented in a language the CFO understand. That's a concept I took a shot at five years ago and the whole "accountability" thing now seems to be playing out nicely for those with the data!

** Transactional Data: The Missing Ingredient
in Your Retail Marketing Strategy
October 8, 2006 Chief Marketer
This is a pretty solid article as it goes but then turns into a pitch for using cooperative databases in retail acquisition. Not a bad idea but old as the hills...still, I'm sure many people have not heard of it so here it is.

****Analytics in Perspective
September 22, 2006 Chief Marketer
Keeping analysis simple and relevant often provides the most powerful and actionable information. Avoid analysis paralysis!

**** Analysis without Numbers
September 09, 2006 Multi-Channel Merchant
Sometimes you simply do not have all the numbers you would like to have. Instead of giving up, do some intelligent guessing based on your experiences in the past.

*** Using LifeTime Value
August 27, 2006 DM Review
Good review of all the different ways LifeTime Value can be used to improve marketing ROI.

*** Top Marketers Forecast Spending Impact
August 6, 2006 Chief Marketer
Apparently there is a new breed of marketing person, one that is being labeled as "capable and confident". How do they get this way? They play by the numbers.

***** Service Advantage
July 18, 2006 Intelligent Enterprise
A great article with tangible examples of using customer analytics to improve service delivery. This is a classic high ROI situation and an example of the kinds of things marketing should be responsible for / paying attention to (see article below for more on this idea).

*** Getting in Synch
July 2, 2006 CIO Magazine
An interesting article from a former CIO with ideas on how to properly run the IT function. I think much of this applies to the Marketing function as well; I see too many marketing people who "silo themselves" and don't really understand the business. Some of the highest ROI marketing breakthroughs come from a full and complete understanding of the business.

*** Mine Data to Predict What Happens Next
June 28, 2006 Information Week
It's finally happening out there, people are using predictive modeling to predict everything from airline safety to patient care to crime. And you can bet that at the center of many of these models you will find Recency or Latency in some form. Can these simple models help your business increase sales / lower costs?

**** From Acorn to Mighty Oak
June 17, 2006 BI Review
This is a great story about a very simple idea - can a bank measure "customer convenience" using ATM and branch transactional data? And if so, can this data be leveraged to improve customer retention? Turns out the answer is yes to both questions - and a revolutionary change in the banking business model.

**** Creating Effective KPIs
June 8, 2006 DM Review
This is an excellent article on creating KPI's, speaks to both lagging and leading indicators. Also reviews pitfalls, provides examples, and takes the heretical view that KPI's must be tweaked over time, which I agree with. Hey, it's great that we're all finally monitoring the business, but let's do it right, OK?

** 10 Ways Process Excellence Impacts Corporate Performance Management
May 25, 2006 DM Review
Recently some of the CRM "gurus" have been talking about how you can't focus on process / apply Six Sigma -like discipline in the soft parts of a business like customer services and marketing. I beg to differ, as does this chap does while providing examples.

**** Take action on data
April 27, 2006 Multichannel Merchant
You've got the data, now what do you do with it? Some classic strategies that always seem to work, online or off - if you understand the psychology of the customer.

*** Unraveling Complexity
April 23, 2006 Knowledge@Wharton
Complexity causes friction. How can you go about optimizing your products and services, just like you are optimizing your web site? This set of 3 articles provides some leadership on the issue. The core idea behind reducing friction is a focus on the customer's Buying Process rather than your Selling Process.

**** Think Inside the Box
April 14, 2006 Catalog Success
It's really surprising how few online retailers take advantage of "the box" - the packages shipped to the customer. Off-liners have been optimizing the box for years, and this article outlines a lot of the best ideas.

*** What You Need to Know About Offers
April 7, 2006 Catalog Success
Offers is another area where the onliners could learn a few things from the offliners. Think you know how to measure the success of an offer? If you are relying on response rate, you're not even close. Learn the right way to make and measure offers do it in this article.

**** Pulling the Trigger
March 23, 2006 Multichannel Merchant
The off-liners are making great progress with integrating online marketing, but what about you onliners? Do you know how to drive profits with offline marketing sources? This is a pretty comprehensive look at one way to go about it. If you like using triggers for retention, you'll love using them for acquisition.

**** Multichannel challenge - better decisions through integrated tracking
March 12, 2006 Multichannel Merchant
So how good are you at tracking order source across your multi-channel view? This is an excellent article on advanced methods for sourcing orders back to origin. Beware, there is math involved...and you should learn it. Fear not, you can do it with your spreadsheet!

**** Competing on Analytics
February 20, 2006 Optimize Magazine
Now you're talking. This article blends some of the thinking in my "Six Sigma Everything" presentation to the 2005 eMetrics Summit and my article Creating Analytical Cultures, but from a different perspective. To the traditional list of business differentiators - product innovation, customer intimacy and operational excellence - can we add "analytics", meaning superior knowledge about customers and processes? Some in the web analytics community, for example here and here, seem to disagree with the core idea of "enterprise analytics". Well, I've seen this movie before, and I can tell the difference between "reporting" and "analysis". The first is non-rigorous and is built solidly around the principle of CYA. The second yields real intelligence on a macro scale.

*** Build Profit With Customer Segmentation
February 12, 2006 DM News
Arthur Middleton Hughes, a legend in the DM business, serves up an extremely complete description of all that should go into a proper customer segmentation plan. Need some help with defining those segments? To get the most actionable results, do not start with product and / or demographic characteristics; start with segmenting by behavior.

***** Lean Machine
January 19, 2006 CMO Magazine
This is a fantastic piece on a large scale Six Sigma Marketing implementation at Xerox. The bottom line: it can be done and you could save millions doing it.

See "Classics" Article List
(more articles on the web outside this site)

List of Articles on this Site

Past Drilling Down Newsletters

Customer Marketing Tutorials

Making Money with the Customer LifeCycle: Trip Wire Marketing (4 pages)

Comparing the Potential Value of
Customer Groups (5 pages)

Advanced Topics

Marketing Productivity Series

Six Sigma Marketing

Recency: The Web Retailing Example

Case Study: Non-Profit Scores 192%
Increase in ROI using RFM Model

Latency: The B2B Software Example

Latency: The Hair Salon Example