Blog : CRM

B2Me Marketing: What’s it all about

B2Me Marketing: What’s it all about

B2Me Marketing – helping people make better choices and get more enjoyment from whatever they buy.

As consumers, we are constantly faced with the challenges of too many choices and too much information broadcast across a cluttered and fragmented media landscape. Any attempt to guide people through their customer journey is totally useless if we can’t deliver the right message at the right time.

This short video explains how personalization can play en important role by increasing the relevance of your marketing messages. Personalization helps your customers make the informed choices that are best for them. In doing so, they will get more enjoyment out of everything they buy from you.

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ROI and Effectiveness – Do You Truly Understand the Difference?

ROI and Effectiveness – Do You Truly Understand the Difference?

Do you understand these common metrics?

Because of the tremendous economic pressures since the downturn, and the need for marketing accountability, ROI has now become Marketing’s new Holy Grail. However, effectiveness and ROI are not synonymous, though many marketers perceive it to be so.

ROI is the efficiency with which a marketing activities produces a result. ROI calculates the revenue generated for each dollar invested.

Efficiency and effectiveness – what’s the big difference?

The fact that a given media, or marketing activity is efficient – meaning that the cost per dollar of sales generated is low – doesn’t automatically make this media or activity a better choice relative to others with a lower level of efficiency. Obviously, you want both. But you can’t always get what you want!

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Do you and your customers speak the same language?

One of the guiding principles of B2Me is to use simple language and familiar terms in order to clearly communicate what you need to say to your customers. Get rid of jargon and marketing speak — Make it a priority!

American insurer Cygna clearly understands the importance of simple and effective communication. The company prides itself on systematically simplifying the language it uses in its marketing communication and more important, in its contact between their employees and customers.

If you’re trying to persuade people to do or buy something, it seems to me you should use the language they use every day. -David Ogilvy

To help achieve this goal, they created a program for first-line staff that dictates what words should be used to describe insurance concepts, products, terms and conditions. The program is called “Let’s be clear”, and is designed to help employees “translate” the obscure language of the insurance industry into plain English.

Here are a few examples: “you” instead of “claimant”, “process your claim for payment” instead of “adjudication” and “start date” instead of “activation”.

The goal is to make customers feel comfortable, to create a climate of trust and allow the customer to feel valued – not diminished by the use of language they don’t understand.

Cigna even created a website that provides a dictionary of common insurance terms and their translation into plain English in order to be clearly understood by a customer.

At the end of the day, it simply a question of respect for “me”, the customer. Do you speak the same language as your customer? Or are you forcing your customers to speak yours?

Five benefits of B2Me™ on RetailExperience.com

There’s an interesting article on B2Me™ on the Retail Experience Blog, by Paul Flanigan, former director of brand communications for Best Buy.
Here are a few lines from his post:

We have all heard B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer). But this has now evolved into B2ME. The simple definition is the practice of marketing to the individual based on the desires of that individual. It’s not about closing a sale, it’s about developing a relationship with every single unique individual.

This doesn’t (or shouldn’t) seem like a new way to market. We have been doing this all along, right? Well, the advent of personal technology has quite a bit to do with it. Marketing has had to catch up with individuals who are mobile, savvy, and in control of the sales cycle in pretty much every type of buyer/seller relationship.

Read more on RetailExperience.com

How much is a customer worth? Probably more than you think!

How much is a customer worth? Probably more than you think!

When you look at marketing from a purely transactional perspective, you often lose sight of an important dimension: the long-term value of a customer. Or more precisely, the cumulative net revenue that a customer provides during the “lifetime” of the relationship between the customer and a business, or a brand.

This transaction perspective focuses on the immediate sale of good and services through marketing campaigns of all nature. From that point of view, the customer value is equal to the amount of the sale produced as a result of that campaign. Transactional marketers will work to reduce the cost per transaction in order to maximize short term revenue. Nothing wrong with increasing revenue… far from it. But this narrow vision often forces us to make choices that as purely short-term.

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Where all those choices got started… according to Malcolm Gladwell

Where all those choices got started… according to Malcolm Gladwell

As a fan of all things Gladwell, I would like to share with you this excellent video produced by TED TV that chronicles the history of how Howard Moskowitz changed the way we shop for groceries — a change that led to the avalanche of choices that we face in our lives, day-to-day. Presented in typical Gladwellian style, this is a fascinating tale of innovation that began in the ’80s.

The unexpected impact of choice on customer satisfaction

The unexpected impact of choice on customer satisfaction

 

In this video from TED TV, american social psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice explains the negative impact of choice – or more precisely, the impact of too much choice – on our level of satisfaction with the things we buy in our day-to-day lives.

Unrealistic expectations, or persisting doubt over the choices we make: these are the reasons why we must limit the number of products and services we offer our customers. By personalizing content and product recommendations, B2Me allows us to reduce the number of products suggested to a limited set or a single item that best suit the customer’s needs… One customer at a time!

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