The 6 Most Common Myths (2019)On today’s episode, we have Mike Ferranti, Founder and CEO of Endai. Damian and Mike cover omni channel marketing automation and automation considerations along the entire customer journey. Damian also asks Mike to debunk the most common marketing automation myths. To wrap up, Mike shares a story about when marketing automation went badly for a large retailer.Mike begins by answering the question, “What is Marketing Automation?” He starts with a high-level overview and breaks it down into the steps that every business needs to take to successfully implement an omni channel approach to marketing automation.Mike and Damien then debate the strategic value of Marketing Automation. Mike drills home the fact that companies need to identify their goals and structure their strategy around them. Mike pinpoints efficiency as the most common value created by marketing automation. He then highlights a few marketing touches that are more or less impossible without automation, such as cart abandonment emails.In response to Damian’s query, “How do you Get Started?” Mike responds with a rule he lives by: “Start anywhere, go everywhere.”Damian then asks Mike to debunk each of these myths:* Marketing automation is only for email.* Automation is not as good as a personal touch. “It is the lazy and ineffective way out.”* Automation is too impersonal.* It’s “one and done.”* It’s only for sales and prospect nurturing.* Marketers should automate everything.The episode ends with an example from Mike on how marketing automation can go wrong.What follows is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 6 of the Inevitable Success Podcast with Damian Bergamaschi and special guest Mike Ferranti.What is Marketing Automation?Mike: You can’t talk about marketing automation anymore without talking about omni channel marketing automation. I think about two years ago now is when we first really began to hear the increasing need—particularly for brands that had a “brick and click” presence—to begin to unify the customer experience, the communication across those channels. And the reason is logical.You go into a store, you make a purchase, and then you try to engage online. Customers must now go over to a whole different channel, and it takes longer. Oftentimes folks don’t even know what you’re talking about. The bigger brands were on this early—I would say the Gap companies did a great job early. I think they were among the first that allowed you to make a purchase online and then walk into the store and return it. Now that is an experience that is very pro-consumer. Could that have some impact on or costs for the retailer, the marketer? Sure, it could.When you make it easy for the customer to engage with you, you make it easier to have a better relationship with them. At the end of the day, managing and growing that customer relationship is really the end-driver. That’s the goal behind omni channel marketing initiatives and automating those steps, those communications, across channels. That obviously makes for a better experience for the individual as well. So it’s a very timely subject, and marketing automation, of course, isn’t new, but doing it across channels is a little bit newer for a lot of brands.The Steps of Marketing AutomationMike: If you take a high-level view, you’re really thinking about, What is the customer experience or the customer journey? A good way to think about it is, before they’re a customer they’re a prospect, and they may express interest. They see your display advertising, or maybe they receive your catalog because they were on a prospect list, but they take some action. Of course the best way to measure that action is still online. That is why most catalog sales today will drive you to the Websi...

BROADCASTING VS NARROWCASTING

Customer acquisition costs continue to rise aggressively, and that trend shows no signs of stopping. Today we discuss broadcasting versus narrowcasting to explore alternative strategic approaches that get more with less. Moreover, Mike Ferranti will cover five steps that you can take now to address the realities of aggressive customer growth targets.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 5 of the Inevitable Success Podcast with Damian Bergamaschi and special guest Mike Ferranti.

Transcript

Customer Acquisition in 2018

Damian: It’s just the beginning of the year 2018. We have Q4 behind us. What are you hearing from marketers about their marketing initiatives and plans in 2018?

Mike: That’s a very timely question. I guess there are a few things: Across the board—and I’m talking to lots of folks—there are a few major themes. For one, this is the year they’re going to get their data act together, and it doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a hundred-billion-dollar conglomerate or the 50-million-dollar middle market business. One approach is to evolve it to a level that they always wanted to be at; a lot of brands have been working on this for the last few years. It started several years ago when the term Big Data first splashed upon the scene. They want to use that data to inform their relationships with customers to grow revenue and profit.

Another thing that many brands are thinking about is customer acquisition. It was expensive last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that. It’s expensive this year, and probably more so as bid-based systems have taken over digital, and digital has continued to take over advertising. The more bidders you have, the more expensive it gets.

Damian: There were recently a few studies—put out independently on Google—that show that the cost per acquisition in each respective industry has been going up materially.

Mike: That’s not likely to change. Competition is going to be greater as a result. The bar is higher. It’s a wonderful thing if your name rhymes with either Google or Facebook.

It’s a big challenge when we have this perfectly competitive situation, just like when there are lots of participants in the stock market, P-E multiples tend to swell. In our industry as marketers, CPA, CPO, or cost-per-customer-acquired tends to swell as there are many more participants. That’s on everybody’s mind right now because in a good economy with a lot of access to capital any brand right now is trying to become more ambitious—because of course they want to grow when things are good. Unfortunately, that means they also have higher costs of acquisition. Brands are really trying to sort that out. They’re trying to use data on things like programmatic and CRM to improve their cost per order and improve the customers that they acquire.

Budgeting for Customer Acquisition

Damian: Do you hear that they are adjusting their plan based on their ideas about where the economy is now, and where it’s going?

Mike: Going back a couple of years, there was some boardroom speculation that things are good until they’re not. I think a lot of brands that we deal with—and this is an overhang since the Great Recession—have ambition, but they’re careful. They wish to couple that ambition with discipline. In digital and in measured marketing that means having great analytics, clear targets, and clear expectations of what marketing should do. That puts some pressure on the marketers as well.

Damian: So what are some of the things that these marketers are doing to deal with that...

FULL PRICE VS DISCOUNT BUYERSWhat follows is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 4 of the Inevitable Success Podcast with Damian Bergamaschi and special guest Mike Ferranti. How could you use purchase history to better understand your customer base?Today Mike Ferranti walks us through just that with a holistic marketing strategy to maximize both profit margins and profit volume for any business especially retailers. Turning the tide starts with understanding how we the marketer can have a material impact on profit margins if we tailor our approach to both full-price and discount buyers respectively. As a bonus, we will also share a simple winning email tactic that maximizes the value of your best customer and by the way, most marketers are not doing this.“The reason we had you on today is that we read your recent article named ‘Full priced customers, How to get and keep them‘ and wanted to go deeper on that topic. Can you share with us why you went there?”Like the answer to many questions, it starts with customers. Going back to the recession, which I guess we bottomed in around 2009 retailers were under tremendous pressure. And so, what was their highest performing Channel? What was the vehicle that was easiest to access revenue through? Of course, it’s e-mail right. Low cost, reasonably good impact, good response, and when you send enough of it eventually your response rates will start to dial down. Now we saw some similarities in the use of direct mail but of course, it’s a much higher cost medium. Brands were looking to get more response and times were tough so what did they do? Well it’s simple they discounted and they discounted and they discounted and they discounted. The upshot of that is kind of what you might expect really, that becomes habit forming that becomes an expectation and once an individual is expecting the discount then there’s a behavior that is very measurable and the results will make most retailers very uncomfortable when they have the resolution to see it. And that is the consumer starts to wait and defer purchasing until the discount comes.“What are ways that they could know that it’s happening, that they can measure it. You know you mentioned the results.”The first dichotomy that you look at is who are the customers that bought a discount? Who are the customers that bought at full price? So, one of the things we were always surprised to see is the number of brands that didn’t have dexterity with their customer data to answer that question at any point in time. You know one size fits all or batch and blast is still the predominant form of outbound marketing even today. Why? It’s easy.That’s the biggest thing, it’s easy number one and number two when the costs of the campaign are so low an email is the primary culprit here.It’s not email that’s the culprit it’s the marketer’s decision making based on resources they have, timing etc. But when they make that decision to just batch and blast and not really discern between those two and to be fair that’s usually driven by the fact that the level of effort to get that information would be significant for many brands. And so, I might not have been so surprised when you know a 50 million dollar brands struggled to get that answer and execute accordingly. You have conversations with executives at 50 billion dollar businesses and some of them say the same thing. That’s really the driver it’s you know the perceived impact in the moment is always quite low the pressure to act and drive that sale is always high.

What is Data Governance?Data Governance may be defined as the overall process used to manage data in an organization. Management activities include acquiring and organizing data, data cleansing and integrity, database management, data security and communications within an organization regarding these functions.What follows is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 3 of the Inevitable Success Podcast with Damian Bergamaschi and special guest Gary Beck. TranscriptDamian: Today we cover how to make sense of your customer data. As marketers, every stimulus causes either action or inaction even the absence of data is data. Let’s dig in with resident customer data expert Gary Beck.Gary: Damian thanks again for having me today. It’s always a pleasure.Damian: So Gary, probably the best place to start is I am a brand, I’m getting transactions, I have email databases, where else can all this data come from? What are the sources? Where does that come from Gary?Gary: Well, data comes from all sorts of places. There are times when I will start to work with clients and ask clients that very same question. “What kinds of data do you have?” “Where do you keep it?” There have been times where a person will start the conversation by saying “Well we have warranty cards” and I will then ask the logical question, Can we get access to the warranty cards?” and there have been times when clients have pulled a box out from under their desk and provided me with a box of warranty cards.Gary: “Here are the latest people that have filed or submitted these warranty cards” and that box of warranty cards is the beginnings of a database. We can’t retrieve information electronically from it yet. But it is a collection of customers.Gary: So any collection of information that we retrieve for the purposes of tracking customers is a database of sorts. But of course, in our business today we want to digitize all that information and make that information retrievable and extract intelligence from it. Sometimes customer databases are maintained in Excel files for example. Then, of course, there are the times when we have sophisticated database management systems that organize the data, allow us to query it, and give us the ability to categorize information in a way that is relevant to our business.Gary: There are many different types of data. We can talk about it from a business perspective and then we can touch on some of the technology associated with it. From a business perspective, there’s personal information or information that allows us to address customers directly. So, things like your email address, your postal address, or your telephone number. All of that is personal, addressable information.Damian: Like P.I.I. type data.Gary: You have personally identifiable information. Absolutely. There is transaction information. What have you purchased from us? When did you purchase it? How much did you pay for it? Did you have to return it for any reason? What are the dates for all those events? That transaction information is very valuable information.Gary: We have promotion history information and promotion history information might be the most valuable information of all and is frequently the information that we don’t always have complete data about.Damian: Can you give me an example of that type of data?Gary: Promotion history information includes the type of communications that were sent to you, perhaps via e-mail or perhaps by direct mail. It includes the date and time if we can get that. It includes the creative treatment. So, what was the actual collateral that was exposed to the c...

Maximizing Customer Value Through SegmentationCustomer segmentation allows us to create groups of customers that behave similarly in response to marketing treatments. By marketing to homogeneous segments, we can customize the persuasion process and maximize the lifetime value of customers.This is segment two of our talk about database marketing and this segment we’re going to focus on Customer Lifetime Value Maximization through Segmentation.What follows is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 2 of the Inevitable Success Podcast with Damian Bergamaschi and special guest Gary Beck,TranscriptDamian:  To drive game-changing growth marketers must be focused on understanding their customer. Today, resident expert Gary Beck shows us how.All right, glad to have you back Gary.Gary: Thanks for having me, Damian.Demographic SegmentationDamian:  This segment we’re going to focus around is getting to the root of customers, how to understand the customers in your database, and what you could do once you know who they are. The very first thing and we hear this a lot when we sit down with clients. Being in the database space for BuyerGenomics brands don’t know, even big ones, don’t know how many customers they have. They think they do when they sit and think about it they don’t. Have you ever experienced that?Gary: I have and it’s a great point. One of the fundamental challenges that many companies have is knowing the quality of the data that they have and being able to, to your point, count the number of customers – so, how many customers do I have? If there are data hygiene issues, there can be a real challenge in understanding what the customer base looks like.One of the first things that many companies will do when they ask that question, how many customers do I have, is they will first clean up their database. That will address issues such as misspellings in a customer’s name or incorrect address information that may not have been put into the system correctly. That cleanup process is usually one of the very first things that we will do.There’s also a fundamental question of, how many households are on the database?Damian:  Well that’s a great point. Could you go into detail more about that, what is a household versus a customer?Gary: Of course. So, when we look at customers we frequently will find customers who are, let’s say, a man and wife or a couple of some sort.They will use one email address for an account to conduct transactions yet we have two different customers in the universe. They will frequently show up as two different customers in a retail database that has not been processed through a traditional name and address hygiene processing system. So, one of the first steps is to make that decision concerning counting individuals or counting households, or counting accounts. There are implications in terms of how we market to people after that. For example, many traditional mailers will seek to only send one expensive catalog mailing per household if we suspect that everybody in the household will share that collateral.Typically, there’s really no need to incur the additional expense associated with multiple catalogs to the same household. So traditionally catalog marketers have marketed based on a household basis. Digital marketers who can see different behaviors by the individual might choose to organize their database based on individuals, giving them the added leverage of understanding how to communicate to one person of a household versus another person of a household who might be purchasing different products.Damian:  I can totally see the value of not getting the same catalog to your mailbox. That ultimately probably it’s really one person that householder’s who was dr...

Defining a CRM StrategyCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term that refers to the practices, technology, systems, and strategies associated with managing your customer through the customer lifecycle. The goal of CRM is to maximize customer lifetime value and relationships over time.CRM is perhaps, in my mind, one of the most misunderstood terms in marketing today. As I think about it, it is a rare event when I pick up a marketing publication and I don’t see something about CRM. Frequently, articles reveal frustration on the parts of authors at organizations who have missed their objectives as it relates to CRM. Part of the disconnect is simply because CRM does mean so many different things to different people.What follows is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 1 of the Inevitable Success Podcast with Damian Bergamaschi and special guest Gary Beck. (Listen Here)How do you develop a CRM strategy?Whenever I think about building a roadmap for CRM, it begins with defining clear business objectives and goals. The goals should be associated with both short-term and long-term objectives. In fact, frequently the driver of CRM is tied to creating the right customer experience over time. And certainly, if we have the right customer experience, our customers are going to be more satisfied and tell their friends about their successful relationship with our products or services. At the same time, they will buy more from us because they are satisfied. So, it makes sense to orchestrate the customer experience in a way that is best for our customers.Frequently, CRM programs and techniques are used to collect the information necessary to understand the current customer experience. This understanding allows us to know where we are being successful, while identifying those areas that need to be improved.There are typically four phases when we think about building a roadmap for CRM success. The first phase is a discovery phase. This includes identifying goals and objectives. It also typically includes some data exploration and understanding the assets that we currently have so that we can better create those goals and set meaningful metrics at this point in time.During the discovery process, no matter how small or large the company, we frequently have stakeholder interviews. It’s important to discuss ideas and create consensus regarding where we want CRM, the customer experience, and the customer relationship to go.Executing a CRM StrategyThe marketing department obviously has to take a leadership role, and they will need help across the organization. We need to have finance involved so that we understand the cost parameters associated with all of the activities that we’re thinking about in the future. We know of course we need our Information Technology organization because so much of what we’ll be talking about involves technology delivery to help guide these customer relationships over time.We also need customer service and the sales organization. In fact, any place where we touch a customer with communications, any department that has that interaction needs to be involved in a CRM initiative. Finally, people from product need to be involved. So, both those who are managing current products and understand them inside out and those who are developing the next wave of products, because as we think about CRM, as we think about the future, we want to incorporate where the company is going as well as what we’re offering today.It is imperative that top leadership within a company embrace any CRM initiative. And embrace the goals associated with those initiatives because there are ...