Accountability + Customer Communication Strategy

How do you keep the stakeholders accountable for implementing the customer communication strategy? Here are some valuable ideas.

By Pat McGrew, EDP, Kodak

In my last column, we learned that a customer communication strategy is essential to ensuring that your customers get your intended messages, but getting alignment across all stakeholders may be a difficult task. No matter how large or how small the company, it is likely that there will be some passion around who owns outbound messaging and how it should be implemented. That can lead to more than a few challenges when you ask the organization to change how it thinks about outbound messaging and consider using more than the channels it has been accustomed to using.

We started with the premise that using bills, statements, notices and other transaction communication as a fully participating member of the outbound marketing toolkit—some call this TransPromo—can be a viable option. We identified that it takes a strategy to produce reliable results that justify the investment. The strategy has to take in data, color and color management, marketing offer development and management, and final delivery to the customer. That delivery might be on paper, but it might also be online. More commonly, it’s both!

With that as the baseline, how do you get everyone on board with a customer communication strategy that incorporates a new marketing channel? Using the same Crawl-Walk-Run scheme we’ve used in the past. Here’s how it works:

Crawl
This is the hardest step, and the most important. The starting point is evaluating the current situation. Are all marketing constituencies already working together? That means the marketing—web, email, search engine, mass media, and direct mail. Is on-statement marketing already in play?

Who owns the marketing message? Is there already accountability among the marketing teams? What happens if a team goes off message? You need a plan before you can achieve full accountability.

If the answer is that no one is sure, or if there is disagreement about ownership, the Crawl step is the place to resolve these issues. A customer communication strategy requires that everyone knows the long-term goals of the messaging to the consumer and that the group has identified where it is rigid and where it is flexible.

Once you know who the players are and have the ground rules set, it’s time to pick up the pace. But, don’t move on unless the ground rules are set!

Walk
Marketing budgets are allocated based on the effectiveness of the campaign. That means that every channel should be scrutinized and held accountable for performance. Just because you have ALWAYS used mass marketing, Free Standing Inserts, or even direct mail doesn’t mean it’s the best value for your budget. This is the time to take that hard look and see what really works. And, if you send transaction statements and other regulatory information to your customers, this is the time to see if you can consolidate some of your marketing costs with the transaction costs.

How can you tell if it works?  First, you have to know where you are. Then you need to run a pilot with several variations to see if your marketing messages to existing customers can migrate to your transaction conversation space. Try color, try monochrome, try high-concept and try text! Then you need to evaluate the response. This is not a one-shot effort. This is something you want to plan for six months to get a good feeling. Yes, that is a risk.

Using the results of the pilot and the known situation regarding other advertising and marketing, it’s time to make the hard decisions. But, don’t move on unless you have done the evaluation and the team has agreed to let the known results guide the further implementation of the strategy.

Run
It’s time to run.

What worked? Did the marketing on the bills actually work, or have you seen no real response? Different industries, different verticals, and even different brands will have different responses and accountability demands some honesty. It comes down to right-sizing the spend and not adopting a new marketing channel because it’s getting some industry buzz.

Remember, we are talking about a customer communication strategy and how to hold everyone accountable. Take the time to test every premise, test every channel and set up a plan to do on-going, incremental evaluation. It’s the best way to keep everyone accountable and keep the marketing messages effective.

What’s the next trick? Getting everyone to stick to it! We’ll explore more ideas on how to make a customer communication strategy work in coming months.

Pat McGrew, EDP, is the Data-driven Communication Evangelist at Kodak. Her email address is Pat.McGrew@kodak.com, Twitter is @PatMcGrew, and blog at http://patmcgrew.growyourbiz.kodak.com.