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In This Section
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P.C. (Pat) McGrew, EDP is the Data Center & Transaction Segment Evangelist in the Graphic Communications Group at Eastman Kodak working worldwide to support the needs of customers involved in high-speed, data-driven customer communication. As the evangelist for TransPromo and other effective customer communication techniques she also works with the Kodak product groups and regions supporting solutions to enhance customer success. She is the co-author of 7 books covering information and multi-channel document delivery, and the author of research studies and articles covering business continuity, disaster recovery, print-and-mail innovations, compliance issues, document strategy auditing, and the worldwide statement printing markets.
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Thinking Multi-Channel and Integrated
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Pat McGrewMcGrew's Communicating with Color
It's become like the elephant in the room or the gorilla in the elevator that no one wants to talk about. We know color is critical to good customer communication, but if we open up the discussion about how to use it effectively we quickly get into discussions about people, processes, and price tags. This column puts it all in perspective, with topics each month designed to help you guide the color discussion in your organization. We'll look at the right questions to ask and provide guidance on how to research the answers that are right for your organization.
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Thinking Multi-Channel and Integrated
Multi-channel is more than print plus internet
By Pat McGrew, EDP, Kodak
Beyond the ability to create compelling campaigns that return measurable business advantage, every company seems to be struggling with how to speak with a single voice to their customer. There is often a sizeable budget assigned to studying the problem, and even more money spent on trying to solve the problem by buying new software. In fact, the simple things may work best, and they start with ensuring that the monthly conversation you are having with your customer is the same across all of the media they use to maintain their relationship with you.
By now most of you know that the modern composition systems such as GMC PrintNet, HP/Exstream Dialogue, Document Science Expresso, and similar products can already handle your multi-channel output needs. They let you design a campaign, set your messaging based on data triggers, and ensure that there is consistency of message in your e-mails, direct mail and high volume transaction output/mid volume transaction output bills and statements.
While we all know it, how many of you are actually using those capabilities? Many of you may answer that you are, but many more are likely to say that you don’t actually know if you are. If you value your marketing budget, this would be a good time to find out if you are maximizing the tools you have to get the most out of them.
Now let’s take it a step farther. Did you know that most of these products will also let you build coordinating campaigns that roll out through SMS (text messaging)? With a little work, you can also coordinate banners that run on partner web pages, social media campaigns via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and specialized social media networks.
Why Is This Important?
Because your customers are living in a multi-channel world, and they are paying attention to the inconsistencies in your messaging to them. Saying one thing on your billing statement, but something different on your web page causes doubt in your customer’s mind. As you attempt to increase wallet share, decrease customer churn, and grow market share, simple mistakes such as offering different prices for a service through different communication channels can drive customers away. Creating an integrated customer communication strategy that leverages the power of each available channel and uses a single, campaign-managed front end can ensure consistency of message and ultimately reduce the costs of communicating with each customer. It can also drive the value of each customer response up from the current baseline.
Think about the next campaign you plan to run. Have you accounted for all of the ways you can communicate with your customer? Are you using the tools you have to communicate as comprehensively as possible?
Let me know if you have questions!
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/
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