By Ian Davidson, vice president of Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies (DMT) International
When it comes to marketing and communications, the landscape is in a period of transition. The power has shifted to the consumer.
Analysts estimate that every consumer is exposed to around 3,000 advertising messages each day. In the midst of this information overload, we are now far more selective about what reaches us as consumers and what doesn’t.
Today’s empowered consumer is more time-pressured, more bombarded with messaging and, crucially, more in control over what gets through and what ends up ignored, deleted or in the bin.
Blogging tools and social networking sites mean that we’re no longer simply media recipients, we’re media creators too. If we can set our own agendas why should we tolerate those companies that get their own messaging hopelessly wrong? And for those that do get it wrong, new alternatives are simply a mouse-click or a text message away. It’s never been so easy to defect – loyalty is hard-earned and hard-maintained.
It takes relevance to break through the marketing clutter. Demonstrating relevance – not once, but time and time again – leads to trust. And customer trust is gold-dust.
Without integration across the print and mail operation, it is unlikely that businesses will ever achieve the level of communication sophistication required to satisfy today’s audience.
Only through integration can businesses create messages that are sophisticated enough to meet the exacting standards of today’s all-powerful consumer
Integration is critical for three reasons – to optimise, economise and outperform. Only through intelligent integration of print and mail can organisations truly be said to be achieving maximum efficiency, quality and return on investment with their customer communications. Integration adds value at a time when there is pressure on every single communication to deliver. And only through integration can businesses create messages that are sophisticated enough to meet the exacting standards of today’s all-powerful consumer.
If we look at the broader picture we see that integration is about more than harnessing the synergies of print and mail. It’s about bringing marketing together with operations to create more fluid and dynamic messaging. It’s about bringing transactional documents and marketing messages together to create new ways of engaging the customer – the transpromo phenomenon. And it’s about having the processes in place to ensure that every communication is a new opportunity.
Businesses face a dilemma. The target is to strengthen one-to-one customer relationships and grow revenue. But managing the constantly increasing volume of individual transactions with growing numbers of customers can make it difficult for businesses to hold the line on costs.
Only through integration - applying higher levels of communication intelligence to every step of the customer communication management process - can an organisation provide "mass personalisation“ while meeting the dual goals of revenue enhancement and cost reduction.
Integration is providing the tools to deliver communications that are helping businesses to earn this customer trust and loyalty. Nurturing existing customers not only provides stability but can lead to impressive growth. Take this quote from Infotrends, "just a 5% growth in current customer business can equate to as much as a 50% profit in bottom-line profits" - that’s a model worth adopting.
The technology to integrate is out there, and it doesn’t necessitate a radical overhaul of current processes. Building step-by-step, at your own pace, towards this end-to-end integrated communications model brings you ahead of the game.
