5 Best Practices to Make Loyalty More Meaningful

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What’s the formula for success for marketers seeking to facilitate loyalty? I recently shared best practices with 1to1 Media on building loyalty. Here are five winning moves for bringing this formula to fruition:

1. Eliminate the Word “Channel” and Replace with “Customer”: Customers don’t think in terms of channel, so brands shouldn’t see them that way either. Strive to recognize customer activity across multiple channels so that most valued customers feel valued.

2. Smartly Move Beyond a Strictly Transactional Relationship: Make the customer experience more robust by facilitating engagement with touches outside the transaction. These types of interactions enable brands to reach out to the audience with meaningful content and collect valuable data in the process.

3. Understand What Data Is Important: Each data source is individually identifiable, but which data points are relevant? Which are not? The new sweet spot of marketing lies where relevant value, authentic dialogue and ubiquitous experience converge.

4. Demand and Facilitate Partner Alignment: A strong alignment among partners is a critical ingredient for a brand’s success. The brand brings a clear definition of roles and responsibilities and the partners must embrace their roles and foster strong ties across the network to ensure success. Together they create the loyalty ecosystem, which is the result of establishing and maintaining one version of the customer.

5. Commit to the Importance of the Customer Experience: Brands today not only live in the merchandise and the shopping experience, but also in what happens after the customer leaves the retail store or website. Use known data to be relevant, timely and appropriate and customers will become and stay more loyal.

Brands that seek to integrate these steps into their strategies are more likely to find and maintain loyalty among valued customers.

Read the entire article in 1to1 Media

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Making History in Email Marketing

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Email MarketingWe all know that engaged customers buy, so it is critical to keep the consumer in a dialog before, during and after a purchase is made. Email connects customers with a brand, inspiring and motivating action. And because the channel is constantly evolving and our team works diligently to stay ahead of trends and create engaging campaigns that also drive business impact. That is evident in this year’s unprecedented win of three MarketingSherpa Email Awards with Sony Electronics. The honor includes:

  • A Gold Award in Email Innovation for a campaign that integrated the email strategy with Sony’s social strategy,
  • A Silver Award in Best Promotional Email or Campaign for a Black Friday/Cyber Monday email program that generated a 53-percent increase in revenue for the holiday shopping period, and
  • An Honorable Mention in Best Triggered Email for a new customer triggered email campaign that streamlined more than 70 email versions into three dynamic email templates, enabling both better brand interaction and relevancy in messaging.

We couldn’t be more proud of our team or happier to be working in collaboration with such an innovative brand.
Read the press release announcing the win
Read the report from MarketingSherpa on all the winners.

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Predictive Analytics at Data Driven Marketing Conference

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What marketer wouldn’t want to be able to see into the future to gain the most value from the customer-base? What many don’t realize is that predicting the future may not be as far-fetched as it may seem. By leveraging various data points, predictive analytics can provide marketers with valuable insight into everything from who is likely to buy to what type of customer is likely to be most valuable to the brand – and no crystal ball is required.

At the upcoming OMMA Data Driven Marketing (DDM) conference, Dan Rubin, SVP of Analytics for The Agency Inside, will be participating in a panel discussion, The Next Big Thing…Squared: Seeing a Future to Predictive Analytics. Although Big Data will be a focus at this conference, Dan will bring the perspective of how customer-level data can be leveraged with predictive modeling to identify and segment customers to produce the greatest customer value.

DDM takes place on Wednesday, January 23rd in New York City. The panel on predictive analytics will begin at 3:15 pm.
To learn more about the DDM conference or to register.

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Data Developer’s Holiday Wish List

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Ever wonder what to get the developer who has everything?! Well, wonder no more. Several data developers, including our own Sean Iannuzzi, shared their “wants” with Visual Studio Magazine. I’m not sure if all their wishes came true this holiday season, but if not, you have a good starting point for next year. Well, that’s assuming that you know a store that has a way for certain fields in data contracts to be marked for different levels of return options and annotate the data fields with levels that would control when it would be included with the return set. Until then, I guess they’ll have to settle for fruitcake!
Read the article on Visual Studio Magazine’s site

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Named Among Leading Edge Strong Performers in The Forrester Wave™

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The Agency Inside was one of more than 50 agencies that Forrester invited to participate in their latest Wave report.  Forrester ultimately included 13 of those agencies in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Engagement Agencies.

The report characterized the landscape of customer engagement agencies (CEAs) as an emerging market and defined CEAs as “agencies that focus on customer-oriented business strategies and mapping them to tactics and execution. They help clients maximize customer profitability and optimize customer experiences by applying data and analytics to every customer interaction.”

Forrester placed The Agency Inside as one of the vendors on the leading edge of those classified as Strong Performers because, “They outperform their category peers in developing proactive business strategy and they tend to have a slight advantage when it comes to cross-channel enablement and execution.” The Agency Inside’s top scores were for customer (client) satisfaction, customer data strategies and technology integration.

Congratulations to our talented staff for this great recognition, and a big thank you to all of our clients who participated in the evaluation process. We couldn’t have gotten where we are today without you.

Read the press release
Download the full report

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Luxury Cars & Fine Wines

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How do you convince luxury car buyers to think of what was once an economical brand as a luxury brand? See how mobile applications, social media, email, direct mail and California wines told a compelling story and created a sophisticated experience for potential luxury car buyers.

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Leveraging Technologies for Innovative Solutions

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Like most developers, I try to leverage combinations of technologies to provide the most effective outcome. So, when I was recently faced with needing to create a secure Web service for an existing database and Web application, I looked for a way to achieve my objective as efficiently as possible while also providing a flexible, easy-to-maintain solution. Not always the easiest task, particularly when the project requires data to be exposed quickly and securely.

I shared my thought process and how I actually accomplished this using the Open Data Protocol (OData), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) RESTful services and Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) in MSDN Magazine’s October issue. Take a look and reach out if you have any questions.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj658971.aspx

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Mobile Engagement: The New Marketing Battleground

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Mobile EngagementMobile consumers are engaged, on the go and ready for anything. Today’s marketers must jump on board the mobile movement and meet the needs of  consumers wherever, whenever the customer wants if they are to keep pace in an omnichannel environment.

Join us for this final webinar installment in our Make CRM Work Harder series this Thursday, November 29th at 2pm ET/11am PT. Learn why mobile matters more than ever for consumers and marketers, how to ensure mobile readiness, the importance of mobile preference centers, and much more.

The Make CRM Work Harder series explores CRM and relationship marketing in an integrated multichannel age, including how the consumer’s path to purchase is changing, how email can be used as a connector between contacts and brands and how mobile can be leveraged to build consumer engagement. All webinar registrants will receive access to our white paper on the subject – Make CRM Work Harder: The ‘New Normal’ for Consumers and Marketers.

If you missed the other webinars in this series you can view them on-demand on the Harte-Hanks Web site:
The New Consumer Path to Purchase
The Changing Role of Email: Going Beyond the Broadcast

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Data is King

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I use an app called Zite and in the evenings I read all about what’s new in social media, marketing strategies and CRM.  (Side Note – I highly recommend the app for personalized news). Article after article, tweet after tweet talk about “big data”.  You can read other blogs about what that means.  As a direct marketer, it reminds me to start with the basics.

Data is the foundation of everything that happens in direct marketing.  Data should be the starting point for all planning and end up driving the measurement and analytics that you act upon for the future.  I’m a big proponent of making fact-based decisions.

A holistic picture of customer data gives you relevancy and that’s what customers want now.  Customers are driving how and when they want marketing messages.  You are no longer in control.  And with digital channels, we can turn that data around so quickly for our next marketing tactic.

Many companies have data siloed.  For example, retail data should be connected to web-front store sales.  You may be working on strategic planning for 2013. Make the investment to bring that customer information together.  I realize it’s not easy but the payoff is worth it.

You can talk all you want about social platforms, awesome creative and great offers but get a grip on your data first to be successful.

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