The Lifestream of Jon Moss

The 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing

December 3 2009, 2:15pm

This is part two of a series on relationship marketing. Please check out the first post,  7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing, and make sure you’re not committing any of these before figuring out how to fix them. That post will also give you a bit more background on relationship marketing, but I’ll include a brief overview here as well. [PS: If you're looking for more on my take of how relationship marketing and pharma fit together, then check out my white paper on "The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma." It's the most downloaded white paper on Dose of Digital.] Here’s our definition of relationship marketing (courtesy of our Chief Marketing Strategist, Bob Gilbreath): “Relationship marketing is ongoing, direct, added-value communication.” Ongoing: It’s a rhythm of regular, expected communication. Direct: It doesn’t mean buying media, but owning it: You have permission to communicate, and it can be done in many forms. Added Value: The marketing itself fills a need; usually, the greater the value to the customer, the greater the ROI. That last one is important: “fills a need.” If you’re not doing that, then you’re probably just annoying your customers. So, to ensure you’re not doing this, I’m going to share with you what I call the 7 Golden Rules of Digital Relationship Marketing. This is your list of “what to do.” Follow these seven rules and you’ll be well on your way to a very successful program. One note, some people refer to relationship marketing as CRM, or customer relationship marketing (or management). For the purposes of this post, I’m saying they are the same thing. So, here’s the list of what TO do:

7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing

Sharing, partnering, endorsing Perfect pitch Personalized and individualized Keep it simple, stupid Members only Personal investment It’s not about you

- 1. Sharing, partnering, endorsing

If you are completely reliant on your own promotional efforts to increase enrollments in your program, then you’re missing a giant opportunity. At a bare minimum, you should include social sharing tools that make it easy for people to share your offers with others and encourage them to join your program. Incentive strategies, where you pay current members something for each new member they enroll, fit in here as well. Beyond social sharing, if your program is good enough, you can look towards industry groups and, in the case of healthcare, patient advocacy groups to grow your enrollment. If your program is valuable enough to their members, these groups will help you and will be your most effective enrollment tool. In the case of healthcare, physicians can become recruiters too if you show them how your program both benefits their patients and helps them to more easily manage these patients. 2. Perfect pitch

(Image from The Brand Builder Blog) In order to keep people engaged over time, you have to communicate with them regularly (but not too regularly) and about things they care about at that moment. This is simple to achieve if you’re willing to do a little planning. Before building anything, plan out what you want to say and what channel you think is best to communicate it. From there figure out when it makes the most sense to communicate. For example, you probably should hold your stories about cold and flu until cold and flu season hits. Once you have these three pieces, then it’s simply a matter of laying it all out on a timeline. Doing this accomplishes three things. First, it ensures that you’re covering your main points of communication and what your customers care about over a set time period. Second, it also serves as a commitment and motivation tool for you. Once you have it down in your timeline, you’re far more likely to actually do the work to launch the piece on time. It makes it far more tangible. Finally, having a quality timeline will help you make budget decisions should you receive more funding or (more likely) have some cut. You’ll be able to tell where you have additional capacity or where you can use some more. 3. Personalized and individualized I’ve written about this before and spelled out what I think the difference is between these two terms (yes, there is a difference). Personalization means adding some personally identifying information to your communications. This usually means putting someone’s name on the top of an email or direct mail piece. It’s remarkably simple to do with digital media and has become very simple (and cost effective) in print as well. Adding someone’s name to an email, for example, is much better than sending an email with “Dear Person” or “Dear Cancer Person.” I only joke because I have seen these before. I assume they were mistakes, but I saw them. Individualization is something different. For our purposes, individualization means creating communications that are tailored for each and every individual person. The test to see if you’re sending out individualized messages is simple: does someone read what you sent and think, “Wow. They wrote this just for me.” If not, then it’s not individualized. This too can be really simple and more and more companies are embracing it. Here’s a great example that my colleague, Bob Gilbreath, wrote about on his Marketing with Meaning blog:

First, Delta included his name. Good. That’s personalization. However, then they go on and apologize for sticking him in a middle seat on his last flight and offer him some miles to say sorry. Interesting point to note, Bob didn’t ask for this or complain to Delta. They just did it. Delta knew the situation and sent an individualized response. Question: if Bob got this email and the 500 miles or another email that simply gave him 500 miles without the individualized touch, which would have more impact? Each results in the same value for him, 500 miles. But clearly the one that talks about his specific situation makes a lasting impression. So, you can’t just give away stuff and expect that to be enough. You have to make the extra effort to make it meaningful. If you invest the time and effort to know what your customers are doing and what will be meaningful to them, then your communications will become more and more relevant to them. As they pass over hundreds of other emails they receive, but can’t remember why, yours will be the one that stands out. 4. Keep it simple, stupid We marketers like to complicate stuff. One of these things I mentioned in the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing. It was number 4: Make it hard. Basically, if you make your enrollment process really difficult or make it a hugely daunting task to get any sort of individualized information, people just aren’t going to do it. So, you have to make it easy…simple, that is. Of course, our programs can be highly complex and necessitate a knowing a bunch of information in order to give good information back. That’s all right. If your program requires a complex or lengthy process to yield the best information in return, you can’t just start with this. You need to start with a “light” version of your process to get people interested and engaged. Later on, you can add in something more complex once people are committed to your program and want to do even more with it. For ConAgra Foods’ program Start Making Choices, our company (Bridge Worldwide), created two different ways to get individualized information. The first consists of just five questions on a simple slider bar design:

If people wanted the most individualized information (likely after seeing the quality information they received from the “light” survey) and their personal Balanced Life Index (BLI), then they are presented with a 23 question, multiple choice, survey. However, instead of making this question after question of text (or worse, 23 pages with one question each), we created an engaging design in which people swiftly entered all the relevant information. They did this because the questions were simple, but also the design kept them clicking and onto the next question, which kept dropout rates at a very low level.

1. Members only Everyone likes being part of an exclusive club. They like the special perks that come along with membership and they like the prestige that comes with being a member. They like knowing that they’re getting something that everyone else can’t get. That’s just human nature. Do you belong to any clubs like this? Better question: do you wish you did?

Take Neiman Marcus’ InCircle program. On the surface, it’s basically a rewards program. Spend this much, we give you this much. However, because it’s Neiman Marcus, they are also dealing with people who are members of a lot exclusive programs and for whom a $100 gift card isn’t that meaningful. Neiman Marcus needs to provide them much more. So, when you get to the President’s Circle (just spend $75,000 or more in a year), you get special offers that others don’t such as exclusive off-hour shopping events. Not every program is like InCircle, but the concept is the same. You need to reward your customers who are part of your programs lavishly and regularly. They are your best customers, the ones that spend the most, and who talk about your products to others. They’re the most engaged, as evidenced by them joining your program in the first place. Keeping them your customer is an important priority. One note of caution, simply giving people incentives without changing their underlying attitude is one of the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing (number 5, Dollars don’t change everything). Giving gifts to people in the healthcare space is pretty much prohibited either by company or government policy in most countries, so this makes it a bit more challenging. You have to think beyond gifts and consider things like access. This could be access to industry experts like, say, the leading physician in lung cancer treatment. If your patients are fighting lung cancer, they want to hear what this person has to say. Limiting it to members provides a special reward to those who have given you something (their business and trust) and also makes it possible to do more. You can do more because instead of spending $5 on a hundred thousand people to give them some tiny gift, you can spend the same amount and conduct a series of powerful programs (and even travel to where patients are). That’s just one example, but the point is clear. You can provide member benefits in any industry regardless of the specific regulations. 6. Personal investment If people aren’t personally invested in your program, it’ll be a failure. Their investment is almost always their time (but can also be financial in the case of membership fees). Time is very valuable to people especially people who are fighting a disease. They don’t have time to invest on every website about their disease. They have to focus on one or two for the long-term and everything else is likely to be ignored. People must invest their own time in order to be engaged with your program over time . There is only one way to get people to invest their time: give them something of value in exchange for their time. This doesn’t mean offering them rewards for coming back to your site or buying things. It means that your program should become more valuable to them for each minute they invest. A great example of this is Patients Like Me.

The more information you provide about your disease (including tracking your progress and compliance with treatments everyday), the more you’ll learn about your disease. You’ll be able to track your progress against “the norm” and receive information on how to improve your situation. If you’re not willing to input this information up-front and over time, you won’t get much out of the site. However, if you are willing to do this, you receive a hugely valuable item in return: information on how to improve your health. 7. It’s not about you This is a common sin committed by us marketers. I’ve talked about this before in the context of how to appropriately participate in social media. The same idea applies here. People inherently don’t care about your brand. Actually, they don’t care about your brand as much as you do. Because of this, creating a program that only features your brand is sure to be a failure. Instead, you need to balance your program with a mix of information about your brand and related information from which your customers are likely to get additional value.

P&G maintains one of the largest consumer databases in the world and is among the biggest users of relationship marketing. Our company works on Everyday Solutions, which is the central program for all of P&G’s products. It’s a single stop for brand offers and new product announcements, but there’s much more. There is also relevant content that matches with what each consumer has either said is an area or interest or whose behavior (pages visited, coupon offers redeemed, etc.) indicates that they are likely interested. In other words, people come to the site (or open emails or direct mail) not just for product offers and discounts, but also for other information. Those who initially come for offers see that there’s more to it than just a couple dollars off a certain purchase. This encourages them to return or to sign up for the program. To be sure, the brands are prominently featured and are the focus of the program, but it’s not just one brand message after another. Every marketer wants to get in every core message at each customer “touch,” but that’s not necessarily a winning long-term strategy. There will be time for your messages if you can show people that your program is more than just a commercial. Those are the 7 Golden Rules of Digital Relationship Marketing. Follow these and your program will be head and shoulders above nearly everything else out there. In case you missed them, be sure to check out the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing so you know what to avoid. If you’d like a POWERPoint version of this, you’re in luck. You can download a copy of The 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing (64 downloads) right here. One request: if you do download it, how about sending out a tweet?

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