ITWeb... making CRM Easy
Web Marketing - eMail Marketing - Direct Mail - MultiMedia
eCRM - Net Intelligence - Customer IQ - Profiling & Targeting

Web Marketing requires more than just sending out e-Mail.

It requires activities that grow, manage and optimize customer relationships online. It begins with combining your online marketing, e-mail, advertising, and product or company websites — into an one existing enterprise CRM strategy.

The emerging best practice approach is to create an actionable profile of online customers. These profiles — when integrated with existing CRM, data warehouse, and e-commerce systems — drive the creation and execution of highly personalized and relevant digital customer interactions via e-mail and the Web.

By linking online customer profiles with existing enterprise systems, ITWeb helps companies strategically build the online channel as part of a multi-channel CRM strategy.

The result? Improved business impact across all sales, marketing, and customer support channels — such as call centers, direct sales, catalogs, storefronts, and the Web.

Enterprise success hinges on the ability to attract new customers, grow their value, and manage the process of migrating them online. ITWeb provides both the tactical and strategic capabilities needed to optimize and measure the impact of the online channel.

InfoTech Services/Acquisition Solutions
We can Help You Build Relationships as You Build Your e-Marketing Database

The process of opt-in, or permission-based, email marketing begins with gathering email addresses from prospects and customers. ITWeb-Products helps you start transforming web site visitors into engaged prospects or sales leads with acquisition solutions that integrate seamlessly with your existing Web site.

Our acquisition tools provide not only the mechanism for gathering data, but also the compelling benefits that attract a higher number of opt-in participants. Ultimately, your goal is not just to acquire names and addresses for your list, but to build relationships that drive brand affinity and loyalty well into the future.

Hosted Forms | Special Web Applications | Data Imports & Uploads
Viral Marketing | Opt-in Lists & Banner Ads | Custom Applications

Email Campaign Services

Email Marketing Works! It's no secret that permission email marketing delivers unbeatable response rates, personalization capabilities, fast time to market, and unbeatable ROI results. And like the Web, it's just a matter of time before you start using it, if you're not doing it already.

ITWeb-Products can deliver customized email marketing solutions that fit your strategic needs ontime and within budget. Targeted, permission-based email is the perfect medium for developing solid customer relationships. Fast, efficient and affordable email is a savvy alternative to regular mail.

Let us launch and track in real time your next e-campaign using our advanced, custom-built technology and email marketing expertise.

• Creative Development
• List Management
• Mail Execution
• Response Tracking & Analysis

Our email campaign services are geared toward helping our clients easily create effective e-mail marketing endeavors which are essential to fostering long-term customer relations in this digital age.

Newsletter Campaign Services

Newsletters... one of the most effective, yet overlooked, marketing techniques on the internet. Done well and it will make your site visits surge for short periods of time. Make your site 'sticky' and your overall number of hits will continue on an upward spiral.

Many web businesses work hard at gaining new visitors while inefficiently managing the "contact points" between company and customers. Most companies "drop-the-ball" when it comes to communicating regularly with their customers. They just hope their existing customers will translate into repeat business. When it comes to "repeat" business and retention, most companies are passive rather than pro-active. And, when the repeat sales fail to materialize, the business usually gets in trouble.

Contrary to what many business owners believe, repeat business is not simply a matter of "doing a good job the first time" -- it is more a matter of staying in the mind of your customers.

The smaller the business -- i.e., the fewer the customers -- the MORE effective "customer contact" is as a marketing strategy. In the past, it was just too expensive for most small and medium businesses in terms of costs and logistics to carry forth. Today, the Internet makes available to virtually every business a cost efficent way to stay in touch with its customer base.

Email newsletters compared to direct mail are almost free.

Sequential Marketing Campaigns
Automated Reaction to Customer Action or Inaction

Peel away the layers, and the typical email marketing campaign works something like this: You send out a message to a group of individuals, track and analyze the results, and then move on to the next campaign.

But Sequentual Marketing Campaigns are not typical. They makes use of a multiple-rules-based engine in a strategy sometimes known as "adaptive sequential messaging" or "remailing" and utilize our unique Sequentual Event Processor™ (Patent Pending) to support your marketing efforts.

Different Action, Different Response

The premise behind this approach is simple. When you send out a mailing, you know that not all recipients will take the same action. Some won't open your mailing, some will read it and stop there, others will click through to your site, and, if there's a further call to action -- such as having the recipient perform some task while at your site -- a few will follow through on that call. Depending on the action taken by each recipient, you'll want to follow up in different ways (if you decide to follow up at all).

What the Sequentaul Event Processor™ does is help automate this process. Instead of your having to take several steps, the Event Processor looks at each recipient's action and takes some of those steps for you.

More importantly, it can contributes a significant lift in response.

Retention Solutions
Keep Customers Engaged and Loyal for Life

In the competitive environment of the Internet, it's not enough to just market to a prospect or customer - especially when they're being bombarded by marketing from your competition. Differentiating your business online requires that you be responsive, add value after the sale, and address customer service issues quickly. It is possible to accomplish all of these objectives with flexible email automation.

For building customer loyalty, you need an integrated approach to both outbound and inbound communications, with tools designed to meet the specific needs of both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers.

Data Driven Trigger Programs

The constant drumbeat of the CRM machine over the past several years has confused the heck out of people. Customer or Visitor Marketing along with the many technologies involved can make it very, very complicated if you want to. But if you start with the basics and don't develop everything in-house, you're going to end up wasting a ton of money and a lot of time. Not counting missed online visitors and sales. Our system provides everything that you need to conduct online customer relationship marketing.

Our process makes it simple: It requires little in the way of IT Development, Conceptual Understanding, Implementation Timetables or Investment!

Trigger Promotions

I'm going to back up a second and explain in a more general sense how metrics like Latency are used, and in particular, address some of the misconceptions people have regarding customer value-based and relationship marketing techniques. Much of CRM is based on these fundamental ideas. Remember, CRM is an approach to managing a business, not a technology. You do not need to live on the bleeding edge of technology to take advantage of a customer-based management approach.

Generally, CRM or Relationship Marketing attempts to define customer behavior and then looks for variances in behavior. When you hear people talk about "predictive modeling" or looking for "patterns" using data mining, they are essentially taking a behavioral approach using the latest tools. Once you know how "normal" customers behave, you can do two things with respect to your business:

* Formally document normal customer behavior and internalize it systemically, leveraging what you know to improve business functionality and the profitability of customers

* Set up early warning systems, triggering events, or "trip wires" to alert you to customer behavior outside the norm. This variance in behavior generally signals an opportunity to take action with the customer and increase their value - online or off-line.

What is most important to measure in CRM is change. People spend way too much time worrying about "absolute" numbers, like Lifetime Value. What they should really be looking at is "relative" numbers - change over time. It's not nearly as important to know the absolute value of a customer as it is to know whether this value is rising or falling - called the customer LifeCycle. Knowing and understanding the customer LifeCycle is the most powerful marketing tool you can have.

Customers in the aggregate tend to follow similar behavioral patterns, and when any single customer deviates from the norm, this can be a sign of trouble (or opportunity) ahead. For example, if the average new cellular customer calls customer service 60 days after they start, and an individual customer calls customer service 5 days after they start, this customer is exhibiting behavior far outside the norm. Is there a potential problem, or opportunity? Is the customer having difficulty understanding how to use advanced services on the phone, or is the customer happily inquiring about adding on more services? In either case, there is an opportunity to increase the value of the customer, if you have the ability to recognize the opportunity and react to it in a timely way.

Understand, there is no "average customer", and a business will have many different customer groups, each exhibiting their own kind of "normal" behavior. The tools available to identify and differentiate customer segments using behavioral metrics are discussed at length on almost every page of this web site. For example, the type of media or offer used to attract the customer can have a dramatic effect on long term behavior, and customers who come into the business on the same media and offer will tend to behave in similar ways over time.

In the cell phone case above, the measurement of Latency (number of days until customer service call) serves as the "trip wire", a raising of the hand by the customer, to say to the marketer "I'm different. Pay attention to me." It is then up to the marketing behaviorist to determine the next course of action. Metrics like Latency provide the framework for setting up the capability to recognize the opportunity for increasing customer value.

This raising of the hand by customers, and the reaction by marketers, is the feedback loop at the center of Relationship or LifeCycle based marketing. It's a repeating Action - Reaction - Feedback cycle. The customer raises the hand, the marketer Reacts. The customer provides Feedback through Action - perhaps they cancel service, or perhaps they add service. The marketer reacts to this Action, perhaps with a win-back campaign, or with a thank you note. It's a constant (and mostly nonverbal) conversation, an ongoing relationship with the customer which requires interaction to sustain. It is not a relationship in the "buddy-buddy" sense. Customers don't want to be friends with a company, they want the company to be responsive to their needs - even if they never come out and state them openly to the company.

This relationship continues to cycle over and over as long as there is value in the relationship for both the customer and the marketer. If the customer takes an Action and there is no Reaction from the marketer, value begins to disappear for the customer, and they may defect. When value disappears for the marketer (the customer stops taking Action / providing Feedback), marketers should stop spending incremental money on the customer.

Notice I did not say "fire the customer" or any of the related drivel thrown around in some of the CRM venues. All customers deserve (and pay for) a certain level of support. The real question is this: for each incremental, or additional dollar spent on marketing to the customer, is there a Return On the Investment? If I have the ability to choose between spending $1 on a customer returning $1.10, and $1 on another customer returning $3, I would be nuts not to choose the customer returning $3. I have not "fired" the customer returning only $1.10; I have just chosen not to spend incremental money doing any special marketing to them.

Do you see the difference?

In fact, much of the profitability typical of high ROI Customer Marketing techniques comes from knowing who not to spend on. Most of the decreased profitability in any marketing program is a result of overspending on unsuitable targets with lowered returns. But because marketers tend to look at results in the aggregate, or they are looking at demographically-based segments to measure a behaviorally-based outcome, they miss details like certain segments returned $5 for each $1 spent, and others lost $5 for every $1 spent. The campaign as a whole may return only $1.10 for each dollar spent because the marketer spent money on low Return On Investment customers.

When you are trying to encourage a customer to buy something, you are looking for a behavior to occur. To measure the results of such a marketing campaign using only demographic segmentation without any behavior-based metrics (like Recency or Latency) is misleading at best, and lazy otherwise - it's apples and oranges.

Why is this all important?

Customers who are in the process of changing their behavior - either accelerating their relationship with you, or terminating their relationship with you - are the highest potential return customers from a marketing perspective. They represent the opportunity to use leverage, to make the highest possible impact with your marketing dollar. You may make money marketing to customers who are just cruising along the LifeCycle, acting like an "average customer".

But when you can predict the likelihood of an average customer to turn into a best customer, and you successfully encourage this behavior, or you can reverse a customer defection before it happens, there are tremendously profitable longer-term implications for the bottom line. You discover these opportunities by understanding behavior and setting up trip wires (like Latency metrics) to alert you to deviations from normal behavior.

What about all the rest of the customers, those who are not either accelerating or terminating the relationship? Leave 'em alone. Whatever background marketing you do (advertising, branding, service campaigns, etc.) is serving them just fine.

High ROI data-driven marketing techniques are best used (and create the highest returns) when they are used to surgically strike at a trend in behavior, not when customers are comfortably plodding along. However, there's not as many comfortable plodders as you think; in fact, from 40% to 60% of your customer base is either in the process of accelerating or terminating their relationship with you right now. The question is, how do you take advantage of the situation?

Latency, and all the other metrics described on the Drilling Down site, are simply tools for recognizing the opportunity to take an Action in Reaction to the customer raising their hand. If you don't have some kind of system to recognize customers in the process of changing their behavior, you will miss out on most of the highest ROI customer marketing opportunities you have.

And don't count on the customer to e-mail you when they're thinking of changing their behavior - we both know that just is not going to happen. A more likely scenario: they will just stop taking Action and providing Feedback. By then, it's too late for you to do anything profitable about it.

Set up your trip wires and predict the behavior, folks. It's the only way to sense when an average customer is ready to become a best customer. And reacting to a customer defection after the fact is a truly sub-optimal way to "manage" a relationship.

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Start Small and Grow Big with ITWeb, talk to us.
For inquiries regarding our services, call 203-341-9812
or email inquiry@ITWeb.com today.

Web Marketing - eMail Marketing - Direct Mail - MultiMedia
eCRM - Net Intelligence - Customer IQ - Profiling & Targeting