Monday 17 September 2012

Proving the case for CRM and loyalty

How do you establish a ROMI for a brand new loyalty CRM program?

This is the sort of thing we get asked all the time. To be honest i am not sure you can, not in a meaningful way, unless you have the Coke answer to the Pepsi question. There are too many unknowns. It's all a bit WHAT IF. Especially when you start chucking in social selling and media to the mix.

The irony is the value of the softer benefits are sometimes easier to calculate. Ability to trial new products: making discrete offers to customer groups; feedback and research; co-creation, influence. But these don't really matter as the question isn't really about ROMI, it is about a particular type of ROMI. The cross sell and retention version. The questions the business really want to answer are ...

How can we develop a relationship directly with the consumer, dis-intermediate the retailer, to sell more?
Is it smarter to spend on direct relationships than brand, advertising, in store etc?

Of course the way round this is to produce a spreadsheet (a.k.a. business case), layer some science onto the intuitive. And this is where the problem often lies, the program can get killed or stripped back before we work out what the real potential is. Marketing and agencies alike need to be far more experimental, more do less strategy. The results of this are probably the best inputs for the business case.

Anyway wasn't Tesco Clubcard an experimental pilot? It will never work.














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Just curious about marketing, psychology, economics, business, irrational behaviour, people, models, communications, advertising, market imperfections, b2b marketing. I work in the marketing communications industry for OgilvyOne.