Metzner Schneider Associates, Inc.

“Worst Practices”

The concept of “best practices” has taken hold so firmly that a survey of such practices is one of our most sought-after services. And rightly so; learning from the best can be very valuable.

But we’re going to devote this discussion to practices which are, unfortunately, more common than best practices. Our purpose in doing so is not to accentuate the negative, but ultimately to emphasize one of our favorite maxims:

It takes no more effort to do the right thing than it does to do the wrong thing.

We’ll get back to how easy it can be to follow better practices. But first, here are some of today’s worst marketing practices. All of these examples are drawn from real-life experience; and all of them involve very high-profile, respected brands.

A consumer signs up to receive news and offers from a specialty retailer. He never buys anything, but receives weekly e-mails forever after, addressing him as a “valued customer.”

A lapsed member of a major national health club chain receives member-get-a-member offers; but no re-capture efforts, and no recognition that her membership has not been renewed. Another customer chooses not to pay $10 to renew his membership in a retail giant’s program. Months later, he still receives e-mail promoting members-only offers for which he is ineligible.

One of the world’s largest multi-product companies sends weekly e-mails to a rewards club member who signed up years ago, but never took action on any offer, never earned or redeemed any points, seldom if ever clicks through to indicate interest in any of the confusing welter of unrelated offers in each week’s e-newsletter. Each week a similar set of offers arrives and is ignored, but the marketer never tries to activate the consumer, motivate a response, or tries to discover why she is unresponsive.

During one recent time period, an online rewards program offered to “reward a member for her time” with eighteen separate e-mails. She opened or responded to none. An even more aggressive bonus e-mail club sent no fewer than 72 separate offers during the same 31 days (yes, that’s 2.3 e-mails per day from the same commercial source), none of which were opened, much less responded to. Neither company has ever inquired as to why the customer signed up but has never responded to anything they offer…or asked what she might find relevant or valuable enough to notice.

And a longtime cardmember who owns two charge card products from a major issuer received four postal mail offers for four different card products on the same day from that company.

What’s wrong with this picture? And why do we care?

After all, it’s only e-mail; customers can always unsubscribe, or simply delete the e-mail that doesn’t interest them, or toss the print mail into the circular file. And why should marketers care? E-mail is virtually free compared to other media, so why not just keep sending it whether or not it makes sales, drives inquiries or engages the customer?

All marketers should care about those careless or thoughtless companies among us, because they foster consumer indifference, rebellion, distrust and fatigue – ultimately blunting the well-planned marketing efforts of others.

Doing the right thing is easier than ever.

And what’s worse, none of this heedless spamming is necessary, given technologies that exist today and are available more easily and cost-effectively than ever. Today, ASP companies offer CRM tools that can be operated easily by non-technical marketing staff, with minimal expense and without significant investment in infrastructure or staff. The platforms available make it easy for marketers to understand and analyze customer and subscriber behavior, and tailor their communications accordingly.

Surprisingly, some of the offenders discussed above actually use these platforms. So clearly, the availability and affordability of the technology is not the issue.

The issue is strategy. Or rather, the lack of appropriate strategy.

In fact, today’s technologies actually enable some of the worst practices we’re talking about. Advances in technology and dramatic reductions in the cost of deployment make it equally easy to implement good strategy or bad. Since the effort and investment are roughly equal, why not pay extra attention – and devote adequate resources upfront – to developing innovative, customer-centered programs to drive desired customer behavior?

We’ve written a great deal about customer relationship program strategy, and it is not the intention of this brief piece to discuss specific strategies and tactics. We only want to take this space to make a single, vitally important point::

Technology is a key enabler for effective customer relationship programs.
But technology alone is not enough.

Implementing a great technology platform does not mean you have a customer loyalty program. And misusing the technology to simply send more non-targeted, irrelevant, repetitive and one-sided communications simply makes the marketer a high-tech spammer.

Technology is vital, but it is no substitute for strategy and creative communications. When tech companies position their offerings as “solutions,” that is not quite accurate; their products only enable solutions.

And let us make clear that we are not in any way criticizing the technology providers and ASP companies; we believe many of them have very exciting products, and we often recommend or specify those products to our clients. We think the best of the tech companies today are creating a great new world, where marketers can make use of highly sophisticated relationship, loyalty, reward and communications strategies, without having to invest in an inappropriate, inflexible and overpriced relationship with one of the large 20th Century legacy companies.

We simply want to urge any company considering or installing a CRM technology platform to make sure they focus first and foremost on their customer relationship strategy and tactics, and never rely on technology alone as a solution to the customer loyalty challenge.

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