Elana Anderson

For nearly the past 15 years, my career has been focused on helping marketers leverage data to better understand and more effectively market to customers on an individual level. In my early days in the industry, I worked primarily with marketing groups leveraging offline channels like catalogs and other forms of direct mail. In recent years, I’ve spent most of my time working with relationship marketing and database marketing groups and with online marketing groups. What amazes me (and is my key topic of my post today) is that while these marketers view themselves as so different they are really starting to converge.

Marketing Channels Are Evolving

There’s lots of change happening in the marketing domain. It’s a time of uncertainty but also one of opportunity. Marketing channels are evolving at a rapid rate:

• Mass media is less and less effective as audiences fragment and adopt technologies and tools (like...

I am very excited to announce the launch of my latest research, "Marketing Beyond The Status Quo." The research, sponsored by my friends at Responsys, seeks to help marketing organizations assess and address the barriers that prevent them from being more customer-focused, relevant, and integrated. The report unveils the Marketing Status Quo (MSQ) Model - backed by a diagnostic self-test and step-by-step program guide - to help marketers determine their relevance maturity and develop a realistic action plan to become more customer-focused.

The MSQ Model assesses the fundamental competencies required for marketing relevance:

Have you ever refinanced your mortgage only to be bombarded by offers to lower your mortgage rate for six weeks after you closed on your new loan? This happens because financial services companies are purchasing "triggers" from credit bureaus that indicate you have had a recent loan approval. The problem with these triggers is that they are not timely. By the time the marketing communication gets to the customer, it's too late.

Relevance = right message + right time + right place

Perhaps it is a cliché, but it's a good one. Too many marketers focus entirely on the message component of relevance. For these marketers, "place" is typically an outbound channel and "time" is based on the internal campaign calendar - not the customer's needs. To be relevant, marketers must step outside the confines of the functional silo that they are responsible for and think outside in - from the perspective of the customer. In addition to targeting the message...

In 2004, a Forrester colleague (John Ragsdale) and I published a report which we notoriously titled, "Why Marketing Should Own The Contact Center." Our chosen title was not aimed at changing reporting relationships. Rather, the emphasis and urgency we sought to establish was recognition of the fact that, for many companies, employees play an absolutely central and crucial role in establishing the customer's perception of the business and the brand. Our position in the report (which is still absolutely valid today) was that the purely operational metrics - e.g., # calls handled, average call duration, etc. - by which many companies measure the performance on contact center personnel run counter to the objectives that many companies have established...