I recently moderated a panel discussion with three stellar marketing practioners – Nauzar Vimadalal, Marketing Operations Manager at Staples, Shannon Balliet, Director of Database Marketing and Customer Data Integration at Carnival Cruise Lines, and Lynn Locke, Director of Database Marketing at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida. What a great learning experience! Thought you might be interested in some nuggets from the panel. While there’s too many for this blog, here’s three of my favorites:

1) Don’t assume your segments will work forever. Two of the three companies have revamped their segmentation strategy in the last 12 months because of the changes in the economy. (And, the other revamped theirs in the last couple years.) “The only constant is change….”

If you want to ensure relevant and targeted communications, make sure to revisit your persistent segments on an ongoing basis – especially when there are large macro changes like the economy, major competitive shifts, etc.

2) “You can never test enough”. Test, test, test. I wish everyone would test. How can we learn on the effectiveness of new ideas if we don’t test them? Test everything – even lists you’re looking to buy!

You got him! Joe applied for your bank's gas rewards credit card and you approved him. Now, how do you keep Joe as a profitable customer? And given the current economic conditions at hand, how do you apply further scrutiny to ensure the up-sell and cross-sell decisions you make down the line are in the best interest of the bank?

Conventional marketing wisdom says you should try to sell as many products as possible to Joe to increase the share of his wallet. If you do that, you will make the company more money and your marketing executives will be happy with you, no? Well, it's just not that simple. There are a couple realities that come to mind.

First, each customer has a threshold of saturation. So getting the right product offer to a customer before he or she feels soaked with offers is key. To do this, you really need to think about optimizing your contact strategy. This word, "optimize," is used loosely in the industry. But what I mean by "optimization" is finding the best of all possible solutions to achieve a goal (such as maximizing profit or revenue) on a group of marketing programs or campaigns given a set of constraints (budget limits or call center capacity) and contact policies (if Joe is in Campaign A, he must also be in Campaign B.)

Imagine for a moment a world where your customers' experience interacting with your organization is truly exemplary. I mean a world where you really understand your customers: their needs, their cross-channel behaviors, their likes and dislikes. Let me illustrate with two customer experiences: