4 Questions to Craft a Contact Management Strategy

Communication used to be limited by the challenges of the message transfer mechanism and cost.  Print, telegraph, telephone, all have limitations in terms of delivery regardless of the demand.  Today’s Marketing challenge is the reverse; unfettered and almost free delivery of communications to an audience with limited attention.  In this supersaturated environment, contact management is key to cutting through the noise to maximize the reach, impact, and cost of your communications.  When you finish this blog, you will have a 4 step formula to create a successful contact management strategy for your business. 

Often coupled with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, contact management focuses on the capture, storage and retrieval of customer contact details.  A more advanced interpretation supported by sophisticated CRM and marketing automation tools like Marketo or Eloqua, contact management is the systematic management of customer communications across all channels to optimize customer engagement efforts for the greatest return.

Sounds simple enough: communicate with my customers in the right mix, sequence and frequency to drive the most profitable behavior.  Many companies offer cloud software to integrate and manage all your channels.   But how do you determine the right mix? 

The answer depends on the specifics of your product, marketplace, and customers.  So strap in and prepare to provide thoughtful responses to the following 4 questions.  When you are done, you will have the foundations of your channel strategy. 

1. What am I solving for?   By far the most important thing to get right, clearly defining the objective goes a long way to being successful.  Common objectives include increase sales, decrease costs, capture new audiences, customer retention, and cross/up sales. 

2. What behavior am I encouraging?

• Go deeper than just “buy my product”.  Walk a mile in your customer shoes and understand the required investment, product complexity, buying process, payment process, and so on…
• Chart the behavior on its behavioral propensity curve.  Make sure to address to ensure the behavior is sustainable
• Determine the inherent barriers to Motivation and Ease in the behavior you want to promote.  
• Craft your message to recognize, inform, encourage, entertain,...your customers in a manner that overcomes the barriers and drives sustainable behavior.

3. What’s my channel mix?

• Reach: Volume counts in this first criteria.  You want to select channels that present your message to the largest potential audience. The greater the reach, the more likely the message will be heard.
• Influence: A multiplier to reach, influence is a measure of how effective the channel is in delivering a convincing message that will impact behavior.  Buying a coke from a convenience store is a relatively low investment purchase which works well with simple reminders instead of deep behavioral shifts.  On the other hand, signing s complex, multi-million dollar service contract which may require multiple approvals within an annual budget cycle can only progress past a certain point with human contact.
• Cost: The contrast to reach / influence is cost.  While a face to face meeting is preferred, its hundreds of dollars more than a phone call, which is dollars more than a chat, which is pennies more than an email (see page 8 of this presentation for more). 
• Relevance: TV, Web, print, outdoor, phone, face to face, guerilla, and social models exist to get your message out.  Each channel has its own personality and use case.  One might argue that twitter, with its short burst text, directional messaging and young audience isn’t the best medium to sell a large investment item like a car.  But it could be excellent for ordering a pizza if they can get the logistics right. 

4. Engage not Enrage: This is the art of engagement style marketing. 

• Get permission: A price of entry for many channels, especially regulated channels like phone, email and text, Seth Godin’s advice on permission marketing is still true today.
• Earn their interest: On low investment products, it’s enough to simply be cute or funny.  For more complex products, earning interest may include good faith efforts to educate the customer, providing value-add alternatives, in an easy to consume format.
• Build a Dialogue: I’ve often found marketers are a bit like stalkers, so thoroughly engrossed in the features, habits, and emotions of their customers that they can get ahead of themselves and scare of the customer because a lack of context.  Instead Marketers need to build a dialogue with their customers at a velocity consistent with the speed of trust. 
• Don’t be Desperate: Nothing demeans the underlying perceived product value more than an overly aggressive sales process and intrusive messaging.

Companies orchestrating all of these steps into a deliberate and progressive dialogue with your customers are able to cut through the noise and create the best opportunity for a long term and profitable relationship.  

Stay tuned to next entry on ways of building out your contact management strategy across the channels and customer journey stages.