An interesting challenge that arises with customer state marketing is that the analysis and the design phases are so short when compared to the traditional approach that it takes you by surprise. You prepare to spend a week in “Discovery” just to find out the current situation, mapping out processes and system interactions, and in identifying what they want to do. Using a customer state marketing approach this process only takes a couple of hours. The challenge for me is that this makes me insecure because I feel so idle during a project, even though my contribution is enormous. Now, the longest portion of the implementation process is the time that it takes for the client to design and build the Creatives and the content for their relationship marketing program.
For example, I recently met with a new client. During our meeting we discussed what they are doing at this time and what they want to do going forward. Their current process involves five online forms, an ecommerce engine and some email blasts. On the technology side there are three applications that need to interact in order to implement a relationship marketing program. By the end of the one hour meeting we had established the guiding principles for their relationship marketing program. The next step is for them to define the number of touch points they want, and to generate the content required for an email and call centre-based relationship marketing program. Our next meeting will be in two weeks, time enough for them to develop their initial strategy for the “low hanging fruit” of the pilot project and to estimate the time required to generate the content.
Customer state marketing analysis and automation is a real change from the traditional approach that I learned and applied all these years. Here is what I used to do:
1) Meet with the client and act as a sponge in order to absorb as much as I could about the client’s existing situation, workflow and desired outcome.
2) Go back to the office and do a "brain dump" of everything I wrote down, remembered or conceptualized during our meeting. I then organized the information in a logical and presentable manner.
3) Meet with the client to validate my understanding of their situation and ecosystem, get clarification, pick up new information, and challenge certain processes and assumptions.
4) Go back to the office and adjust the documentation (i.e. requirements) according to the feedback I received during the validation meeting.
5) Meet with the client, hopefully for the final time, to validate the new document and to get approval before moving to meeting with I.T. to understand the integration challenges (i.e. cost and timeline).
6) Assuming a budget can be found and the implementation delay is not too great, proceed with the design, build and implementation of the solution.
Compare that to what I do today:
1) Meet with the client for about two hours to get their requirements.
2) Go back to my desk and design the marketing automation scenario.
3) Meet with the client to validate the scenario and make any adjustments as required.
4) Go back to my desk and connect the scenarios (I may have to wait a couple of weeks for new connectors, if I need new ones.)
5) Publish the scenarios, test and then promote them into production. Voila, the project is finished.
Total work for me, from first meeting to marketing automation solution, is between 4 and 6 hours. (Ok, so this is not six seconds; however using the traditional approach I would still be at step 1.)
The first time I experienced this reduction in the time required to do the analysis I thought that I must have missed something blatant. To me, it was not possible that in two hours I could finish what my past experience told me should be a 48 hour job. Now that I have repeated this experience with six clients I am no longer surprised; however it is always a pleasant experience for my clients.
With customer state marketing, the process for designing marketing automation solutions is simple, fast and effective. And what’s best about it is that by the time I have finished designing my scenarios the work is about 50% done. The other 50% is connecting and testing the scenarios. What more can you ask for from your marketing automation software!
