In many of my blogs I have alluded to the fact that Customer State Marketing has significantly increased my productivity. The more I practice the craft the more productive I become. What really strikes me as incredible is the fact that I am seeing a 10 to 20 fold gain in productivity. How to explain this?
I guess the best way to look at it is that a Customer State Marketing diagram adds a new dimension that greatly simplifies the design of automated processes. As David Raab mentions in his Marketing Automation Interface Should Focus on Customers, Not Campaigns post, most marketing automation vendors use the same flowcharting techniques introduced by Frank Gilbreth in 1921. Customer State Marketing improves on this technique by adding the concept of Customer State. Simply said, Customer State is the context that governs the action/response flow of a process.
Let’s take a simple example such as a double opt-in process for an email subscription in the Customer State diagram below.
This scenario contains three states: Unknown; Unconfirmed; End. An examination of each state reveals the following
- State: Unknown – Possible events/actions:
- Signs up/send confirmation email
- State: Unconfirmed – Possible events/actions:
- Clicks confirmation/add to newsletter list and send welcome email
- Bounces/do nothing and move to End state
- Does nothing (‘3 days after sign up’ event)/send reminder email
- State: End
Notice how simple the scenario is. Knowing the state of the contact allows us to identify a finite number of events to consider when automating a process. The number of actions associated with each event is also finite and relevant to the state of the contact. A few simple steps are all that are required to build this automated scenario.
The same is true for more complicated scenarios. Each scenario contains a finite number of possible states, and each state contains a finite number of events and actions.
As of the writing of this blog, I am building a nurturing and retention program for a local retailer. He has segmented his prospects and customers into three groups: contact; top customer; regular customer. His nurturing and retention program includes 19 different communications designed to stimulate sales. The content of the communications depends on the state of the customer (e.g. contact, top, regular, or at risk) and the number of communications since moving to that state (e.g. there are six levels of reminders for customers who are at risk). So far it has taken me about 8 hours to design, build and connect the required scenarios. Testing will take another 3 to 4 hours.
(This is the Top Customer scenario. Note the four possible events that need to be considered for Top Customers)
If I think back to the way that I used to work, it would take me a minimum of a week to automate such a complex program. Thanks to Customer State Marketing I am done in no time, not to mention the agility to make changes at any time.
