Best Practices for Relationship Marketing

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Best Practices for Relationship
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Webtrends Sales
Marketing
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Overview
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Marketing is shifting from a push to pull model and consumers are taking more control over
emea@Webtrends.com
what they view and how they view it. This shift in the marketing landscape means consumers
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are less likely to respond to mass media marketing strategies. To address this challenge,
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companies are turning to relationship marketing in order to develop more creative, innovative
and cost-effective strategies for retaining and building loyalty with their customers.
Let’s take a look at how your organization can move beyond traditional marketing and
leverage the loyalty-creating power of customer relationships.
Business Challenges
Today, it’s all about more. More consumer control, more channels, more media and more
money spent online. Because the online channel gives consumers more options to choose
from, organizations face a big challenge: when customers can visit any site at any time,
what will make them loyal and keep them coming back? According to Frederick Reichheld of
Bain & Company:
• Businesses in many industries may lose up to 50% of their customers over a five year period.
• Studies have shown it’s 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to
retain a current customer.
• As little as a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25 to 95%.
Yet many businesses are still focused only on customer acquisition and see customers from
the fragmented view of individual transactions.
A New Marketing Model: The Learning Relationship
With competitors just a mouse click away, marketers need to create strong relationships
with their customers in order to build loyalty and keep them coming back. With better
customer insight, both online and offline, marketers can develop relationship marketing
programs that are relevant to their visitors’ needs.
The goal of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty. At the core of this strategy
is the concept of establishing a “learning” relationship with each customer. Every interaction
you have with a customer is an opportunity to learn about their individual motivations. The
unique measurability of the web takes this relationship to a new level because it provides
greater insight into customer preferences and behavior.
Marketing experts Peppers & Rodgers have demonstrated that, “Even if a competitor offers
the same type of customization and interaction, your customer won’t be able to enjoy the
same level of convenience without taking the time to teach the competitor the lessons your
company has already learned.” That’s a powerful motivator for them to stay loyal.

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Gaining deep insight into visitor behavior at every stage of the visitor lifecycle is essential to
successful relationship marketing. Businesses must move beyond the fragmented view of
individual transactions and view customer behavior over the lifetime of the relationship.
Customer behavior should be represented by a comprehensive cross-channel analysis of all
customer data, allowing deep insights into customer preferences and motivations.
Moving beyond transactions lets you monitor individual behavior accurately across any time
period and learn about customer preferences and motivations. It allows you to segment your
customers, not just activities and transactions. Instead of reacting to transactional data
(which is a mirror to the past) you can proactively meet the needs of your customers through
relevant online and offline marketing programs and a personalized online experience.
Economies of scale—which provided benefits in the past to large companies running mass
media marketing campaigns—no longer apply in the world of relationship marketing.
Companies that have the most insight into customer behavior and motivation will have the
greatest competitive advantage. They’ll also outperform companies continuing to operate
on a transactional basis with their customers.
How can Webtrends help you start building relationships?
Step 1: Understanding the Visitors Behind the Visits
Every interaction is an opportunity to understand more about your customers. Because
customer data is captured through a variety of channels, marketers often have a fragmented
view of their visitors. It’s essential to develop a comprehensive cross-channel view of
customer behavior to have a complete understanding of their interests and preferences.
You must recognize individual customers at every contact point to learn about individual
customer needs and motivations. Webtrends Marketing Warehouse makes it possible to tie
what you know about your visitor’s offline to the behavior they exhibit online, allowing you
to tie demographic, psychographic, and geographic visitor information to the powerful
attributes from your web channel.
Here are a few examples of the kinds of online and offline visitor insight you can capture with Marketing Warehouse.

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Step 2: Segmenting Customers by Behavior
The next step is segmenting by customer behavior. Marketing Warehouse gives business
users the flexibility to explore and segment visitor data on the fly, gaining insights with
every customer interaction.
• Group your customers by their needs and their value to your organization.
• Discover how visitors’ frequency and recency impact the sales cycle
• Identify visitors that are most likely to purchase, register or apply
• Create and customize your segments in real time by assigning levels of visitor interest, or
visitor attractiveness
• Compare segments and look for ways to increase the value of underperforming segments
or look to expand your most valuable segments
Segmenting customers is your chance to find opportunities for creating an ongoing
dialogue with your customers.
Create and manage customer segments on the fly and identify the visitors that share common preferences.
Step 3: Creating Specific Content to meet Your Customers Needs
Marketing Warehouse gives business users the ability to generate real-time visitor lists for
targeted marketing, ensuring you reach the right customers at the right time.
• Send personalized email to customers who have opted into communications
• Tailor the messaging around recently viewed products or around events in the customer lifecycle
• Limit your marketing dollars to customers who are more likely to respond positively to
your campaigns
Use the data you’ve gathered to customize your marketing message to individual customers,
and use insight gained to take action to improve the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of your
marketing efforts.

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Generate real-time visitor lists to drive targeted and relevant communications with your customers.
Step 4: Measuring your Success
The final step in the process is to measure the results of your relationship marketing campaigns
and continually optimize the results of your programs. Webtrends makes it possible to get
immediate feedback from your customers. You can easily identify customer detours and
abandonment points and react quickly to re-engage them.
Webtrends Analytics lets you see how your customers are accessing your website and
measure the ongoing performance of your relationship marketing programs. By measuring
and learning from your customers at every interaction, you can continually provide a better
experience every time the customer returns, which creates a lasting competitive advantage.
Use Campaign Reporting to measure and compare the effectiveness of your relationship marketing campaigns.
The resulTs OF relaTiOnshiP MarKeTing
Drive Customer Response
Use the insight you gain to develop online and offline marketing programs based on the
preferences and motivations of your customers. Marketing Warehouse helps you target
customer behaviors across multiple channels of visitor information. Then you can measure

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the results in Webtrends Analytics to refine your approach to the market. When you create
learning relationships with your customers, you can meet their needs more effectively—
and more efficiently.
• Identify buyers, applicants or registrants that are on the fence. Immediately generate a
product-specific offer based to compel them to convert
• Increase your site stickiness and downloads. Personalize your content and offers based
on online behavior and offline customer data.
Build Brand Engagement
Learn how customers want to engage with your content and your brand. By using every
transaction with a customer as an opportunity to gain insight, you can create customer
lock-in by delivering the right experience and modifying the experience based on your
customer’s needs and motivations.
• Reward your loyal customers. Identify your high-value visitors that forwarded a new
product offer to a friend and send a special discount offer as a thank you.
• Reengage inactive customers. Identify your loyalty program members that have not been
to the site recently. Send them a text message with a bonus points offer.
Increase Customer Loyalty
Once you establish a learning relationship with your customers, you become their partner.
You’re able to meet and exceed customer expectations by anticipating their needs. The more
complex customers’ needs become, the more they will appreciate the relationship you have
established with them—and the less likely they will be to go elsewhere.
• Improve customer service. Identify your high value customers who used your online
support system and indicated their issue was unresolved. Launch proactive customer
service calls to help resolve the problem.
• Increase up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Tie offline information such as purchase
history and demographic data to online behavior to tailor up-sell and cross-sell
promotions to include product or services a customer is most likely to buy.
Summary
As customer perceptions continue to shift toward a more commoditized view of the world,
traditional marketing methods are quickly becoming obsolete. The market advantage is shifting
from companies with the ability to reach large numbers of customers through mass media to
those that have high levels of insight into individual customer’s behaviors and preferences.
Businesses that move beyond individual transactions and engage in learning relationships with
customers are seeing a lasting competitive advantage. Marketing Warehouse dramatically
simplifies this process, providing real-time visitor insight businesses need to build customer
loyalty and succeed in the new world of marketing.
About Webtrends Inc.
Webtrends is an enterprise customer intelligence company that turns online and offline data into understanding.
Webtrends delivers the industry’s most recognized search engine marketing, visitor intelligence, and analytics solutions to
enable companies to understand their customers, drive engagement, and enhance marketing and brand awareness.
Thousands of global organizations, including Microsoft, Reuters, General Mills and Ticketmaster have chosen Webtrends
business solutions and client services expertise to optimize their customers’ online experiences. You can learn more about
Webtrends products and services at http://www.webtrends.com/ or call 1.877.932.8736.

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