Digital Relationship Marketing

Sometimes called eCRM. But what is it? Not what it was (sending emails…), but what is it now?

It’s not talking at people. But it involves talking.

It’s not just listening. But that’s where it starts.

It’s not about a one-off campaign? But it is structured, targeted, and sustained activity that delivers value to your users.

The ‘digital’ element is not about ignoring offline channels, but about realising the business value that comes from communications that are frictionless, cost effective and instantly activated.

Key elements

• Not all of your customers think, talk or act the same. So your activity must be broad enough to attract attention from them, whilst tight enough to deliver on your brand values.
• Content is the key. Not just sales messaging, but engaging multi-channel content that captures attention, inspires action and conversations, and delivers a compelling reason to come back.
• Complete the feedback loop. Collect and use the analytics, so that the interactions of each user is built into evolving their personalised experience.
• Connect multiple digital identities. People engage on different platforms, so why not allow connections via email, twitter, Facebook and others. By incentivising users to authenticate their details across multiple platforms, a much more complete view of the customer is seen.

The Relationship

Relationships are formed from an ongoing set of interactions initiated by either party, but participated in by both parties.

Just talking at your customer does not create relationships. Listening to what they say helps. Watching what they do helps. Changing what you say based on their responses is pretty vital.

We have found that quality and relevant content is a vehicle for valuable customer relationships. It provides an easy and accessible interaction which requires little of the user, but generates insight and a more valuable relationship. You might be investing in event sponsorship or corporate hospitality or TV advertising. Those can all drive deep engagement for a short period of time. A quality, personalised content offering, tailored to each users’ context can help smooth the gaps in between these spikes of attention, generating more brand engagements and insight that can power the aforementioned activities.

The future of digital relationship marketing:

initiating and responding in near real-time to a variety of user interactions across multiple channels, with the most relevant and valuable content or product propositions for that user.

The real value is found when your digital relationship marketing has the following three attributes. We have worked hard to ensure that the projects on which we work are truly:

1. Scalable – you can manage many relationships concurrently without much incremental cost
2. Measurable – everything is tracked and recorded to brand CRM for wider business use
3. Evolutionary – everything you learn can help evolve the activity to deliver better value to the user over time