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Contact Strategy and Management

The sheer volume of messaging that the average consumer sees on a daily basis has led to "active discernment." Active discernment occurs when a customer asks himself: "What can I ignore because I have a limited amount of time and attention to pay to all the people who send me things?"

To solve the active discernment conundrum, marketers have to get more relevant, more targeted and more aligned with effectively communicating with their customers in a judicious and effective fashion. That alignment is the reason for a Contact Strategy and Management approach.

We all have certain emails we'll open, or calls we'll interrupt when another line beeps in, or mail we'll open first while other offerings sit in the unopened pile. It's not necessarily about how often we receive this communication, but how important or relevant that communication is to us and how valuable we might find the content. A Contact Strategy helps determine what's relevant, and for whom, and places a greater priority on its delivery to the customer.

A Contact Strategy provides the reasons, structure and business rules that an enterprise expects to deliver in creating optimal customer interactions and experiences. When a well crafted strategy is put into practical management, it leverages data about customer purchases, promotions, patterns, interests and preferences to profitably regulate the sequence and frequency of communications. It's also instrumental in customizing the offer, creative thrust and positioning of contacts. The best contact strategies use key decision and data points that are customized to each individual - the audience of one - where possible.

Now, this may sound challenging to companies using a frequency-based approach. This is also a sizable problem for companies with multiple lines of business looking to complete up-sell and cross-sell activities across those lines. However, when you consider that consumers see so much messaging daily, and that they have become extremely discerning, a Contact Strategy becomes even more critical for those companies.

By moving to less frequent but more effective messaging developed in your Contact Strategy and its management, your customers will learn that your organization has something worthwhile to say to them - something that provides a real call to act.

A successful Contact Strategy requires the development of three key criteria:

1. A customer lifecycle map across a defined period
2. A means matrix of prioritizing communications, such as revenue,customer value, seasonality, product/service priorities and shoppingexperiences
3. The underlying business logic that allows customers to be assigned to specific communications streams.

Implementing the strategy generally can take one of two forms, either a "pre-campaign" that determines the right customer candidates, or a master campaign. Both have their benefits, and Covalent Marketing's experienced consultants can help you determine what's right for your organization.