Relationship Systems Marketing (RSM) - Advanced Drip Marketing Considerations

905

IBC

Relationship Systems Marketing (RSM) is a powerful and competitive weapon - especially on the Internet. The growth of RSM is rooted in the small business philosophy of staying close to the customers, understanding and meeting their needs and treating them well after the sale.

Corporate marketing is tied to BIG, general marketing or advertising campaigns with a single non-targeted message. This message may be based on the companies Unique Selling Proposition (USP). However, customers have different needs and a single USP spelled out to the whole market is no longer enough.

Messages must be tailored to specific segments of the market and ultimately to the market segment of one, the individual customer. Computerizing the customer database makes it possible to address messages more specifically and market additional products to each customer.

What is RSM?

RSM is an interactive approach to marketing communication, which uses addressable communications media (mail, email, telephone, fax, etc.) to reach your target audience, stimulate demand, staying close by recording and keeping an electronic database memory of customer, prospect and all communication and commercial contacts, to help improve all future contacts.

The characteristics of fully fledged RSM are:

1. Each customer and prospect is identified as a record on the marketing database; markets and market segments are groups of individual customers.

2. Each customer and prospect record contains not only identification and access information but also a range of marketing information. It also includes information about past transactions and about campaign communications.

3. This information is accessible before, during and after the process of each interaction with the customer/prospect, to enable "you" to decide how to respond to the customer/prospect's needs.

4. The database is used to record customer/prospects responses to campaigns.

5. The information is available to marketing policy makers to enable them to decide such things as which target markets/segments are appropriate for each product/service etc.

6. Selling many products to each customer, the database is used to ensure that the approach to the customer is coordinated; and a consistent approach developed.

7. The database eventually replaces market research. Marketing campaigns are devised such that the response of customers to the campaign provides information, which the company is looking for.

8. Marketing Management automation is developed to handle the vast amount of information generated by RSM. This identifies opportunities and threats more or less automatically! This is fully fledged marketing automation. Very few companies have succeeded in doing this; but many have it as their goal.

RSM presents many challenges to management. It requires careful maintenance of great volumes of detailed customer data. Accessing the data, interpreting it, and using it to drive or support the marketing function requires a long-term marketing systems development policy.

It also requires computing and marketing people to work together, often educating each other. And, it may well require most people in the company to forget their traditional way of doing business.

RSM works only as an on-going process. The ladder of loyalty is a key concept in RSM.

1. No awareness of business or product/service.

2. Awareness of business

3. Awareness of product/service

4. Positive perception

5. Recognition of personal benefit

6. Inquiry

7. Objections overcome

8. Sale of product or service

9. Entry into continued relationship.

RSM is used to move customers up the ladder. The essence of RSM is communicating directly with the customers and asking them to respond in a tangible way. It provides the means for the customer or prospect to respond and is set up to measure and fulfill the response. It sets up or reinforces a relationship with the customer, which is "fulfilled" when we follow up a customer's response to our communication.

Fulfillment is "delivery" and can take the form of a personalized email, a telephone conversation, sending literature, a sales visit, attendance at a web seminar, exhibition or store, or sending products to the customer. So DBM is a broad discipline, not a separate marketing communications medium, but a way of using any medium to elicit the desired response.