I’ve been observing a worrisome trend with Chief Marketing Officers: too many are still doing business as they did a decade ago. I’m referring to their continued usage of outdated techniques to make circulation decisions for their direct marketing campaigns. While there has been progress on several fronts (most have adopted new marketing channels and many are trying to allocate revenue back to the marketing campaign which triggered a purchase), they continue to rank order customers for each marketing campaign in silos independent of the surrounding marketing events.

This campaign-centric approach was outdated in the ‘90s, yet it is still prevalent today. When viewed across time, the best customers are over-contacted while the weakest customers get ignored. When are CMO’s going to realize that the only way to make efficient and effective marketing circulation decisions is to switch to a customer-centric approach? When will they realize that choosing the best campaigns for each customer is significantly better than choosing the best customers for each campaign?

This reluctance to change circulation decision-making is exacerbated with the proliferation of marketing contacts to customers. Email marketing with its seemingly insignificant cost is pummeling customers with marketing messages beyond the saturation point. Often this pummeling is piled upon heavy direct mail contact strategies without coordination between channels.

The solution exists. Case studies show companies moving to a contact optimization solution easily removing 10-20% of their circulation without losing more than 1% of their revenue. Besides wasting valuable marketing dollars, the excessive promotion is turning off customers and killing retention rates and loyalty.

The wise CMO’s are making the switch from “business as usual” to contact optimization. They can reallocate the cost savings towards growing the business. They break from the herd, beating their competition and winning the consumer’s wallet.

About Randy Erdahl
Randy is an analytic marketing champion and is Clario’s Executive Vice President, Optimization Solutions and co-founder. As the executive leader of optimization solutions, he provides vision and direction for Clario Stream Solution development, as well technical leadership to sales, marketing and direct client interaction.