Making the Most of Marketing Money
What about some of the greatest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
There has been no shortage of both internal and external challenges, which, on the bright side, keeps my job extremely interesting.
In terms of internal challenges, I’ve touched upon many of them already. One has been to develop a common understanding of CRM within the organization.
A second challenge pertains to the large amount of customer data we have on hand. It requires us to know which pieces of data to hone in on and which to disregard.
Another is determining the right balance between long-term objectives and short-term considerations. Continuing to hit our short-term objectives is a critical component of our long-term growth, but if you don’t also take a more strategic approach to the long term, you risk short-changing your organization’s ability to fully realize its growth potential over time.
The last internal challenge has been to ensure our processes, data, and technical infrastructures keep up with our strategic directions. As we strive to take more sophisticated approaches to customer interactions within individual marketing channels and then expand on that via a more coordinated cross-channel approach, our needs have evolved. It has required us to periodically step back and retool certain processes and find ways to effectively scale our infrastructure.
One persistent external challenge relates to the increased marketing noise in the marketplace. It’s becoming harder than ever to cut through the clutter and stand out, which makes it even more pertinent to communicate with the customer in the most relevant ways possible and in ways that truly address their core needs. Hence, our increased focus on segmented marketing and one-to-one personalization.
The explosion of mobile device usage over the past five to 10 years has also created new challenges for us and the CRM space as a whole. Customer intent can—and often does—vary depending on the device being used at a particular moment. It’s pushed us to expand our analytical focus to better understand and then address the differing needs of customers when they’re engaging with us over their phones versus desktop devices.
On which CRM marketing initiatives are you currently focused?
There are lots of CRM initiatives we’re pursuing right now, and I’m going to highlight three of the biggest ones. The first is around making a concerted effort to be more relevant to customers with each interaction. Getting smarter about our segmented approaches is an interim goal, but we ultimately want to get to where every interaction is completely tailored to the individual customer. This entails having an extremely strong command of customer insights to ensure we’re serving the right message to the right customer at the right time. And it entails having the right technology in place to not only tell us what’s the right message for each customer but also to ensure we’re effectively following through on that in how we execute.
Second, we’re working to better understand which types of customer activities that don’t involve an immediate purchase correlate most directly with long-term customer value growth. In other words, given that customers in the photo merchandising industry typically don’t make purchases daily, weekly, or even monthly, what other types of engagement behaviors can we drive in the interim that will result in more of our customers staying loyal to Shutterfly over time? Examples could include getting customers to browse our newest product offerings, enticing them to participate in a Facebook contest, or getting them to upload their latest photos to our site.
Lastly, we’re diving deeper into each customer-facing channel to better understand what types of smaller-scale CRM activities have been successful and should be rolled out to a broader set of channels. The first two initiatives entail more of a top-down approach; this last initiative is more of a bottom-up endeavor.