Companies Fail to Realize Customer Revenue Potential

The shift to Individualized Relationship Marketing (IRM) is one of the key preliminary findings from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council's new thought leadership initiative, "Precision Promotion: Timely, Targeted and Trackable," sponsored by the InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh. Using more personalized, relevant and precise customer communication is a key strategy marketers intend to leverage to achieve greater revenue and profitability from existing customers.

The research is part of a multi-faceted program aimed at exploring strategies and techniques for customer revenue optimization, including integrating transactional print and electronic communications with personalized promotional marketing offers. To date, more than 600 sales and marketing professionals have completed the survey that focuses on the challenges, solutions and new strategies for realizing greater bottom line growth through deeper, more targeted communications with customers.

Among the key findings:

--Maximum revenue is still out of reach: Over 76 percent of marketers surveyed felt that they were not realizing the full revenue potential of their current customers. Over 10 percent claimed to not know at all.

--Strategy is getting personal: Messaging that is more personalized, relevant and precise is the top strategy marketers will deploy for achieving greater revenue and profitability according to 60 percent of the respondents. Marketers will also look to find new ways to up- or cross-sell current accounts (45 percent), address under-penetrated markets or new customer segments (41 percent), and will use more efficient channels or alternative media to engage (32 percent).

--Bribery won't lead to loyalty: As marketers look for new routes to customer loyalty, providing new inducements and incentives to do business will probably not factor into the strategic roadmap (9 percent of respondents).

--Good news for database marketing solution providers: Marketers will be introducing better segmentation, profiling and targeting strategies (60 percent of respondents), adding or improving database marketing systems (49 percent) and acquiring new analytics capabilities (30 percent) to better target and engage.

--Better news for direct marketing solution providers: Marketers also indicate continued investment in personalizing multi-channel communications (30 percent) and individualizing print, email, text messaging, call center or web interactions (26 percent).

More information on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be found at www.CRMindustry.com