Is your company ready for one-to-one marketing?.
In the past, marketers used to concentrate mostly on attracting new customers, rather than trying to retain the existing ones. Nowadays, something has been changed. Only attracting the new customers is not enough, good marketers should pay attention on attracting the new customers, as well as creating a strong relationship with the current ones, what we called one-to-one marketing or CRM (Customer Relationship Management.) This theory emphasizes on increasing value of the customers. You always have to make sure that your customers are satisfied with your products or services. Sometimes, you have to change your behavior toward single customers to meet their needs and wants.
To put the one-to-one marketing into practice, there are four implementation steps that you need to follow; identifying your customers, differentiating among them, interacting with them, and customizing your product or services to fit each particular customers" needs.
1. Identifying customers. This is the first step that you should know before implementing the one-to-one marketing. You must be able to identify the exact number or portion of its customer base. Also, it is important to know as much as information about your customers. Not only names, contact numbers and addresses, but also their preferences and habits - what they like to do. The company should keep tracking on their customers. Another thing to consider is that this one-to-one marketing will be applied to end users, channel members, and all other intermediaries.
2. Differentiating customers. In general, customers can be classified into two groups: they have different levels of values and they have different needs. This step will help you to determine how much efforts you should put on each customers and also help in deciding what strategy the company should be applied. .
3. Interacting with customers. The company should improve two things: cost efficiency and the effectiveness of your interactions with customers.