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Close-to-Customer approaches and why they matter
By Jeff Kear

Although advertising isn't quite dead, it sure seems out of fashion ... and probably for good reason. According to a recent study, advertising effectiveness is at a 30-year low, with only 16% of all campaigns returning a profit and ROI for the average campaign at 1-3%. You read that correctly ... only 1-3%, which in the end puts a majority of campaigns in the red.

The causes of such awful performance are the typical culprits ... poor (or no) targeting, pursuing less profitable demographics, relying on hunches instead of facts, creative with no differentiating or value-centered message, too many cooks in the kitchen, NAFTA, the designated hitter (okay, maybe those last two are a stretch), etc.

With conditions like this, it's no shocker that companies are as focused as ever on lowering their costs for acquiring each new customer and retaining existing ones. As CEOs and marketing officers are calling on the advertising industry to overhaul its old way of doing business, we thought it would be a good time to talk about alternatives to mass marketing - what we call Close-to-Customer tactics for reaching customers more efficiently (another common term for this approach is one-to-one marketing).

For us, Close-to-Customer means several things. First and foremost, it includes all the ways in which a company can get closer to each customer and interact with them in a one-on-one setting - from a sales meeting or an online experience to individualized contact by snail mail, e-mail or at events. This necessarily excludes mass media, which, even when well targeted, is still scattershot compared to the close client touches I'm talking about here.

The word "touches" is critical in Close-to-Customer marketing, because it is at this personal level where you can best connect with customers and stay in their lives. And the better the quality of these touches, the more inclined customers will be to listen to you again and again.

Pause for a minute and think about all the places along the way of acquiring and serving a customer where you have the opportunity to reach out to them in a personal way:
* During the initial stages with targeted messaging, direct response approaches and lead generation.
* During the sales process with letters, interactive applications and collateral that drive customers deeper into the sales channel.
* After the sale with satisfaction surveys, rewards programs, e-mail newsletters and the like. (Note: it is almost always less expensive to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one, and Close-to-Customer approaches are perfect for maintaining contact with existing clients because of their low cost to high reception ratio.)

Each one of these occasions is a moment of opportunity, one easily squandered if you don't use the right message for the right audience at the right time. So, yes, Close-to-Customer is also about timing and saying the right thing in the right way.

For example, your message for a direct mailer to new prospects must be dramatically different than the language you use to speak to an existing client in a quarterly e-mail newsletter. The mailer has to interrupt whatever the prospect was doing and compel them to listen and act. The newsletter has to lead a customer to reaffirm their choice of doing business with you and re-engage them so you're even deeper in their head.

What is vital at this point in Close-to-Customer marketing is to know, without question, who your customers are and what they need to hear at each step in the process. This takes a thorough knowledge about their likes and dislikes as well as research and testing to get each component just right; without these, you're just guessing.

And yet, despite all this specialization of messaging, what you communicate in all materials, on all occasions still has to be consistent with your brand identity, your value statements, your company personality.

It might sound like a lot of work to implement Close-to-Customer programs (and it is), but in the end you may find them the most rewarding programs you have ever put in place.

About the Author
Jeff Kear is a principal at Kear|Stevens, an integrated marketing communications firm in Denver, CO. During his career in marketing and advertising, Jeff has created revenue-generating marketing communications for nationally recognized brands such as Budget, MetLife, Moosehead Beer, Qwest and Toyota. Before his work at Kear|Stevens, Jeff served as a senior-level creative at a few well-respected Denver ad agencies as well as a marketing and communications specialist for a Fortune 500 company.