Online Marketing

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Online Marketing

Passion is the "Holy Grail" of customer engagement states and online marketing is only reached when the other three are firmly rooted. Not only is a customer in the Passion state less likely to be price sensitive, they will go out of their way to purchase from the company who does online marketing over competitive products.

Further, the authors state that an online marketing customer "couldn't imagine a world without it." Great organizations know how to maintain passion with their customers. Organizations such as Nordstrom come to mind, with their relentless pursuit of online marketing, even if it means buying a
product from another store just to satisfy a customer need.

So how does one go about working with this knowledge of customer engagement states? We recommend the following steps:

1. Gain insight about your customers on a deep level.
A lot can be learned from surveys, however true, customer clarity comes from qualitative as well as quantitative research; in other words, get in front of them and ask the right questions.
A great place to start might be the identifying questions used by Gallup. We would suggest taking it a bit further by not only learning what state the customers are in, but learn specifically what is keeping them from moving forward to the next engagement state. This research, if done correctly, can uncover many ideas that can be easily implemented based on the values of customers.

2. Gain insight about your operations and how they affect the customer experience.
Using the Insight gained in the first step, learn which online marketing customer-facing operations need improvement and use innovation to improve them. Additionally, it is vital to have online marketing people with the proper skills interacting with customers. The authors of Follow This Path, have astutely pointed to discovering the natural strengths and talents of online marketing employees and placing them in the right positions where their strengths can be leveraged for customer delight.

3. Implement and test your changes and improvements.
After implementation, gather new insights on how well you are doing. For instance, you might have only 10% at the Passion stage and 12% at Pride before you started your initiatives. Six months later you might find these numbers increasing to 15% and 17% respectively. This improvement can be tracked directly to the bottom line with a lifetime value of customer analysis of Passion and Pride engaged customers.

There are other considerations to think about when mapping out an improvement project dealing with customer engagement states.

We suggest the following:
Measuring the engagement levels on a online marketing market segment or buyer group basis
Identifying the life time value of customers in each segment or buyer group
Make this online marketing strategy an on-going process where each initiative is reviewed for effectiveness and improved upon as needed as insight from online marketing results are gained.
Learning about your customer's engagement states can do wonders for both online marketing and customer acquisition improvement.