NEW YORK — How direct marketers can get to know their customers was the opening theme at the 35th annual DM Days New York conference here yesterday. The conference continues until May 25.
Michael P. Haydock, vice president and worldwide practice leader, IBM Business Intelligence Consulting & Services, delivered the keynote address and focused on the importance of direct marketers getting to know their customers. He unofficially subtitled his speech, “Six Cool Things You Can Do.”
The six are:
• Look from the outside in: View customers objectively.
• Build a frame: Look at what customers are buying, what it says about them and how they are paying.
• Technology opens doors: Use it to collect structured and unstructured data.
• Analyze to survive: Build a model to score customers, but do not over-promote.
• Time, transparency, trust: Think across time, personalize customer contact and respect privacy.
• Dot-com or dot-toast: Pay attention to the Internet as an important marketing channel.
Haydock stressed that direct marketers need to pay attention to how their customers prefer to be contacted, and to do so in the least intrusive manner possible.
The average customer record was 3,000 bytes of data 10 years ago, according to Haydock. Today, it is 20,000 bytes and will continue to increase, he said. Haydock urged direct marketers to turn that data into information and to use it to deliver customer value.
