8020Info Capsule - One-to-one Marketing

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One-to-one Marketing

One-to-one marketing focuses on determining and meeting the needs of individual customers, instead of concentrating on products or broad market segments. The goal is to sell one customer at a time as many products as possible over the lifetime of that customer's patronage.

One-to-one marketing increases the "share of wallet" a company wins from its best customers, as the business understands preferences better, and builds loyalty. It also creates a barrier to switching to a competitor, since the competitor would need to be educated anew about the customer's needs and wants. And since it's cheaper to deal with existing customers than find new ones, the one-to-one approach brings cost savings as well as revenue growth.
Companies of all sizes are using one-to-one marketing. In some cases, where it's impossible to deal with every customer uniquely, the company opts for customization, developing a limited series of options that can each be targeted at the most likely customers, such as the bank which may have a half-dozen retirement savings packages to offer in January and sends each person the one that seems most applicable.

Four Steps of One-to-one Marketing:

Identify your customers, gathering as much detail as you can about their habits and preferences.

Differentiate your customers, learning the value your company could create by meeting their different needs.

Interact with your customers, trying to improve the cost-efficiency of those interactions.

Customize your enterprise's behaviour, so that you are adapting to and adhering to customer needs and desires.

This works best when you can employ sophisticated technology - such as databases and data mining tools - but small companies can still make one-to-one inroads. They should start with a portion of their best customers and over time, if possible, keep expanding the efforts to more and more customers.

First Steps for Your One-to-one Approach

A good way to begin is by:

increasing cross-selling;

reducing processing or transition costs;

reducing customer attrition; and,

trying to raise customer satisfaction.

The next level of a modest one-to-one program might include calling top clients just to make sure they are happy; initiating more dialogue in general with such customers; baby-sitting the orders of customers who have complained about your products or service more than once in the last year; and finding customers who are only buying a few products from your company and making them an offer they can't refuse to try other items.

If you would like more information or assistance with One-to-one Marketing for your organization, please contact us.