Direct marketing to your existing customers, the best way to grow revenue for most companies, is like a three-legged stool.  The three legs are customer data, customer analytics, and customer campaigns.  Remove any leg and the stool falls over.

Without customer data, you’re flying blind – forced to use newspapers, TV, pay-per-click, and take a chance your customer will find your message.  You can’t use personalized direct marketing and all the revenue lift it generates.

Without customer analytics, sending catalogs, email, and direct mail becomes merely ‘spray and pray’ with the same message going to each recipient. You miss out on both segmentation and personalization, which we’ve learned can produce double-digit response rates.  We’ve seen personalization alone double and quadruple response rates.

Without outbound customer campaigns, you are left with a fatal reliance on inbound marketing.  While inbound marketing is all the rage — see David Meerman Scott — we know from painful experience that failure to launch outbound customer campaigns is a sure-fire path to lower revenue.

We believe in this three-legged approach so strongly that every one of the teams that work with our customers has four members – a team leader, plus a data concierge responsible for managing the customer’s datamart; a mathematician who shepherds the data through our automated analytical engine and analyzes results; and a marketing specialist who interprets the analytical insights for the customer and helps plan campaigns.

Does your customer marketing stand on all three legs?  If not, you can borrow some of ours.