The first Wicklow Business Expo took place on November 24th last. Lauded as a great success, the exhibition showcased businesses from throughout the county. Most of the exhibitors were more than pleased with the turnout and there is no doubt that there will be significant volumes of business generated as a result. Many thanks to the Wicklow Chambers who organised the event, and we’re looking forward to a repeat.

Tadhg Henderson, Charlie Melia, PROFITS.IE and Pat King, VOIPLINE.IE at Wicklow Business Expo 2009

PROFITS.IE held a free draw on the day – the prize being a free hosted CRM setup, training course and first month’s subscription. The name drawn from the hat was ABCD Engineering of Arklow, who specialise in stainless steel and aluminium sheet metal manufacturing. More information on PROFITS.IE range of business services can be found on our website at www.profits.ie

The old adage “It’s easier to sell to an existing or previous customer than to a new customer” is probably most evident of all in the hospitality industry. If a hotel or guest house has a customer with a happy experience, it is infinitely easier to convince that customer to return than to try and find a new customer who has never been before. So how can you use this information to target your existing customer base for repeat business? The answer is to let Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software help you communicate with them. It’s all about keeping in touch. And an added bonus – you can also target new business at the same time.

Marketing Campaigns
The hotel marketing strategy should definitely incorporate CRM. There are various means of using cheap internet services to produce fancy graphical e-mails to target existing clients. However, used on their own, these do not form a structured marketing campaign. You need to be able to filter the data, for example, by region (town, county, country), by industry (for business clients – conferences, business lunches and the like), by customer profile (visitors for Christmas, Valentines’ Day, Mother’s and Father’s Day). One Dublin hotel that springs to mind actively targets wedding reception and honeymoon couples. Each anniversary they receive a very attractive offer in the post to entice them back for another stay or meal. Others use simple e-zines and newsletters sent monthly or bi-monthly – this keeps the brand fresh in the mind while also alerting the client to any special offers.

Maximise your occupancy
All hotels and guest houses know what it costs to turn a room. Using CRM, we can find out what guests have previously negiotiated lower rates. We can then target those individuals or businesses directly to maximise the occupancy in periods of low demand. As you only make the offer available to a carefully selected segment of your guests, you will not erode your price positioning or branding. It’s common sense, however, many hotels just don’t have the facilities to find this information. That’s where CRM is your friend!

Satisfaction Surveys
Once a customer has left, contact them by phone or e-mail for a short satisfaction survey. The survey should be short, but will quickly highlight any perceived deficiencies in service. But most importantly, you can record the responses in CRM, and use this for future marketing campaigns.

Much has been written over the years about the principles of Lean – whether it be in a manufacturing, stock, management or distribution-type application. From Lean Six Sigma to Kaizan, the amount of information available in this area is colossal. However, the concept of Lean Marketing is only just emerging. In its basic form, it takes those same principles alluded to above and applies them to the marketing strategy of an organisation. The fundamentals of lean incorporate complex theories which are too in-depth to explain in detail here. There are, however, a number of common components. We examine here how a properly implemented and well managed CRM system can apply each of these components to help acheive Lean Marketing.

Identify your Value Stream
If you have a range of products, each with its own range of marketing campaigns and messages, it is critical that we identify what products our customers want, but more importantly what message different customers respond to. For example, customers in construction might respond to a campaign that can help them work in bad weather. Using CRM, we can create more efficient methods to deliver targeted messages in the particular manner that customers wish to receive it. It must be remembered that it is our job as marketers to deliver the message in a manner a customer wishes to receive. Lean marketing is a system focused on and driven by customers. Review your past sales to your ideal customers. Determine when and what was of value to them. That is your value stream and your vision.

Measurable results
Any lean marketing campaign must deliver measurable results. You need to be able to identify the response rate out of every 10, 100 and 1000 direct mail pieces. However,the measurements you use determine your success. Having good measurements are the key. Once you have identified the measurement rate, we need to be able to improve on it. Constant tweaking of the campaign in an incremental manner should improve the response rate. If an individual change causes the rate to go down, we immediately revert. CRM assists here by allowing us to measure responses to campaigns and identify over time whether we are improving, and to what extent.

Benchmark where you are
If we want something to measure results against, we need a benchmark for where we are. This is critical in to acheiving a well-balanced lean marketing strategy. Where are we at currently? Take stock, and use the system to keep an eye on the metrics identified.

Where are you going?
Having identified a baseline at a point in time, we now need to measure results against this periodically. Generally, we want to see the response rates going up. But we also need to set targets. We can use CRM in this regard to establish targets at each stage of the sales pipeline. Objective, realistic goals are the key. Too many marketers and sales people generally are overly optimistic. It has to be real or the results will not be measurable.

Continuous Improvement
The final element in an effective Lean Marketing Strategy discussed here is Continuous Improvement. We must always strive to improve. The fundamental theory of Continuous Improvement or Kaizen in Japanese was developed by Toyota. Every single element involved in the process, even the smallest, should be improved upon. For a direct mail campaign, if I can produce 1,000 letters in 3 hours this month, I should strive to do it in 2 hours 50 minutes next month. CRM helps to automate the processes and speed up repetitive tasks.

Businesses across the board are revising budgets and cutting costs where possible in order to cope with the financial crisis. We all know that it is not advisable to cut marketing budgets, as this causes sales to reduce in the medium to long term. That said, many business owners and fincanical controllers feel they have no option. Or have they? What about taking a different approach to marketing that’s not only cheaper, more effective, but truly GREEN?

Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system it is possible to automate the marketing and sales function to facilitate a personalised direct marketing campaign. The objective is to target advertising and promotional material at the decision-maker directly. It is now possible to have a low-cost, hosted sales software system where you don’t need any expensive equipment on-site to run the software (see www.profits.ie for full details.) This means that not only are you not paying for a server and all of the equipment that goes with it, but also you don’t need to have the associated running costs. You also have the added benefit of choosing electronic delivery of your marketing material, or if it needs to be paper based, the numbers are much lower due to direct communication with the right person.

How Hosted CRM is GREEN MARKETING:

• Using our datacentres to host your IT system means that many businesses are using the same servers – each business does not have a dedicated server.  This means much lower energy consumption through manufacturing and on-going maintenance of servers
• Enegery consumption is further reduced in running costs – one server might have 50 systems running
• Electronic delivery – e-mail, text message – means no paper and printing
• Direct, targeted marketing via letter means much smaller campaigns with much larger conversions. So no more leaflet drops of 10,000, bulk newspaper ads, etc.
• Less manual tracking means much less paper notes

Green marketing is fast becoming a vital component in getting new customers and retaining existing clients. Linked to social marketing (using Linked in, Fackbook, Bebo, Twitter), hosted CRM can provide a whole new Eco-Marketing strategy that some of the largest corporations in the world are beginning to embrace (if you don’t believe me, google “Green Marketing”.) It’s only a matter of time before this filters down to the small business. Why wait when you can get in first and build a name for Green IT?