In one of the famous Seinfeld sketches, he receives a call from a telemarketer trying to sell him something. Seinfeld replies the time is not convenient for him and asks for the telemarketer's home number so he could call him back later. The telemarketer is not happy about it and then Seinfeld delivers the punch, saying "I guess you don't want people calling you at home - well now you know how I feel!" He then hangs up the phone to the audience's applause.
We can all sympathize with this scene - the majority of people looks upon incoming marketing as intrusive. Most incoming marketing calls are nipped in the bud, lots of marketing mail ends up in the trash without being fully read or understood, and the finger is very light on the delete button for marketing mails. In addition, regulation is now playing a role and the annoyed individual can opt out from those initiatives and eventually make some money from privacy violation law suits. Considering the increasing customer resistance to incoming marketing, the marketers have to think of ways that would help them promote products without causing customers to turn a deaf ear to their promotions.
This is where inbound marketing comes into the picture - when interactions are initiated by customers, such by calling a call center for service request or by browsing a website for online shopping. Field experience shows that offers properly selected and proactively proposed at the right time can generate response rates in the range of 30% -as much as 10 times better than conventional outbound marketing campaigns.
SAP is now offering such capabilities, Real-Time Offer Management software is a new CRM component that provides an advanced self learning real-time decision engine that lets you optimize any decision-making process, such as for selecting cross-sell and up-sell offers that are likely to be accepted, offering a retention offer that will maximize the lifetime value of the customers and more. The software takes into account all relevant information, including the up-to-the-moment interaction context, to recommend intelligently the most appropriate next best action.
I will be posting more blogs about this new marketing approach and in the mean time you can read more about Real Time Offer Management here.
And for those of you who missed the famous Seinfeld chapter, bellow is the link - Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hllDWSbuDsQ
