B/OSS Blends Competitive Content

Riner showed what happens when a company cuts corners on its data-gathering methodology and assumes it knows its customers based on scanty information. He citing a near real-time example of a marketing group reaching out to him with a text message the morning after the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup because his “hometown team had won.” The company made incorrect assumptions about Riner’s preferences based merely on his zip code. They didn’t really know him on the level they assumed they did as he actually grew up in Philadelphia and his home team had lost.

“The company who planned the marketing campaign didn’t really know me,” Riner said Rather than displaying competence in personalization, “the company violated my trust,” he said.

Riner went on to say that it was equally important to use the right vehicle for getting one’s marketing messages out. Since the average person sees some 3,000 marketing messages per day, they either tune them out or throw them away.

The best place to reach the customer with messages they will read and act upon is on the transaction document, or bill. Ninety-five percent of these documents are opened and read, he said. And the customer spends one to three minutes reviewing it.

These numbers have led InfoTrends to become very bullish on transpromotional billing. In fact, they project that the market will grow at a 48.5 percent clip over the next few years.

“You don’t see many things growing at 48.5 percent,” Riner said.

Transpromotional billing is not a marketing effort alone, Riner said. Nor is it an IT function or even a finance function. “It takes everyone working together and it takes data, lots of data,” he said.

“As long as you have that monthly connection to your customer, you’ll want to measure their response to see how to enhance and refine your relationship over time,” Riner said. “It is an interactive process — not one-way or two-way. Nor is it tactical. It is strategic; the financial impact can be significant if done right.”

The bottom line is to never stop learning about your customer, Riner said. “Customer knowledge will never become a commodity,” he said.

That sounds like the theme for next year’s show.

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