Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

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216 BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKETING Use that marketing pyramid we discussed earlier. For example, you may wish to treat customers at the top of the marketing pyramid very differently from other customers. You may want to develop a special relationship with these highly valued customers, communicating with them more frequently via e-mail, enrolling them in preferred customer clubs, and making them special offers on a regular basis. You may also wish to develop a special program for resellers or partners. Business partners are a customer audience in and of themselves, and they should be treated differently and communicated with separately. 5. Make One-to-One Fun The idea of a one-to-one relationship is that you get to know your customers, their attributes, and their individual needs over time. The more you learn about your customer, the more you can use the Internet to target individualized communications to your customer. Building that relationship is a serious marketing process, of course, but it should also be fun for the customer. Having fun—providing the customer with an opportunity to smile or even laugh—is a part of relationship building that can endear your company to the customer because you make him or her feel good. The Web can be a playful place. Some b-to-b marketers make excellent use of this characteristic, offering customers games, contests, and cafes where customers can do the cyberspace equivalent of leaning back, putting their feet up, and just relaxing. You can use the informality and interactivity of the Web in a good-humored and informal way to make your customers feel that your company is friendly, down to earth, and easy to do business with. We have discussed a number of ways to implement Internet-enhanced customer marketing, but the bottom line is customer database integration. You need to have access to customer data and use it in a proactive yet appropriate fashion to build a long-lasting customer relationship program via the Internet. With Internet-enhanced customer marketing, you have the potential to keep your most valued customers buying more, the ability to push other customers up the marketing pyramid until they reach “golden” status, and the likelihood of improved productivity and profits that come from the cost-effective implementation of superior customer service.
Building Customer-Driven Extranets Building Customer Relationships 217 The culmination of one-to-one marketing is the creation of a customerdriven extranet, a Web site established by a company to specifically offer private or preferred customer access to information and order entry. The extranet can be implemented as a restricted area on an existing corporate Web site, or it can be built as a separate site. Either way, it makes it clear that the company believes in the credo “the customer comes first.” As just one example, IBM reported at a recent Internet marketing conference that the company created extranets with some of its key customers to encourage them to do business with IBM online. The move contributed to moving IBM’s e-commerce revenues from $35 million a month in early 1998 to over $1 billion a month by December 1998. As an aside, IBM saved some $300 million in call center costs in 1998 by handling more customer service inquiries online. A restricted access customer service area of a corporate Web site is, in effect, a version of a customer-driven extranet. Many companies establish such areas for customers only, so that they can interact privately with the organization or gain access to information intended only for them. For the most part, access is permitted via a simple password, which the company assigns or the customer selects. Invitation-only Internet events are also a form of extranet, because they are often delivered via a special URL and require passwords to enter. Private-access customer areas and virtual events running over the Web may be acceptable solutions for some b-to-b companies, but conducting business on an ongoing basis with customers and partners over the Internet could stretch the boundaries of any public Web site. An extranet may make more sense, if only because the load of real-time customer service and transaction processing could eat a Web server alive. The customer-driven extranet is, of course, a major technological undertaking. The impact on the organization should not be minimized, because business processes themselves may undergo dramatic change. If systems serving customers within your company are not centralized, the extranet will likely not succeed. However, if you have your organizational act together and you have the technology to back it up (either with in-house resources or through outsourcing), then the business benefits of a customer extranet can be huge. In larger companies, for example, the costs associated with customer service and support can be dramatically reduced by
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BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKE
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BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKE
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Publisher: Jim Hoskins Manager of F
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Acknowledgments For helping me crea
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Table of Contents Table of Contents
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Table of Contents xi Automated E-ma
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Table of Contents xiii Real Estate
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Table of Contents xv Maintaining On
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Table of Contents xvii Office.com (
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Table of Contents xix DellHost ....
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About This Book About This Book xxi
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Introduction The original edition o
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sively. Large businesses are moving
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101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site,
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