Are marketing dollars best spent on customer creation or the optimization of current customer relationships?
While both are important, I think optimizing current customers wins this one. It’s generally easier and cheaper to get more value from an existing customer than to find a new one, and the current economic climate will likely make this more evident than ever before. I also think that companies can create much more competitive separation with current customers. After all, when competing for new customers, everyone is even. When optimizing your current customers, however, you have a huge advantage—data. All that data you have on your customers and their prior behavior can and should be put to work in treating your customers more appropriately, targeting customers more accurately and retaining customers for increased profitability. Your competitors don’t have this customer data making every time you put it to work effectively a competitive advantage. You recently wrote about the “art and science of better.” What does this mean in the world of customer relationship management? It’s a phrase
