By M. Isi Eromosele

Inbound Customer Marketing (ICM) is emerging as a new channel for marketers to target customers when they initiate contact themselves.

Consumers today are deluged by advertising messages promoting an ever increasing choice of products and services via a growing number of marketing channels. As the advertising clutter grows and the battle for consumer attention escalates, marketers face declining effectiveness of marketing communication as well as increasing customer dissatisfaction with the relevance of marketing messages.

For example, recall rates of TV advertising, in fact, have fallen to less than 10 percent from a high of 40 percent in the 1960s. In the U.S., 59 percent of respondents in a recent survey felt that ads have very little relevance to their daily lives.

In this environment, Inbound Customer Marketing (ICM) presents a sales and marketing opportunity for companies to target customers when they initiate contact themselves at various touch points.

Inbound Customer Marketing is the practice of offering a targeted product, service or communication when the customer initiates an event, such as contacting the call center or retail store, visiting the website, or roaming abroad.

These customer-initiated interactions present a marketing avenue for companies to make cross/up-sell or loyalty offers and drive an increase in revenues or reduce customer churn.

In implementing Inbound Customer Marketing, advanced mechanisms can be used to capture customer information on parameters such as needs, lifestyle and preferences and conduct in-depth analysis to generate insights.

Such sophisticated ICM deployments also use predictive modeling to anticipate customers’ propensity to purchase or churn, and use real-time learning algorithms to take into account the most recent interactions to present personalized offers, thus ensuring a higher chance of success.

In some cases, separate applications are implemented across various channels that lack common decision logic, whereas in the more advanced implementations, ICM is integrated across channels to ensure a consistent marketing approach.

Inbound customer channels are increasingly emerging as a viable sales channel to cross/up-sell or make retention offers. For example, telecommunication service providers are well positioned to exploit this trend since the frequency of customer contact is relatively high across various channels for activities ranging from payment to new product/service information requests.

Additionally, the range and complexity of offers to customers in the industry tends to be high, so that ICM tools that can assist in determining the “best” offer for an individual customer will help to increase marketing effectiveness and success.

An integrated, multi-channel ICM implementation approach ensures real-time customer information capture and visibility, employing customer-centric segmentation,predictive analytics and real-time decision-making tools to effectively and efficiently make customized offers to customers.

A synchronization of inbound and outbound campaigns could enable a company to run coordinated multi-stage campaigns to be conducted across outbound and inbound channels where more than one contact is needed with a customer to achieve the desired result.

An ICM solution that attempts to match offers to customers requires an extra level of data integration. The challenge is to identify the data needed to support the desired inbound marketing campaigns, and to make the data available with appropriate levels of freshness, quality and consistency.

Companies can also consider dynamic customer segmentation, which takes into account real-time information and behavior of the caller, to present targeted offers. 

This can help address issues related to outdated data and insights with a system that can enable dynamic re-classification of the customers and revision of offers based on current behavior and preferences.