From PR/Newswire release by Silverpop (here):

While marketers remain positive about the role email will play in meeting their goals in 2010, they are also prepared to face related challenges. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said the biggest challenge in the coming year will be “inbox clutter.” Not surprising, given that Forrester Research estimates consumers will receive more than 9,000 email marketing messages a year by 2014.

Twenty percent of email marketers said they will struggle with “providing timely and relevant content.” MarketingSherpa has reported that lack of relevance is the No. 1 reason people unsubscribe to email programs. To ensure messages are anticipated and welcomed, 27 percent of marketers surveyed plan to incorporate behavioral targeting into email campaigns for the first time in 2010, and 26 percent will begin to use surveys to gather useful customer data.

I get the challenge: gaining and engaging customers deluged with largely irrelevant email in the B2C space. But for B2B, the challenge is adapting behavioral targeting to business organizations which likely do not behave similarly to consumers. I’m curious to see how behavioral targeting plays out for B2B.

A few highlights from ‘Experts predict 2010’s key trends’ on Target Marketing (here):

Rogers says she and Peppers first began talking about the concept of one-to-one marketing in 1993. Since then, they’ve taken deep dives into ideas like “return on customer,” which means that a company should sell the right products to customers instead of finding customers for the products they want to sell, and taking the long view, or emphasizing lifetime value. That last idea deals with beating “the crisis of short-termism” among companies, to paraphrase the title of their latest book.

[snip]

(From Eric Shmitt quote) But I think even more … more important than that now is just the continued integration of new sources of data. And then the application of that combined database to drive intelligent communications through these new channels.”

The article looks at the trends for B2C but I think the above are just as relevant for B2B.

A great view of how Web site designs become less than perfect at How a Web Design goes Straight to Hell . Let me say that this applies to product design as well, a feature there and a feature here…

Here is a study by the Center for Marketing Research at  Umass at Dartmouth on social media usage by the Inc 500 (here)

This article on marketingprofs Ready, Aim, Market outlines the advantages of a more precise location information on customers. As we work with a lot of customer information from clients and the resulting geospatial analysis, let me add a few thoughts and observations:

1) The capability exists with open source and commercial tools to perform fairly extensive analysis of customers by geography. While it’s helpful to view customers as points, it is also likely you will have to look at things at higher levels of geography if you want to overlay data such as demographics and firmographics as this type of data is typically not available on a point-by-point basis.

2) The importance of distance as a metric varies according to where you are: if I’m in midtown Manhattan, traveling 2 miles is quite different than traveling 2 miles in a suburban area. In practice, this is an easy parameter for a small business with a single location to define while much more difficult for a company with a large branch network covering a wide array of geographies.

3) As a corollary to 2, companies with large networks and customers need some way to rollup the geodata for analysis as I’ve yet to meet any senior manager who will drill down into each of their locations for the micro view of each customer. The trick is often getting verfy localized data into meaningful rollups for decision makers.

I’m thinking through a very good article from strategy+business “What Banking Needs to Become“.

One of the recommendations to build a better bank centers on customer management. Here is the salient quote:

Bankers have been reminded that their core asset is their customer base, both individual customers and businesses. Like successful businesses in most other industries, the leading banks are sharpening their capability for capturing customer information in a timely manner. For banks, this means analyzing their customers’ product holdings, cash flows, behaviors, and personal circumstances. Depth of relationship will be more important than breadth.

In our work with banks, we pitch this concept all the time and most of the time, bank executives agree with the concept. It’s the execution where the disconnect between concept and execution appears.

While banks may have a rich set of demographic data on the consumer and firmographic data on the business, the objective is not to really engage the customer in the sense that we talk about in social media. Instead the objective becomes one of a transaction: cross-sell them a new product, pitch them a new product, or announce a new service. So banks are not truly going deep into the data to engage the customer but going deep into the data to mine for transactions. It is a profound difference in approach.

If we want to engage customers to build that depth of relationship, it has to be more than just on a transaction-by-transaction basis driven by the bank. The customer needs to engage back in a meaningful way. And here is the rub: you cannot readily measure the depth of engagement from the customer but you can easily measure the transactions of the customer. I guess the question becomes one of metrics: what is the right metric or right set of metrics. Is the quality of relationship measured by the cross-sell and the level of wallet of the customer or do other metrics count as well? Here is but one example: a small business owner with a relatively few products and relatively low wallet who likes doing business with the bank and tells everyone he knows about his good experiences as a customer. By standard metrics, this would likely be an average type of customer but given his buy-in to the bank I’d argue that he should be moved up on the curve from average to well-above average. We should all have such customer champions.

I’m not sure of the answer right now but building depth into the customer base requires an evolving set of metrics around exactly what defines depth of relationship.

Again I encourage a read of the article as it is thought provoking in the challenge ahead to building that customer experience especially with the pool of prized customers shrinking and likely to ever increased poaching from the competition.

From Marketing Week’s: Direct mail lives online but email needs refining:

The Marketing Week poll also provided a glimpse of changing dynamics within the sector, with 45% of people using interactive direct marketing methods, bettering the third (33%) using physical direct mail.

Note: This is UK

A nicely compiled list of strategists on 451 Heat (here).

A framework and scoring system nicely laid out here  to see how your marketing database is performing , or not.

 As the economy slowly shows signs of recovery, almost 40% of b-to-b marketers say they plan to boost their marketing budgets next year, according to BtoB’s “2010 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans” survey.

Full article + report findings (here)