Chapter 18. Delivering the Customer Offer

Now that we've chosen the set of customers most appropriate to the offer we plan to make, it's time to design and deliver the offer to these customers. The “offer” is what all our project efforts so far have prepared us to do. The offer can be anything from a marketing campaign to an opportunity to take advantage of a new online capability, as long as we want the customer to perform an action in response. For CRM projects, all decisions should be based on customer information. We are going to work on defining the right goal and the right offers for each customer segment.

The actual creation (content and design) is important enough to be at least a course topic, if not a full degree program, in most universities and MBA programs. You may very well want to hire professional experts either on staff or as consultants to help you with these communication tasks. But it's important to understand the basics so you can tell whether you've hired the right consultant! As you can see in Figure 18-1, we are starting the last phase of our CRM methodology.

We have identified the customer set that we believe will return the most value (greatest response rates, highest profit margins, or lowest cost to serve). Now it's time to deliver the offer.