I ran a lapsing customer programme which finished before Christmas 2006. In our business, a lapsing customer is any customer who has set up an account with us, but has not ordered for six months. I sent a lapsing email out which contained a free shipping offer on the next order a customer placed. The email went to a list size of about 980 customers. To be honest I was not expecting this email to have much impact. Would I place an order after six months in return for free shipping which would save me US$8.95? I was absolutely staggered to have a 43% clickthrough rate, with about a 21% take up rate. What I need to do next is to see whether those customers who ordered have continued to place orders. I would definitely say that for a small investment it was well worth testing to see what the response was.

The mechanics of the lapsing campaign were as follows. The first email was followed up with a resend of exactly the same email two weeks later. The second email was sent to all customers on the original list who did not place an order. In all the promotion lasted for one month. Customer tracking was set in place, and customers needed to use a promotion code contained within the email to get the free shipping offer.

From the various other campaigns I have run, any activity that is going to take place will do so within the first few hours of being received and then more or less cease within 48 hours.

It's been awhile in my sporadic life as a blogger. I hesitate to even use the word blogger to describe my irregular ramblings. Something else to add to my list of New Year resolutions to do and fail miserably on. But perhaps I can make in here some tenuous link to the value of understanding the customer. In understanding that I am at best an irregular blogger, a company would know that they do not need to engage with me too often; just enough for me not to forget what service, value, need state they offer me. They would understand that I like to write, but that I don't do it very often, or that when I do write, I will tend to write two or three entries and then have a hiatus for weeks, if not months. So it is the same with customers. If I can understand their pattern of behaviour, then it follows that I should be able to respond to or pre-empt their needs. Easier said than done.

Where do you start when you are putting together an eCRM programme of customer engagement?

One of the first things to do is actually understand what it is your customer does and why they do it, what are their motivations or drivers for doing what they do? How do they do it? When do they do it? How often do they do it? How much do they spend?

Imagine yourself as a customer. When you buy a product, why do you buy it, where do you buy it, when do you buy it, would you buy from that supplier again, if so why... We often forget that we are customers also.

Once you understand these fundamental drivers, you can start to map out the journey the customer takes and begin to really appreciate what they go through. You can begin to empathise with them. You can begin to understand when you need certain communications and when you don't need them. You can understand points of vulnerability.

Points of vulnerability are those moments when a customer has the opportunity to not use your service again, defect to a competitor, begin to forget about your offering etc.

For me, it is these points of vulnerability that should be focussed on, examined and understood. Such moments might include: abandoned cart, registering an account but not purchasing, saved order that is never submitted, lengthening times between orders, renewals, gifting a product to someone who subsequently does not order from you etc. But only once you understand your customer and their motivation for bying from you can you really being to address these points of vulnerability.

I am currently working on a model illustrating customer engagement (see attachment below). As I was putting it together it became increasingly apparent to me that customer engagement is characterised by a series of encounters that take place across a customer's lifecycle. These encounters or instances of engagement - moments of truth perhaps - result in either a negative or positive experience for the customer. And over time, both positive and negative experiences are built up, almost like a tally. At some points along the way the company is in credit and at other times in debit. But as long as the overall experience remains for the most part in credit, that individual will hopefully remain a customer.

These points of engagement or encounters can be seen as positive or negative 'trip wires', which inform us of a customer's changing behaviour. In turn, they alert us to the fact that we need to respond with an appropriate action that keeps our customer scorecard in credit. Too many negative experiences and we run the risk of the customer going elsewhere.

I recently went on a course on Principle-Centred Leadership (Covey) and one of the 'habits' was about empathetic listening. To actually let someone talk, to say nothing back to them and really try to understand and feel what they were saying. To listen without letting your own prejudices, preconceptions, assumptions, expectations get in the way. Apart from being very difficult, it also made me think about customers and how we engage with them.

All too often we make assumptions about what is best for our customers. We believe we know best. We tinker with our service or add new features to our web site because we think our customers would benefit from them. Unfortunately, we often forget to do one small thing: To actually ask our customers what they want, what they think about a particular service, and then to actually listen to what they are saying, and then to translate this into something relevant and meaningful for them.

Web 2.0 and the growing move towards co-creation are giving customers and businesses the tools by which to engage with each other, to listen and to try to find a common ground on which to understand each other. There is no doubt that, at present, this tool set favours customers. However, this is more to do with the fear of the unknown - not being in control - by businesses than anything else. So for the moment we are still awkward bedpartners.

First contact marketing is about that first experience or encounter a customer has with you in whatever context you interact with them. Whether it is the very first time they visit your web site, or that first moment they open a box to get your product out, or the first thirty seconds on the phone with you.

What the customer does, thinks or responds to in those first moments is started by you. But in those first few moments the customer in a split second brings to bear all the historical baggage of the relationship they are building up and have built up with you: their expectations, anxieties, prejudices. Each new expectation piled on to the existing ones, each moment of satisfaction and excitement added in, but just as equally each moment of dissatisfaction added in, and perhaps added in doubly for good measure. Those first moments record all previous moments, and also serve as a marker of future expectations.

At the moment I am putting together a lapsing customer strategy. Basically, trying to encourage existing customers who have not ordered with us in a while to start ordering again. What became evident as I was working through this, was the gap that exists between how the business defines lapsed and the lapsing behaviour of the customer themselves.

Our business defines lapsed as a customer who has not made a purchase for six months. A customer, on the other hand, may become lapsed within days, weeks or months of their last order. They become lapsed due to a better or more convenient alternative coming along, or just simply forgetting to order and gradually falling out of the re-ordering habit with us. We may have set up measures to identify or pre-empt lapsing behaviours based on recency and volume of order, and these 'trip wires' in turn may begin a series of win-back communications. 

The key here, however, is accepting that it is the customer who lapses and we as a business must be ready to respond whether that lapsing behaviour is exhibited at 9 days, 27 days or 65 days after their last order. A customer does not suddenly lapse at 6 months. By then, it may be too late any way.

Organised a very successful digital day on 21st July 2005 for Four Square, the drinks division of Mars, Inc. It may well have been the first digital day within Mars, Inc.

I managed to get, with the help of Ashley Friedlein of e-consultancy, Ajaz Ahmed (co-founder of AKQA, twice voted the most respected agency by NMA) and Danny Meadows Klue (founder and European President of the IAB) to speak to an audience made up of the decision makers within the global marketing team from Four Square.

Ajaz looked at the trends currently facing us today and the profound impact these are having on us, while Danny looked at the media mix and the challenges digital media is placing on traditional marketing methodologies and thinking.

I have provided a link to a recent insight paper by Danny in which he urges marketers to learn from the past, understand the truths of the digital economy and ride the trends they give rise to.

> Truths of the digital economy: trends marketers can harness