What is one-to-one marketing? Marketing experts Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., define one-to-one (1 to 1) marketing as a process that helps a company identify its most valuable customers, remembers everything it learns about each one, and acts on that learning in all its dealings with that customer. The goal is to focus on the most valuable customers and to win a greater share of each valuable customer's business. In the book The One-to-One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, Peppers and Rogers say, "There is one way and one way only for any company to ensure its financial security: by creating satisfied, loyal customers. A satisfied, loyal customer is one who repurchases, again and again, and recommends a product to friends as well."
How do we get our customers to repurchase, again and again, and recommend friends? Forget about treating all customers equally. Customers today want to be treated as individuals and they all have different needs. The goal is to build loyalty and profitability by giving customers what they want.
Peppers and Rogers have five specific terms (the Five I's) that apply to the discipline of one-to-one marketing: Identification, Interaction, Individual-ization, Integration, and Integrity.
Identification. Who are your customers, what are their characteristics, habits, preferences, and so forth.
Individualization. Customers are different in two principle ways: They have different needs from your dealership, and they represent different values to your dealership. Understanding the degree of differentiation within your customer base is a critical step in planning your one-to-one marketing strategy.
Interaction. The challenge is getting the information that you need. It is difficult to treat a customer as an individual with specific needs if you don't know what they are. The solution is to create a system that allows you to interact with your customer and to capture valuable information. There are various ways that you can interact with your customers. Mail surveys, phone surveys, and response cards are all tools that can help you capture valuable information. While some people complain of being surveyed too often, the majority of the population is willing to give you feedback if you ask. Too many companies don't create a system to get accurate feedback from their customers. In addition to surveying, I recommend creating a system to capture customer information from your sales staff.
Integration. The behavior of your dealership toward each customer must be driven by your knowledge of that individual customer. All of your customer information needs to be captured in a format or database that you can use to market to your customers on a one-to-one basis. One-to-one marketing cannot be developed and implemented by yourself. Your entire staff needs to understand the importance of your customers and how to leverage the information that you have gathered. Whether your staff member is a salesperson, cashier, or service advisor-they all have the ability to build a relationship with your customer.
Integrity. If you can't gain, and keep, a customer's trust, the customer won't be willing to share enough information in a dialogue to sustain a one-to-one marketing relationship.
If you can implement a one-to-one marketing strategy that encompasses: (1) identifying your customers, (2) differentiating them by what they need and by their value to you, (3) interacting with them, (4) customizing your product or service to meet their individually expressed needs, and (5) earning your customer's trust and loyalty, you will have an excellent advantage over your competition.
Grant Dunning is President of the OCT Group, a relationship marketing company working with dealerships in all 50 states and Canada since 1986.