Fuji Xerox Asia Pacific creates marketing campaigns that can connect businesses on a one-to-one level with clients and is able to massively improve response rates, sales, life-time value and brand loyalty.

Hélène Blanchette is the driver behind Fuji Xerox's 1:1 Experience, covered already in the September issue of Asian e-Marketing (Part 1). She is the one that developed the service that enables advertising and marketing companies to drastically improve their ROI while reducing their risk of failure.

Hélène's method combines targeted messaging based on customer profile and contextual information with an integrated multichannel approach across the web, print, SMS, social media, and mobile platforms. The enthusiastic and energetic marketing personality is an expert in her field of activities and knows a lot about 1:1 marketing that she shares generously.

Asked how she is managing to get the consumer insights needed to start a 1:1 marketing campaign, she said, that just four data – namely name, job title, name of company and whether the person is male or female – would be enough to achieve good results and summarized her in-depth knowledge of 1:1 marketing with a few simple steps that explains the success of such an approach:

  1. Communications should be customer-driven and directly impact the set goals of clients, while resolving their challenges. Media channels are just tools to use for communications, but it is important to make sure that data collection doesn't get isolated in silos as it would reduce the ability to be relevant in future communications.
  2. When the strategy is well defined, intelligence can drive and capitalize 1:1 marketing, even with just a small amount of information. Any usable data can help refine the relevancy of the first communication.
  3. To break internal silos it is best to work with product and department managers to better understand the audiences' multiple profiles and get insights into which products or offers match those profiles best. This will be your guideline when developing variable messages for cross-selling opportunities.
  4. To gauge the success of a one-to-one marketing program you need to measure response rates in each channel, conversation rates, value of Tier 1 to Tier 3 customers, life time value, value of prospects, requests and complaints at the call center, customer defection, retention, traffic and trends on website, sub-segments and much more.
  5. A 1:1 marketing approach is a continuous conversation, a progressive insight into customer behaviours and a gradual adaptation of your communications to ensure your customers are the main focus of your strategy. Each successive communication will be more relevant and consequently more valuable.

"We have a very strict methodology that we follow and we know exactly where to go and what to do", Hélène said and explained further "we always do one intense workshop in an afternoon to find what are the messages, what are the different segments and their messages, what is the key message and what are the particular actions that we are going to do to get results. That's basically the line-up, before it goes to the copywriters who have to write the text. Then the twin concept comes into play that takes into consideration as many twins as there are cultural differences and diversity in Singapore, such as Chinese, Australian etc., and just then we decided what we want to address as an issue."

According to Hélène, agencies often see her service as competition and therefore she always addresses the issue in the first meeting with clients, emphasizing "I would like many agencies to adopt this model not just for me but for the sake of the marketing and to make sense of all of this. It's about a strategy and methodology being used properly and I would like for more agencies in the market to be there to create independence." She affirmed: "I am very proud of the one to one lab and I am certainly proud that the whole one to one marketing experience is taking shape and being adopted and that we have succeeded to bring credibility to our service which was a very long shot when you think of what was the first, initial reception of Fuji Xerox on the market. They perceived us as a very great company but they still think that we make copiers - and to come to the market with a service and be completely accepted right away makes me, of course, very proud."

She explained again that the use of hyper personalization in her direct marketing campaigns can be achieved by a very simple methodology - she looks at the:

  1. data available, whether a lot or a little;
  2. several objectives that need to be achieved within it;
  3. major challenges that need to be resolved.

For her one to one marketing approaches must resolve and must accomplish something and she claims that following these three points is all that is needed to deploy a one to one marketing strategy.

"Instead of spending so much time in designing or re-designing, we are extremely regimented so we spend a lot of time in the first four weeks to ensure that we have done the work that needs to be done to prepare for these assets and once that is done we start to produce the work. We are regimented in our work and we never miss a step, never!"

So, you don't actually need a lot of customer data to start a 1:1 marketing campaign, if you have the proper strategic approach that empowers you to have a more relevant and more memorable conversation with customers. For more information, get in touch with Fuji Xerox's 1:1 Experience and go to http://1to1.com.sg/helene.blanchette

By Daniela La Marca