Sustaining Social CRM...ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

Dictionary.com lists the following definitions for the words:

"Sustaining"

1. to support, hold, or bear up from below; bear the weight of, as a structure.
2. to bear (a burden, charge, etc.).
3. to undergo, experience, endure without giving way or yielding.

"Social"

1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.
2. seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable: gregarious

"Customer Relationship Management (CRM)"

1. The practice of building a strong relationship between a business and its customers and potential customers.

Dear Erin,

I hope this question has a resounding positive answer: What if your business could get higher average orders values, higher frequency of ordering, higher conversion percentages, more new customers, reactivate of older buyers and have multiple brand impressions that are permissioned every day?

Would you test a program that could deliver to your business any one of these metrics or any combination of them? Of course you would under two conditions:

First, the program would generate an ROI your business could afford; and second, you are not just moving dollars from one channel marketing program to another.

So if it can be proven to you that both case 1 and 2 occurred. Should you test this program? Of course you should. This is what the exact nature of market testing is all about. I sense your business does this all the time. If you could get these returns would you make this market testing a priority?

Well, this is exactly what The ShoppeSimple Network program is providing our clients and what we would like to test with your business.

In fact, we are so convinced that this program will work for your business (like it has worked for every other client) we have a special and guaranteed offer for your business.

I will tell you about this guaranteed offer in a minute please read on...

Have you done a Groupon/LivingSocial offer?  Have you sent out a catalog or a direct mailing with a planned 60-70% list rental and 30-40% buyers?  How many of your do a PPC program?

In any of these cases, what do you do once you land a new customer? What do you do to capture another order from this first or repeat buyer? How much money are you willing to invest to get another order?

So let's look at the Social Coupon business model which is essentially a revenue share, new customer acquisition business and let's run some simple math

Let's say you have a product and you gave 50% off on this offer and you had a 50% product margin. So a product which sells at  $50 retail is now being sold to the consumer for $25. Now these Social Coupon businesses take another 50% so you are left with $12.50 to cover your new customer acquisition. Let's say you were very successful with your offer and landed 1,000 customers. That would mean you paid 12.50 times 1,000 customers or $12,500 for this offer. A revenue share deal.  But when you planned this offer did you consider you would be out $12,500?

But you are now also under water by $12,500 and what do these Social Coupon sites do to help you recoup your new customer investment. NOTHING...NADA... ZILCH!   The only thing that could make this scenario worse, is if your existing customers are also the ones redeeming the deal.

What do you do to maintain a Sustaining Social CRM program with these consumers?

For those in the catalog space or pure ecom space...I can hear you thinking, "I would never do a deal like that."

Well, let's take a look at a pure ecom company who uses Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. You manage 100 keywords and you pay .75 per click on average.  You spend $12,500 a month on PPC instead of social couponing and you get a 1% conversion. So what does this look like from an initial customer acquisition cost perspective?

Let's keep the same margins and spending level. $12,500 dollars is 16,666 clicks and the number of orders at 1% conversion is 166 orders.  At 166 orders you brought gross profit to the business at $25 per sale which is $4,125. So your out of pocket loss to do PPC per customer is $8,375 ($4125-$12,500)/166 orders = $50.45 (LOSS) Gulp. If your conversion is 2% just half this number.

Would you have guessed that PPC cost per order was $50.45/12.50 or 4X more expensive than Social Couponing for your business?

It's no wonder that in two years Social Couponing has exploded to a 3 Billion industry and is projected to be 6 billion in 2 years.

Pareto's Principle from Wikipedia...(also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. You can restate the 80/20 as it applies to CRM where your customers drive 80% of your revenue so why is there such a missing focus on retention marketing (CRM). Now, adding the Social layer, why are you not focusing energy, resources and budget on building lifetime value of your business?  They would argue that they are, just maybe not in the coupon space yet

Proof in point

The ShoppeSimple Network's Sustaining Social CRM

Now, for the first time you can manage  your consumers' Lifetime Value efficiently and effectively. We simply plug into your business and in less than 10 days you are driving Sustaining Social CRM eCommerce sales. We don't replace what you are doing in social and mobile commerce we enhance it.

Let me show you how...Let's follow what we are doing for Signals.com. Signals has loaded our "Push The Button" widget in their website header and in their email and Facebook Store. Because of this, they are also mobile enabled and their consumers can mobile order through The ShoppeSimple Network's digital properties directly to the Signals website shopping cart. It is important to note ShoppeSafe doesn't collect any personal identifiable consumer information/data.

Take a look at the top right of the Signals website. Consumers see this Push the Button everywhere they go on their website. By the way, you can manage the copy as you would like and you do not have to focus on deals. This is client dependent.

When Consumers Push the Button they are taken to a trusted 3rd party page we build for every client and it can match the look and feel of your branding. From Push The Button widget to your branded ShoppeHub page, consumers now can Pull-Place-Buy-N-Share relevant and targeted offers.  These offers can also be pulled by the consumer to appear on their ShoppeHub page which they bookmark or subscribe too.  Click here for an example.

On Facebook ShoppeFans Store.

The consumer can also place these offers on Shoppesafe.com, their personal home pages on iGoogle, MyYahoo and MyMSN. Plus from the merchants ShoppeHub page consumers can text, email, Like, Tweet offers to their "Trusted Referrals and print or enable digital coupons with barcodes.

You may be thinking, "why would I want to direct my valuable traffic away from my site and onto your ShoppeHub page?" The answer lies in our secret sauce. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, would you do this if you could increase average order values, conversions, order frequency, new customers, reactivations and brand exposures? Of course you would.So now is the time to provide your business with a "skin in the game" guarantee. You must be happy with the program results or you just don't pay us. Period End.

My hope is that you will contact me to start your Sustaining Social CRM program for your business. Please reach me by phone at 612-349-2740 or by email sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com.

Best

Jeffery

PS. Please join me for our June Webinar "Is Your Social Toast Burning" on Wednesday June 22nd at 2 PM ET.

Feel free to forward this eNewsletter to colleagues who might find the topics covered here of interest or would be interested in learning more about working with The ShoppeSimple Network.