How do you get customers to buy your products? That has been the marketing
problem for centuries. In Follow That Customer!, the authors have provided an
extremely useful and practical answer to this question: you communicate with
them based on events that are important to them.
We often hear marketers claim that they make “the right offer to the right person
at the right time” as if that were an obvious method of gaining sales. Perhaps it
might be, but assembling the information necessary to carry out that claim has
proved to be very difficult for most marketers. In fact, today, most marketers are
thinking about what they want to sell rather than about what their customers want
to buy. This book should change that approach for those who read it and take its
lessons to heart. It tells just how to obtain and use the information needed to send
messages based on customer events.
In six very detailed and useful case studies, Follow That Customer! explains
how several companies have succeeded in using events in their customers’ lives
successfully to trigger their marketing campaigns. Following the case studies, the
authors explain the principles behind the case studies in useful ways that can be
adopted by the thousands of corporate readers of their useful book.
For me, one of the best parts of this wonderful book is the Eleven Lessons
Learned. Included in these lessons are the following:
- Think like a customer.
- Test on a small scale first.
- Keep asking questions.
- EDM is a permanent process, not a one-off promotion.
- Be different—make your EDM program special enough so that people stickwith your program.
This valuable book should be on the bookshelf of the marketing staff of every significant
company in America or Europe. Those following its lessons will earn millions
of dollars in profit for their companies as well as making their customers
happy.
Arthur Middleton Hughes
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
2010
