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Are You Basking in the Warm Glow or Getting Burned?

You are a marketer. So am I. And I've been one for more than 30 years, giving me a unique perspective on our business and the marketplace. This book, however, is not an anecdote-filled memoir, because the old ways of marketing are over, and I'm not interested in revisiting them. I'm much more fascinated by what's happening now – and excited about helping our industry rethink some of its core tenets. I want to help marketers be more effective, drive profitability, and earn new respect within their organizations. And I want to help solve the number-one challenge that every marketer faces in our chaotic, lightning-fast marketplace – how to deploy your marketing resources to create an emotional connection with customers and engage them in new, effective ways that achieve impressive, repeatable results.

During the past few years I have seen clients fundamentally change the performance of their marketing by simultaneously focusing their strategies on improving how customers engage with their brand and how they (and the broader base of consumers) experience the brand. They're not just observing this connection. They're proactively allocating marketing strategies and dollars to improve engagement and experience, and are ultimately improving business outcomes – including sales, share of wallet, and brand equity – dramatically.

That said, I wanted to write a book not based on theory or simple anecdotal examples. So I have commissioned proprietary research that provides clear insight and direction in terms of how we, as marketers, should optimize the range of diverse new channels, media, and technologies to drive brand and business equity.

I'll be introducing you to an innovative new way of inspiring and measuring major leaps in customer experience and engagement. We call it Return on Experience × Engagement, or ROE². It may look like a simple mathematical expression, but it's a powerful tool for marketers, with major implications for business outcomes such as brand and business equity. In the research section of this book (Part Two), you will see impressive results that show the power of ROE²– such as the ability to triple brand and business equity by addressing experience and engagement together.

In short, this book does more than just describe ROE². It delivers data that proves its efficacy. And it includes first-person accounts from leaders at organizations that are using it to increase customer engagement and drive profitability.

Ultimately, ROE² is a commonsense approach that you as a marketing professional need to have at your fingertips – no matter how large your organization or what you're marketing.

Meet the Powerful Combination of Engagement and Experience – ROE ²

In this book, we'll explore a refreshingly effective approach that helps you drive more profitable customer connections and measure the impact of your marketing – Return on Experience × Engagement, or ROE². At its essence, ROE² looks at the ways that marketers can drive engagement and experience together in a way that creates a dramatic impact on business outcomes, such as brand equity, share of wallet, and lifetime value.

• Part One explains the approach, why it's so different, and how it can complement return on investment (ROI), the standard but outmoded way of evaluating marketing.

• Part Two shows how it works via research especially commissioned for this book – plus interviews with executives with firsthand insights on ROE². Here we will break down the individual components of engagement and experience and look at the predictive powers for improving your business.

• Part Three dives more deeply into the fundamental elements of ROE²– content, channels, measurement/segmentation, and technology (in all its many permutations) – providing a clear primer for marketers who want all the details on how to make ROE² happen. This section concludes with an overview of consumer privacy issues, a key area that every marketer needs to be conversant in.

Let me give you a simple, single-channel example of Experience × Engagement and why a new metric like ROE² is so important. I have the privilege and opportunity to work with some of the most sophisticated retail and e-commerce e-mail marketers in the world. During the holiday season, many will e-mail their customers daily or multiple times a day. This approach often drives engagement in the form of opens and clicks that lead to short-term sales. However, over the past few years we have seen that opt-out rates increase as well during this period. Research has shown that consumers don't like the experience with a brand that is filling up their mailbox. So what is the trade-off – do you make a short-term sale but lose a customer forever?

ROE² excels in these situations by providing a framework, and even an equation, to help marketers make these hard decisions.

A Quick Look at the Past

To get started, let's take a brief glance in the rearview mirror. When I started in marketing, the channels (TV, radio, mail, telemarketing) and types of campaigns were limited and the pace was slow. A direct marketing campaign generally meant direct mail or telemarketing. It might take three or four months for a campaign to go from ideation to execution. The job of the marketer was to run a few major campaigns every year. Success meant people expressing increased brand awareness, people carrying fliers into stores, bringing a friend with them, or calling a catalog order center. It was all one-way communication. We controlled the content, timing, and cadence of the messages – and the messages were inherently limited.

Campaigns might have a couple of versions. They were launched every quarter or every year and evaluated strictly on the sales that could be directly attributed to them in a single channel. Brands could only learn about customers and their preferences three or four times a year, if they were lucky. We relied exclusively on market research to understand people's attitudes. There was no way to interact individually with customers at a large-scale level. It was simply too complicated and expensive.

Now, Everything Has Changed – for the Better

Major shifts in consumer behavior and the advent of powerful (and affordable) new marketing tools are driving a quantum leap in marketing sophistication, effectiveness, and complexity. Today's marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to combine the best of both disciplines – the reach of mass marketing and the targeting of direct marketing – opening up powerful new approaches to drive engagement and experience.

Consider these facts about consumer behavior. There are more smartphones than people on our planet. Since consumers are totally mobile, channel distinctions don't matter as much as they used to – decisions are made on the spot, 24/7, at home, on the road, and in stores. The path to a buying decision may include a digital ad, an online search, a smartphone price check, and advice gathered via social media. In fact, more than 58 percent of U.S. smartphone and tablet owners are using their mobile devices to learn about products or prices – either online or while in a physical store, according to research from the website testing and personalization firm Maxymiser. Social networks have a huge influence on purchasing behavior as consumers take more control. And that's just one side of the story.

On the marketing side, incredible new tools are available, and digital marketing spending is skyrocketing. Major players like Adobe, Salesforce.com, IBM, and Oracle are investing heavily in the marketing space, as traditional technology companies see the value of marketing and the impact that technology can play. Savvy marketers and the brands they work for are already beginning to take advantage of these incredible technologies and designing new tools, strategies, and techniques to make new inroads into the changing marketplace. They are working to take advantage of the unbelievable array of opportunities created by fast-paced, multichannel marketing. Content can be more relevant, personalized, and consistent. Campaign cycle times are measured in minutes rather than days. After all, marketers can reach millions of potential customers with a single click, e-mail, post, or tweet. Ultimately, new customer insights are triggering new transformations as organizations rethink their core processes and align them around customer-centric delivery.

It All Starts with Customer Connections

The ability to conduct dozens of targeted campaigns, to gather detailed customer data, and then to use it to generate impressive results – these possibilities make marketing exhilarating. Never before have marketers had the opportunity to drive such dramatic improvements in their business – engaging new consumers, expanding their customer bases, boosting revenues, and building their brands. Consider these recent results:

• A major consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand generated one billion impressions via the use of emotionally engaging, multichannel, user-generated content.

• A large bank reduced customer attrition by 20 percent by triggering client-specific content based on account engagement.

• An e-commerce site increased its conversion rates on e-mail by 15 percent by doing device detection and retargeting e-mails based on whether recipients opened e-mails on their computers or on their smartphones.

These impressive results aren't enabled by technological advances alone. They happened because marketers took full advantage of the capabilities available to them, injected great content, and nimbly avoided the downside. Understanding and balancing these two elements – the potential and the pitfalls – will determine the winners and losers. To succeed during a time of new challenges and great potential rewards, marketers must master the power of the new technologies and channels, while finding new ways to use data and rich media content to drive the emotional connection to a brand, the end goal that has defined marketing success for generations. To do that requires a new approach to customer connections and a new way to determine success – ROE².

For Marketers of All Stripes and Types

I wrote Igniting Customer Connections to help marketers like you use data, content, and technology to forge customer connections in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. This book is intended to help you take advantage of the amazing capabilities available today – and also get the respect (and promotion, of course) that hardworking marketers deserve. It provides a unique set of research and intellectual property designed to guide you to the next generation of successful marketing – turning marketing from a cost center to a vital function that systematically drives profitability for your organization.

Start the Fire – Now

Igniting customer connections starts with a single spark – a new idea, a revolutionary approach, or advice that makes a real difference. I think ROE² is that spark, and I'm very excited to pass it on to you. Let's begin.