It’s no surprise that Direct Marketing response rates have dropped to a historic low with success rates in the low single digits. And further - that marketing organizations are becoming increasingly focused on Inbound Marketing (credit HubSpot for creating this term) which are a source of much higher response rates.
Given the pervasive nature of the Internet I think the balance of power has shifted toward the customer or prospect indefinitely – which means we will be in a period of Inbound Marketing for a very long time.
But with all this Inbound Marketing happening – who is looking at the higher order of Inbound Interactions across many different channels – call it Inbound Interaction Management (IIM).
Inbound Interaction Management could mean many things. First it can encompass how you respond to all that Inbound Marketing across your website and social outposts for your content – typically with a system for capturing all the touches that have happened and nurturing those in sales leads has a lot of promise. Next it could also take you into a more traditional space such as the contact center and field service teams – where CMOs already have tons of activity trying to provide superior customer service. So then the question becomes how to bridge the two so you can deliver the Right Offer in the Right Channel at the Right Time.
All this interaction is going to need to be managed and optimized – since some of the touch points have very low customer acquisition costs such as field service teams – who could easily be an extended arm of your Inbound Marketing efforts if they knew how to deliver the Right Offer at the Right Time. Same goes for your contact center – historically a cost center could now become a revenue producing center if you could get them the Right Offer at the Right Time to deliver to the customer.
I am becoming fascinated with the opportunity to meld Inbound Marketing with Inbound Contact Management especially for CMOs of B2B firms. There is a huge revenue producing role that marketers can play by taking all that highly trackable inbound marketing and combining it with existing contact management to create an Inbound Interaction Management system that learns to deliver the Right Offer in the Right Channel at the Right Time.
