Back in 2002, when we were trying to get our new catalog company off the ground, we quickly learned the value of a customer.  The old saying “it is easier to keep a customer than get a new one” came to life when we were buying names of prospects and less than 1.2% of them became customers.  The house list was our bread and butter and we learned how to squeeze every last drop of value out of it.  We quickly became experts in segmenting our list using the RFM model: Recency, Frequency and Monetary value.  It worked well.  A new customer was a live customer and we did everything we could to let them know they were valued and keep them engaged.  We incentivized heavily to increase purchase frequency and treated our best customers like royalty.  Now, segmentation goes much deeper and CRM models have become much more sophisticated, but the same fundamental principles still apply.  Today, with brands engaging customers through social channels, how are these relationships managed?  What are the rules in a world driven by return on engagement not return on investment?  Social Media is changing the brand-to-consumer relationship driving the need for new strategies to take advantage.  We call this new strategic approach Social Relationship Management (SRM). Continue reading →