Month: May 2014

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In the News UK

UK political groups warned to play by marketing rules in lead up to local and European elections

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has written to the main UK political parties warning them about the need to follow data protection and electronic marketing rules ahead of the European and local elections on May 22.

The Information Commissioner Christopher Graham’s letter follows a number of concerns raised with the ICO about the political parties’ use of market EU flagresearch surveys to gain political support.

Genuine market research can be carried out in order to help inform a party’s positioning and formulate policies. However, communications claiming to be research that are also intended to canvass support now or in the future are covered by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. The regulations apply to all electronic marketing, including texts, calls and emails.

Christopher Graham said: “This is about the political parties demonstrating best practice, and being open and upfront with voters about their marketing activities, explaining to people in an open and transparent way how their personal details will be used.

“The rules apply to political parties, just as they do to businesses and charities. In communicating with voters, the parties need to be clear about what their intentions are and why they are asking people for their information. We don’t need election campaigns featuring nuisance calls, spam texts and canvassing under the guise of ‘research’.”

The ICO has produced detailed guidance for campaign groups explaining the data protection and electronic marketing rules. The guidance states that campaigning organisations must:

  • only send marketing emails, texts or make automated telephone calls to people who have consented to being contacted;
  • identify themselves and provide an easy way to opt-out of future direct marketing at all times;
  • be clear on whether they are carrying out market research (seeking someone’s opinions) or political campaigning (seeking to persuade them to vote a certain way); and
  • be extremely careful when using ‘viral marketing’ that encourages individuals to contact friends and family on the organisation’s behalf.

Read Christopher Graham’s letter in full, here.

 

Categories
In the News UK

DPD to launch new Sunday delivery service for retailers

Online retailers get Saturday collections for ‘next-day’ Sunday delivery

UK delivery company DPD is set to become the first UK carrier to provide a nationwide express Sunday delivery service for all its customers. The service, which will start on July 20, will help create more than 500 new jobs around the UK as DPD’s depot network expands to accommodate a seven day week.

The new service will also mean that, for the first time, DPD will be able to collect from business customers on a Saturday for next-day delivery on Sunday. Equally, on a Friday, online retailers will now be able to specify either Saturday or Sunday delivery. Deliveries will be made between 9am and 5pm on a Sunday and DPD’s network of more than 50 UK depots will be open during those hours.

From launch, DPD will have the ability to deliver to more than 98% of the UK population on a Sunday and the service will include DPD’s award winning one hour Predict timeslot deliveries, where parcel recipients are notified by text or email of their one hour delivery timeslot in advance, and can then track their driver in real-time all the way to their front door.

Dwain McDonald, DPD’s CEO, said; “I’m delighted to be able to announce our new Sunday service. We know from talking to retailers and recipients that there is a real demand for Sunday deliveries. The majority of our larger customers in the retail sector are moving to a 24/7 operation, so we wanted to make sure that they have a trusted delivery partner that can provide a full collection and delivery service every day of the week too.

“Saturday has long been the busiest retail day of the week, but with the blurring of the offline and online retail boundaries it can now also be the busiest day for e-tailers. Therefore it is very appealing for e-tailers to be able to offer next-day delivery for those customers who buy on a Saturday.

“The launch of DPD’s one hour timeslot service Predict was a game-changer for the delivery market. Now customers are far less tolerant of having to wait in all day for a standard courier to turn up. But the market has moved on and shoppers want immediate delivery, seven days a week. Predict gives you complete control over when and where your parcel is delivered – from the initial notification on your smartphone on Saturday evening, to tracking the driver to your door or being able to relay alternative instructions to him in real-time. As a result, I think most people will see this kind of smart Sunday delivery service as an excellent addition to their options.

“We are committed to an unrivalled programme of investments in the UK to ensure we have the smartest technology, the most up to date network infrastructure and the best people. Our weekend service is proof of how this can all come together to provide an unbeatable package for retailers looking to differentiate their delivery service.”

With DPD’s Predict service, recipients receive a notification of their delivery the evening before and are able to access five ‘in-flight’ delivery options, including; ‘Change the delivery day’, Deliver to a specific neighbour’, ‘Deliver to a safe place’ and ‘Collect from nearest depot’. These can be accessed via a smartphone, tablet or desktop at any point during the delivery if the customer can’t be at home on the day to accept their parcel. DPD now send around 1.1 million Predict notifications every week and approximately 10%, or over 100,000 recipients, use one of the in-flight options.

DPD recently announced its most ambitious expansion plans to date with the development of 15 new depots in the UK in 2014, including three new ‘super-depots’ capable of handling 25,000 parcels a day. Construction of DPD’s new £100m parcel hub at Hinckley Commercial Park in the East Midlands is well underway. The facility, which will be the largest of its kind in Europe and capable of handling 70,000 parcels an hour, is on schedule to be completed in 2015, creating up to 1,000 permanent full-time jobs.

DPD is a member of one of Europe’s leading parcels groups GeoPost, wholly owned by France’s La Poste, the second largest postal group in Europe.

The company employs more than 7,000 people in the UK, operating more than 3,000 vehicles from over 50 locations and delivering 1.6 million parcels per week.

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Going beyond content marketing – start getting personal with your customers

Content marketing is no longer enough. Recent research has found that 78% of consumers say they feel personalised content has led to a deeper relationship with a brand. It’s all about integrating customer service information with marketing across multiple touchpoints, as Richard McCrossan (pictured) explains.

There are two core elements to any marketing strategy – content and audience. Marketers often tend to focus a lot on content but not so much on the audience – but what if you could increase engagement by using more of what you already know about your customers to better understand their needs?richard-mccrossan

Personalised consumer marketing is becoming an integral part of securing sales and building a loyal customer base. By providing a more personalised experience, brands have a huge opportunity to provide a much-needed personal approach to consumers across an ever-growing amount of communication channels.

But how can this personalisation be achieved?

The answer lies in leveraging the information which lies in the contact centre. To be able to personalise your marketing strategy, a lot of data is required to be able to gain relevant information about your customers, and this is often found within the customer service department.

By using contextual history which dwells in the contact centre, marketers can better understand customers’ needs and their previous interactions with the company. For example, with this knowledge, marketers would know not to push any promotional emails to a customer if they had complained in the last week. Conversely, if a customer recently responded positively to a customer service satisfaction questionnaire, they may be more receptive to promotional emails.

Personalisation is much more than just welcoming back a returning customer or showing recommendations based on what they have bought before. It is about using the data you have to create an enjoyable experience that encourages the customer to keep returning to you.

It’s good to talk

And this covers all communication channels which are available to customers. The phone certainly isn’t going to go away, and we’ve found that human interaction is still a very valuable customer experience, where either a call or web chat can be helpful to the consumer. It’s important to bring the human touch back to your digital customers, and that means reaching out to help them make a purchase at the right time.

Using targeted and proactive web chat can be a great way to provide proactive and precise assistance at the consumer’s point of need. It can also reduce call handling, help to maintain customer loyalty and boost retention.

The online shopping experience needs to mirror the human experience you would get in a store, talking to the customer, engaging with their needs, having a conversation with them to find out more about what they are looking for. It’s all about building a personal profile of the customer – and this means integrating your contact centre customer information with your marketing across multiple touchpoints – from webchat to email, across to text.

And this technology can all easily be integrated into sales and marketing – by monitoring and reacting proactively to buying signals, companies can utilise the value of bringing a sales person into that digital customer experience at the right moment.

Taking marketing to the Clouds

Cloud technology is fast becoming one of the most used – and useful – services for marketing, giving marketers real-time access to customer information from whatever device they are using to create and deliver relevant customer experiences that encourage long-term engagement.

Cloud offers a flexible deployment model for tools to enhance the customer experience, and means that companies can adjust campaign strategies to cater to customer needs, increasing marketing effectiveness and in the longer term, improving revenues.

Richard McCrossan is strategic business director at Genesys