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The first thing you should know about Graeme Beardsell is that he was born in Penang. His father was in the Royal Australian Air Force stationed in Butterworth at the time. At the age of one, he left the Malaysian island.
The second thing you should know about the Chief Customer Development and Marketing Officer of Experian Asia Pacific is that, having lived in Singapore for six years, he is a foodie and named the conference rooms in the office after food items. As we walked past one named “Prata”, I asked him what he would be if he were a food item.
“Hor fun. Beef. Dry. To be specific.”
Being personal and specific is what Beardsell is all about these days as he tries to convince his customers of the new tools and technology that now make it possible for them to get personal with their customers, whether through emails, social media or mobile.
He calls it “embracing customer identity and analytics in the online space”.
It means the ability to target email market campaigns and gain insights into customer behaviour and convert lookers to bookers. It means the ability to know a customer’s profile and interests and target him with specific offers at the right time.
Imagine, you walking into Marina Bay Sands and getting a message on your smartphone offering you tickets for Wicked the musical at 30% off if you booked now.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. As a reality check, Beardsell believes that with the economic uncertainty in Europe and the US, there will be a constriction of overall marketing budgets this year.
“For a lot of CMOs and CEOs, the word is, proceed with caution. Budgets are being tethered and we will have to do more with less.”
However he sees more budgets going from traditional to digital media and he sees a drive towards social media, in particular. “There is a view that consumers see social marketing endorsements as more genuine than traditional advertising. Companies want more bang for their buck and are looking at social.”
While he himself isn’t sure about social yet in terms of ROI, he says the social sphere works for brand awareness and brand legitimacy. “There is a whole universe of interaction around your brand and you need to be aware and engage with that.”
So is email dead, given that there is a school of thought that only old people use email these days?
“Email blasting is going the way of the old-fashioned catalogues we used to get by post but targeted email marketing and understanding customers and their likes is the growth engine of our business. And people expect that with mobile too.”
Groupon, he says, has to move from being an aggregator of deals and blasting everyone with them – “I don’t know how many chocolate cakes I can buy in Ponggol” – to personalizing and understanding their customers more.
“I’d be happy to share more personal details so that as I move along through a shopping mall, it can target me with offers that suit my interests and I can take advantage of them.
“People are sharing everything, their likes, dislikes, where they are, what they are doing – for a marketer, it’s really exciting.”
He cites an email marketing campaign Experian executed with ZUJI in which the OTA implemented Experian CheetahMail and used Experian Hitwise, its online search intelligence service, to capture behavioral data and personalize customers' experiences to re-market to site visitors who made searches, but did not purchase.
According to Beardsell, ZUJI was looking for an integrated CRM database platform with centralised visibility and distributed capacity to support its email marketing and promotional activities.
The campaign was conducted over a two-week period, targeting subscribers who visited the website and searched/browsed for hotels or packages (flight + hotel) departing from Singapore, but did not convert. A re-marketing email with a personalised message and three hotel deals were sent to this group within two days of their searches.
As a result of the campaign, ZUJI saw 70 times improvement in Revenue Per Thousand Emails, exceeding what ZUJI had expected during the limited test period.
“The key to success was ZUJI gaining access to the insights of web users’ behaviour. This offered better understanding of behavioural patterns and online preferences that enabled the company to improve the level of sophistication of its campaigns. This allowed them to better cultivate customer relationships with personalized messaging.”
He agrees that tools such as these can give companies like ZUJI the wherewithal to compete with private sale sites that claim specific offers to specific customers.
Beardsell said a similar approach could be taken with mobile. However do consumers want to be bombarded by promotional messages, no matter how personal and specific they are?
“I don’t want to be blasted with every single offer by Groupon but if it’s a specific offer to my tastes and interests, I wouldn’t mind,” he said.
Contrary to hype, Beardsell said not many marketers were getting into “social, identity and mobile” as may be portrayed in the media. “People are still paying lip service to it. I guess there is the reluctance to be a first mover and also the fear of giving up something you’ve done for years for something new.”
“As a marketer myself, I understand. I find it hard to let go too and let’s face it, we do enjoy our sporting events.”
He identified markets of growth as China, Singapore and Japan. “We are seeing email marketing and extension into personalized mobile marketing bubbling along nicely in Japan.”
Said Beardsell, “In a tough economic environment, people have to think about deeper relationships with customers. Acquisition is still important but needs to be selectively done. Loyalty will also come more into the picture during tough times. Most OTAs now have loyalty programmes.”
He said it was an eye-opener to him, viewing the list of top 10 travel websites in Singapore and Hong Kong in 2011, that Cathay was #6 in Hong Kong and Singapore Airlines wasn’t in the top 10.
“It’s a wake-up call for airlines, I think, they are being disintermediated and everything SIA can do with its frequent flyer programme, OTAs will be able to catch up soon in understanding customers.”
Beardsell said the recent experience SIA had when it received customer backlash with its new website again proved the power of social media to change the course of a brand story.
That, by the way, remains the main topic of conversation on the new SIA Facebook page.
