I don't write for a living. Blog posts intimidate me because I'm a bit of a perfectionist.
Sometimes luck strikes and someone who writes well writes a post that is almost exactly what I'd write.
That's happened with Bryan Eisenberg over at ClickZ. Bryan is a best selling author and true Guru.
Lately he's been writing about RFM. RFM stands for recency, frequency and monetary - essentially the foundation for modern direct marketing. Catalogers have been using these basic data points to optimize their catalog effectiveness for decades. Here's a quick quote from the article The Power of RFM:
"But sometimes in e-commerce, we outthink ourselves, get too cute by half, or just get too plain confused by all the data that flies our way on a daily basis. Instead of keeping it simple, we get too "sophisticated." What we should be doing is mastering techniques like RFM that have been proven over time."
Top Right was founded on the premise that leveraging these basic data points can improve online retailers email marketers efforts in a huge way. With RFM, you don't need fancy algorithms, multi-variate testing, or machine learning. With just 20% of the effort, you can often get 80% of the results.
With every Top Right basic subscription you get RFM data for everyone of your past customers. You get last purchase date (recency), number of purchases (frequency) and total value of purchases (monetary). I think in these challenging days people are getting back to the fundamentals.
It reminds of a funny saying that was floated around during the dot-bust earlier in the decade. While B2C at one point meant Business to Consumer for many of the MBAs who flooded the
San Francisco Bay Area in the late 90s, by 2002 it meant back Back to Consulting. In 2009, we can rename B2B as Back to Basics.
