The Engaged Customer: Using the New Rules of Internet Direct Marketing to Create Profitable Customer Relationships

Rating:
Summary: solid mix of vision and practicality
Review: Hans Peter Brondmo's "The Engaged Customer" is a must for Internet marketers. Whether you're an experienced Internet marketer or a novice, this book will be prove to be of enormous value.

It is extremely thorough in its coverage of e-mail marketing from planning to vendor selection to analysis, and this book goes deeper into exploring customer relationships.

Buy it.

Given the highest rating in its December 2000 MarketingToday.com review.

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Summary: Outstanding and Essential Text on Email Marketing
Review: I have adopted Brondmo's email marketing book as a text in my electronic marketing course. I recommend it as essential reading. The book takes over where Seth Godin's Permission Marketing left off. Godin's book was all about philosophy, with not too much about implementation. Brondmo's book start with a grounding in a customer-centered / one-to-one business philosophy but carries through implementation to program review, getting down to nuts and bolts. His examples and analogies ring true... .

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Summary: This books wraps up other online marketing concepts.
Review: I have read many books on e-mail strategies, viral marketing and permission-based marketing and this one makes the cut.

I figured by reading the book I would get some pretty good analysis of what it takes to run a good e-mail marketing campaign, the pros and cons of various strategies (in house vs. outsourcing) and some "big picture" issues to deal with. The author delivered on that but I wish he had some # crunching and data analysis in it.

If you have read about permission based marketing and viral marketing this is a book that will help to "pull it all together." While some concepts will have been covered by then I know it has helped me in pulling together a strategy long-term for a few websites I want to rollout in the next few years.

Good books to read about viral marketing, in order of preference, are (1) Seth Godin and Permission Marketing (2) Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and (3) Emanueul Rosen's Anatomy of a Buzz. Kim McPherson's E-mail Strategies That Work book is a good book on e-mail campaigns.

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Summary: The New Rules...of the really obvious.
Review: OK, the book was published in 2000. But it still seems to me that if you call your book "The New Rules..." they ought to be somewhat useful and somewhat timeless. Unfortunately, the "rules" in this book are neither. For example "The e-customer expects to be in control." Well, yah...but so has every customer in recorded history. Auto dealers get a bad rap when they obviously and purposely deny any sense of control. In later chapters we get tips like "Don't send unsolicted messages." Even (back) in 2000 (several years after the first successful anti-SPAM lawsuits) this was a no brainer. Instead, check out Shapiro's "Control Revolution" -- written a year earlier (1999) it's still relevant. If you're new to the discipline and haven't already, check out "Permission Marketing" or "Cluetrain Manifesto." They too provide a sense of history...and a lot more insight.

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Summary: A real and ethical plan for internet marketing and not spam
Review: The authors have put together perhaps one of the best and most complete books on marketing via e-mail on the market today. Note that I said "marketing via e-mail" and not spamming via e-mail. The authors actually address this issue and how to use e-mail marketing in a positive manner where it will be welcomed by the recipient and not instantly deleted. Hans Peter Brondmo is an authority on this issue and is one of the owners of Post Communications, which uses e-mail marketing extensively.

The book details how to move from traditional marketing methods to an Internet based marketing system that concentrates on the efficient and positive use of e-mail. It not only covers how to use it to obtain new customers but guides the reader step by step in how to effectively use e-mail to create and maintain customer loyalty and positive relationships.

Rating:
Summary: A real and ethical plan for internet marketing and not spam
Review: The authors have put together perhaps one of the best and most complete books on marketing via e-mail on the market today. Note that I said "marketing via e-mail" and not spamming via e-mail. The authors actually address this issue and how to use e-mail marketing in a positive manner where it will be welcomed by the recipient and not instantly deleted. Hans Peter Brondmo is an authority on this issue and is one of the owners of Post Communications, which uses e-mail marketing extensively.

The book details how to move from traditional marketing methods to an Internet based marketing system that concentrates on the efficient and positive use of e-mail. It not only covers how to use it to obtain new customers but guides the reader step by step in how to effectively use e-mail to create and maintain customer loyalty and positive relationships.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging look at email marketing
Review: The economy is quickly becoming one that's led by services. In effect, a customer-led economy. The April 2001 Inc. magazine cover story makes this contention as well.

In "The Engaged Customer," Brondmo's thesis is that in order to effectively compete in this post-dot-com economy, your company must engage its customers in a dialogue. The tool most suited for engagement is email. On a customer cost-efficiency basis, it's cheap, fast and measurable. The value of "The Engaged Customer" is found in the numerous methodologies for strategy development, deployment programs and measurment systems for email-based programs that Brondmo supplies.

He also makes the well-versed argument that engaged companies are the ones more likely to prosper in the customer-led economy. An engaged company is one that makes its communications with customers completely seamless. How many times have you conversed with an airline or a phone company about needing support and ordering new services that you cannot do both with the same company representative?

In the customer-led economy, it doesn't matter -- nor should it -- if your customer-service department is based in Albuquerque and doesn't have access to the web-based ordering system and its IT group in Dallas. Why should your customer have to hang up the phone, call another number and wait another 20 minutes to talk with another represenative? The engaged company keeps a history of every communciation with every customer ever made. Furthermore, every customer contact point across the enterprise -- from the clerk at the retail store to the technical support rep in Seattle -- has access to that same data.

This is no small endeavour for a company that's doing a billion-plus in annual revenues, but it's what many up-and-coming companies are doing, and it's a central theme of their strategy to eventually overtake their larger competitors.

Brondmo also makes a somewhat compelling argument for merging your customer-service department with your marketing group. A good marketing group ensures consistency of communications internally and externally (since your company has both internal and external customers). This idea, while not new, seems to be a lay-up, but Brondmo could have provided more insight into the strategy and mechanics of completing this rebalancing act for several types of companies.

If there's anything major to quibble with in Brondmo's debut work as a business author, it's that "The Engaged Customer" would have been a richer experience if it had shared additional major case studies other than ebags.com, CDNow and Peopia. As of this writing in April 2001, those three companies are either hobbled victims of the dot-com downturn or extinct. Also, Brondmo does not make it clear if those companies have been paying clients of himself or his company (Brondmo is the founder of Post Communications, an email marketing company that was acquired by Netcentives). Additional case-study work with traditional brick-and-mortar companies would make this otherwise enlightening book rank in importance with Patricia Seybold's important and declarative "Customers.com."

Rating:
Summary: The Best Book Available on Email Marketing
Review: The Engaged Customer is, in my view, the best book available on email marketing. Hans Peter Brondmo is a top expert and he pours out his knowledge on every page. Even more, it is well written and keeps your interest.

Rating:
Summary: Concise, readable & insightfully practical
Review: This book is an unexpected surprise. It is packed full of strategic and tactical insights that come from actually having done it with clients, rather than just "logically theoretical".

It presents an integrated approach to email RELATIONSHIP marketing (emphasis on relationship, rather than merely email marketing) without losing sight of marketing thinking in other areas and the role of alternative channels in creating synergies.

With the case studies to back up a lot of the areas, it is not surprising that the author can provide a credible implementation and operations framework -- with considerations to planning & decision making, competencies, role, resources, costs, product service suppliers/vendors to develop this capability, etc.

Overall, I found the book highly readable with examples of real life case studies that supported the points presented.

Rating:
Summary: Indispensable!
Review: This book revises the direct marketing concepts for the Internet. Based on the excelent Seth Godin's book Permission Marketing (by the way, another must-have), Hans Brondmo explores how to use the e-mail as a powerful marketing tool, in order to obtain high return rates with your on-line campaings. Obvisously this book is not about spam -- which is severely criticized at this book and at other books about this subject, like Permission Marketing -- but about e-mails that your clients ask for (opt-in).