“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” Warren Buffet’s famous axiom is in all too frequent use in these times of financial Armageddon but it still remains a useful one for online marketers as they trade through these exceptional conditions.

A great deal is made online of differentiating functionality and experimenting with new features, which is great if your main objective is brand differentiation. However spend too much time tinkering with your costume as the tide goes out and you won’t have any water to swim in at all – if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor.

The place to focus budgets right now isn’t on developing brand differentials through experiential marketing, but on the conversion funnel.

In the midst of the financial crisis that enveloped the country during the second week of October 08, We carried out an email campaign for one bar and restaurant chain that generated over 5000 new enquiries within three days, representing a huge leap on prior performance. The reason – well the offer was great but the campaign allowed customers to easily make their enquiry and because of this, it was quite literally like turning on a tap within their eCRM system.

Of course the communication process has to be good and automating large personalised campaigns is never easy, but the investment will pay off several times over if it’s done well.

So even while the tide is going out, some savvy operators online are seeing large percentage increases in their online trade simply by focussing on customer service delivery and loyalty schemes for their existing and new online customers; in measurable campaigns that add to the bottom line. 

Reflecting on my old Morris minor whilst looking at my new iphone, it occurred to me that actually they have a lot in common, despite being technologically worlds apart – they’re both really easy to use, add value to my life and as a result, I’ve grown attached to them emotionally .

Businesses can learn a lot from this. Take for an example the restaurants and bar sector. If I’m looking to book a table at a favourite or new restaurant, I want to speak to them or email or book online – not via a third party – but with them. How can a restaurant expect customers to begin to bond with their brand if they put bookings out to third parties? It really bugs me that I frequently have to sign-up with a restaurant website only to be told that I have to sign-up again with someone else just to make a reservation enquiry!

Savvy operators in the sector have realised that investing in direct online relationships with customers and making it easy for them to book and interact, will help them grow their business, even in difficult times. It’s a throwback to good old fashioned customer service, but with high tech underpinnings – a Morris minor with an iphone installed perhaps.

I follow the work of Schulze and Webb with interest, and have for as long as they’ve been around. They’re an R&D consultancy, helping other companies think about the way in which their business can adapt and be enhanced by the opportunities that the internet and other modern technology offer. I don’t know that they’re always right, but they’re always thought-provoking. And their presentations are very entertaining.

I think the slides of their talk from ETech this year provide a lot of material to think about for the near future, from the idea having a little action figure on your desk (that’s your actual desk, not your computer) that moves in some way to indicate when one of your contacts has come on line, to the more abstract idea of RSS-I (RSS-Interactive), a means of developing an aggregating system like RSS for all the little decisions that websites ask you to make, so that you could queue them all in one application, and process them later in a batch of yes/no (or similarly simple one-click decisions) rather than having to visit each website, in response to an email or other push-prompt.

Their big insight, though, is their notion of generation C - the generation coming into maturity now, who don’t really remember a time without the internet, and whose response to not being offered the exactly the product or service they want (particularly on-line) is to go away and build it themselves. That certainly describes a lot of my friends, even the ones who aren’t terribly technical themselves - they’ll just talk someone else (often me) into building it for them…