Information Week carries a new piece titled "Finding the Customer", in which he highlights the benefits/success of Email Survey and other tech tools that are being leveraged by marketing departments to get closer to the customer.

Hyundai Motor America put together one of its most successful promotions last year. The carmaker contacted existing Hyundai owners and prospective customers, asking them what options they most want in a new car, then packaged those options into a special edition of its Sonata sedan with $750 worth of add-ons, including heated seats, automatic climate control, and a built-in garage-door opener. After racking up 15,000 sales of the special edition, an E-mail survey of buyers told the automaker the promo worked: 11% of the buyers bought the special edition specifically because of the options.

A slow shift is on: Carmakers and other consumer-goods advertisers still pour most of their marketing money into print, TV, and radio, but there's a clear move to shift some of that money to more-interactive channels. And those channels create a new opportunity to pitch products and ask for ideas.

Business-technologists need to be ready to support the conversation marketers want to have. "If you can feel it or sense it or perceive it, you can measure it, and if you can measure it, then you can find a way to make it better and refine the methodology," says John Krafcik, Hyundai's VP of product development, strategic planning, and marketing.

Forrester Research predicts that spending on online advertising and marketing will grow from nearly $12 billion last year to more than $26 billion by 2010. Search-engine marketing is expected to grow most dramatically, nearly tripling from $4.3 billion to $11.6 billion, while online display advertising will double from $4.1 billion to $8.1 billion, as will classifieds, which will go from $2.2 billion to $4.7 billion. E-mail marketing appears to be leveling, from $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion.

Hyundai, watching what car shoppers are looking at online is one of the ways it stays in touch with would-be customers. It runs the E-mail polls with a few $600 licenses for the Zoomerang online-survey-management tool. It has invested even more in the technology to establish a "shopper quantification" program that combines outsourced clickstream analysis from Compete Inc. with a custom tool built using Hyperion Solutions Corp.'s Brio business-intelligence software, which tells Hyundai how it's doing with online car-shoppers. The tools let the company know "what's going on in the digital channel to make packaging, pricing, and marketing decisions," says Paul Whitworth, director of strategic planning and brand development.

Marketing has long been a blend of numbers and nuances, with data crunchers and creative types forced to live with one another. But this relationship is about to get even more complex and intertwined as customer-interaction tools grow richer and more complicated.Source: InformationWeekPrashanth RaiTag(s):New Media, CRM