RETURN TO SPENDER HEWLETT-PACKARD
Palo Alto, Calif.

Paul horstmeier, a 14-year veteran of Hewlett-Packard who took on the position of e-marketing manager two years ago, quickly realized that the computer industry giant had made a mess of its attempts at e-mail marketing. The company’s typical customers include IT managers whose business division has purchased servers, printers and services from Hewlett-Packard. These customers also include managers in other parts of the business, and those managers request e-mail updates and newsletters that tell them when new printer drivers are available, when security updates are posted and when product updates come to market. Once in a blue moon they call a customer help line, but they’re much more likely to get most of their answers from online sources. Customers like these love getting news and updates by e-mail and are quite responsive to online marketing offers.

Even with that knowledge, HP, based in Palo Alto, Calif., wasn’t using its Web presence effectively, Horstmeier says. HP had been steadily collecting business customer data and e-mail addresses from all of its sales channels but didn’t have a central program or strategy for e-mail marketing. At times, as many as nine different marketing groups would blast out e-mail marketing campaigns to segments of the list, but each one was a single shot effort. "They weren’t coordinated, they weren’t leveraged in any way, and we didn’t learn from them," Horstmeier says. Instead of (by some fluke) promoting loyalty among its business customers, these efforts were more likely to promote irritation by inundating people with information they didn’t want or ask for, he says.Horstmeier recognized that in order to provide useful benefits to HP, his group needed to take control of e-mail campaigns from those nine different marketing groups. It also had to champion the customer-centric idea that marketing should be a long-term process that focuses on the life cycle of customers instead of looking at a sale as a singular occurrence. "We didn’t do this in a vacuum, though. We worked with HP’s larger CRM strategy groups to figure out what we could do with e-mail marketing that would fit into the larger CRM framework," Horstmeier says. That meant Horstmeier’s group had to focus on the e-mail marketing piece while coordinating its efforts with the larger corporate picture that included other customer-facing groups like call centers and customer service teams.

The reverse was true too. HP at large had to understand what Horstmeier’s group was up to, says Mike Overly, worldwide CRM manager for HP’s business customer organization. HP is in the process of rolling out a worldwide system that shows a single, unified view of customer contacts, says Overly. "We need to do this in order to provide a consistent customer experience, and [the e-marketing group’s] work is a rock solid piece that will be tightly integrated into that single-customer master."