A high value advantage that comes from the integration of your online conversational brand community and your CRM system, is that targeting for offer relevance can include self reported customer attitudes and ratings. Makes for richly targeted direct marketing - right offer, right customer, right time, right channel, right attitude & context.

Paul Greenberg (author of 'CRM at the Speed of Light') calls this integrated result CRM 2.0 and has an interesting wiki that is community defining the term.

A client, who is developing this marketing approach, recently questioned the need for their interval based suppression policies (they have implemented a 'must be relevant and no more than 1 contact every X days' policy to keep opt-out rates low).

"If the offer is relevant and attractive to the customer, 1to1 offers, does it matter how many and how often we send offers? It isn't spam if it is relevant...?"

Good question.

My feeling is that offer relevance is critical to build trust which may in turn develop into loyalty and advocacy, but it is not enough;

*There is a natural customer cycle for shopping in most categories and a good offer at the wrong point in the cycle is not relevant - though it may be tomorrow or the day after. This is true in consumer goods with short cycles and automotive with long cycles.

*You have to be able to measure campaign effectiveness unambiguously - so you need a complication free suppression period that corresponds reasonably with the customers' response cycle.

*There is a individual limit to the frequency of communications that a customer wants from you. Increasingly US retailers, for example, allow customers to set the number of communications they will accept as an alternative to a blanket opt-out - 1 per week, 1 per month.....

*Without suppression periods, you get 'offer bunching' as your best customers qualify for most offers. The chance that even great offers will arrive at the wrong point in their shopping cycle increases with the frequency of communication. So the customer at most risk if you adopt a uni-dimension criteria; relevance, is your most valuable! And remember, an opted-out customer is a squandered resource.

Conversational marketing allows you to get more customer insight and target even more relevantly and valuably for your customers - but the disciplines learned from decades of database marketing should not be forgotten just because we now know (some) customers quite well.

It is really a mashup.