use Perl

Had a meeting w/ "the management" yesterday and they laid out a long-term vision for the company IT-wise and that was to investigate 1-to-1/CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and see what benefits it could do for us. Personally, I find this opportunity exciting, but I'm right now at the accumulation phase, where I'm researching and absorbing knowledge on the topic. If you have any experience w/ this topic, I'd love the hear it.

To illustrate some of my original thinking as well as the company I work for, we're a small publishing company that publishes trade magazines. Right now, our flagship magazine is QSR Magazine (QSR = Quick Service Restaurants [iow: Fast Food]) and we give free subscriptions to US CEO's, Presidents, Managers, and Allied. International folks can pay for a subscription, too, which covers postage. We make our $ from advertisers who want to reach our readers.

So my thinking is that we have 2 sets of customers, our readers and our advertisers. Within our readers, we have a fractured set of folks that subscribe directly, folks that we bought lists on and folks that were subscribed indirectly by a representative of the company they are with. One aspect to CRM is to set a scale of what a customer is worth. A reader that has directly subscribed with us (and on a continued basis) is worth more to us (b/c advertisers see those folks as our true circulation) than a reader who we bought or reaped. So right now, the CRM system I'm thinking about for our business will identify the type of reader they are and help migrate less valuable readers to become more valuable, and retaining our valuable readers.

I guess it's easier for advertisers. Obviously, the advertisers that spend the most over the most amount of time are more valuable than others... haven't thought about this area a lot yet.

Anyway, I hope you find this interesting ... it will be occupying most of my professional thoughts for a while, while I grok CRM & think of ways how it can apply to us (management wants me to head it up, including the business aspects - I hope this doesn't make me marketing material ;)).

Jason