Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

DeBonis, Balinski, and Allen: Five-Step Process

As outlined in their book Value-Based Marketing for Bottom-Line Success (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), the five steps are:

1.	Discover—Understand the Customer includes understanding the market, understanding customer expectations, discovering customer segments, assessing competitive position, selecting target segments.
2.	Commit—Commit to the Customer includes defining segment strategies, developing offerings, creating an organization and processes that support the strategy, defining key performance indicators or metrics.
3.	Create—Create Customer Value includes creating a culture committed to customer value, process planning, investing in required infrastructure, implementation.
4.	Assess—Obtain Customer Feedback includes tracking won and lost business, seeking customer feedback, resolving customer complaints, assessing performance against customer expectations, performing analysis that can be used to improve processes.
5.	Improve—Measure and Improve Value includes identifying gaps, challenging corporate understanding of customers, redefining customer value commitments, improving customer value, anticipating change.