Michael Leander's presentation at The Customer Loyalty Conference in Moscow, Russia

Blue Business Media delivered a very successful Customer Loyalty Conference in Moscow early December 2009. Michael Leander presented the topic "Loyalty marketing in the age of multichannel conversational economy – opportunities and threats of engagement"

Once again I was invited to speak at one of Blue Business Media's events. This time in Moscow, Russia where BBM hosted their first ever event in Russia.

With around 140 delegates from many of the leading companies in Russia, the top speakers included UK based Terry Hunt presenting "How Tesco built a rich relationship with 15 million customers", Laurence Stock of Nectar, United Kingdom, presenting "Best Practice in Coalition Loyalty", Radak Hrachovec from Bata Central Europe in the Czech Republic presenting "The Club Pays Back" and Jacek Powalka of Great Open House in Poland presenting "Consumer Loyalty programs world practices", the event in my opinion was a great success.

The danger of going off topic
Since this 2 day conference was a customer loyalty conference, I took a bit of a risk on the contents of my presentation. Not that I don't find the message I tried to pass to the delegates relevant - but because the conference was very much focused on loyalty concepts, case studies and loyalty program learnings from practitioners.

I tried to pass on some simple messages, namely;

- the importance of delivering good-to-great customer experience in all touchpoints
- the importance of establishing customer listening posts, monitoring these frequently and ensuring that the feedback collected is actionable.
- the opportunity of utilizing social networks to extend the loyalty experience and to initiate and retain a conversation with customers
- be relevant, respect your customers; the importance of communicating relevant messages to customers with the right timing and contents

Luckily the six or seven people I spoke to immediately after my presentation, seemed very happy about the content and the way I presented it. In fact the volunteered feedback from those people makes it all worth my while.

Evaluation satisfactory with room for improvement
I am always disappointed if I do not get top-marks for my presentations. But sometimes one has to be willing to take a change. Well, I often do because I insist on including content, which on the offset may seem obvious to marketers, yet most marketers do not get it right.

The evaluation of my presentation in Moscow on a 5-scale where 5 is high, 1 is low was:

Contents of presentation: 4,0
Presentation technique: 4,4

If I were to rate the audience, here is my rating::

Willingness to interact: 3,5
Ability to pay attention: 4,5

So there you have it. :-)

I will be presenting at BBM's Loyalty Marketing Conference in Cracow, Poland in April 2010 and am looking forward to extending my presentation by 10 minutes and improving this rating.

Congratulations to the Blue Business Media team for organizing yet another successful marketing/loyalty marketing conference. They are indeed a pleasure to work with and they deserve all the success they can get their hands on...

In the picture CEO of Blue Business Media - Dutchman Casper Haring and business director Edyta Olbratowska.

Michael Leander's workshop at Eurobest in Amsterdam

At the Eurobest 2009 in Amsterdam, Michael Leander presented the FEDMA workshop "Decoding email marketing" on the 25th. of November. It took place at the Beurs van Berlage in the very heart of Amsterdam. A fantastic venue, which I am sure the many delegates enjoyed.



Unfortunately we will not be getting any evaluation of the workshop, however judging from the number of camera's actively used to capture images of Michael Leander's slides, some members of the audience might actually have learned a thing or two.

FEDMA will be following up with a web-seminar in 2010 presented in collaboration with the FEDMA Pan European Email Marketing Benchmark Report 2010 sponsor, Alterian.

Pictures are from the event and our little outing after the fact.

An unreal experience in Ljubljana - I experienced world class customer experience

Having delivered full day internal marketing workshop for around 50 employees at Mladinska Kniga - Slovenia's largest publishers of books, magazine publishing, 60 retail bookstores, etc. - I was pressed for time to finish the preparation for my speech at an email marketing seminar in Ljubljana (organized by Dima Center / Promarket) the next day. But I had to eat. So I walked down to the center of Ljubljana to the same restaurant where I had lunch with that same customer Tuesday afternoon as part of my preparation for the workshop .

After arriving at the restaurant I found a table and ordered a few dishes. But it took quite a long time before the first course was served. I therefore asked to have the bill when they would serve the second course, while I explained that I was getting stressed because I was in a hurry and it was took far longer than expected to get the food. (at this time it was around 21 and I still a couple of hours of preparation for my 3 hour long lecture the next day).


The food was quite delicoius, the coca-cola's tasted like they should, but when the bill was presented it came along with the highly surprising "we have decided that you do not have to pay for dinner - we'll only charge you for the sodas."

I was not quite sure I had heard the waiter correctly and said "excuse me?". He repeated, and I have certainly looked like one big qustionmark. It actually took me the better part of an hour to get over the experience. That's how unusual and world-class it was.

Now that's what I call delivering a fantastic customer experience, and all that at a restaurant that - notwithstanding that many customers are likely to be tourists and business travelers - takes its own quality seriously. Whether or not this is an integral part of their business philosophy or a special case, I do not know. Hopefully when I am back in Ljubljana, I will get a chance to ask them to learn more about their customer experience philosophy.

This was an experience that I will certainly tell to others over and over again. The name of the restaurant in Ljubljana Slovenia is Gostilna restaurant and can be found at this URL.

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5 things I am going to do to improve my results in 2010

Inspired by recent events, I thought I'd join the hoards of people coming out with New Year's wishes and similar to do lists in the coming month.

So here are the 5 things that I want to do to improve results in 2010. Order is random as I am writing this from the top of my head.

1. Improve Michaelleander.com with a clear direction
I never had a clear plan with this blog, but merely wanted to secure my name-url. Now I want to turn this Danish language blog into a personal site in English and Danish.

2. Improve meemoo2.com and improve quality
Meemoo2.com is my English/German language blog. While it enjoys steady streams of traffic, I want to increase the reading experience, offer more unique content and in general just improve the quality of the contents.

3. Re-launch marketingboss.tv
Some may remember how I lost all the content placed on marketingboss.tv. By far the best content idea for attracting visitors, I want to rebuild it, but this time I will be in control and not risk loosing hundreds of hours of work again.

4. Step-up the video presentation/tips efforts
Not sure if I will manage one video with marketing tips/tricks each week, but that will be my goal. I meet loads of interesting and highly knowledgeable people every month. All I need to do is to prepare questions, tape, publish.

5. Launch emailmarketingbenchmark.com
I have owned that domain for quite some time, but haven't done anything. In 2010 I want to establish a great ressource for anything related to email marketing benchmarks.