The consumer buying process is complex and can demand a great deal of effort. As a marketer, imagine that you could minimize both the consumer's effort and your own - creating demand and sales leads in a coordinated fashion, while simultaneously enhancing customer loyalty and increasing positive word of mouth. This is the principle behind dialogue marketing - a structured program of ongoing, two-way communication.

But dialogue programs are by nature highly ambitious and require tremendous focus, process and information management skills, internal collaboration, and cost-control discipline. In this article, we outline the general framework for developing a dialogue marketing program and suggest 10 guiding principles for implementing such programs successfully.