Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard the phrase “Data is King”. Let me say, that is like saying sugar is the secret ingredient to making a good cake. It has to be the right data, used at the right time, with the right content and campaign that could make your data King. First let’s discuss data; there are a lot of companies out there, big and small, that have their hands up telling you, “I have data” or “See our case studies on how our data worked,” and while it is true the case studies are real; you are not told all the other elements that went into it, that made it work.
Understand that everyone has data. My 12-year-old son has data with his subscribers on his youtube channel, his followers on Vine and Instagram; but what data really works for what you are trying to do and how do you find out what you really need? For this article, we are going to take on a new client who has been in business for some time and had their own data to start. When we bring a new client, one of the things we try to get from the client is a demographic profile of their perfect customer. We want to know age range, sex, married or single, with or without kids, credit score, income range; pretty much everything piece of information we can gather about their current customers in order to build a marketing persona. However, before we can build a marketing persona and start advertising we need to analysis their data to verify the information they gave us. This has to be one of the most important steps taken during the onboarding process because most of the time the client does not really know or understand who their customers are. Surprised, it true most of the time.
Let me give you an example. In our case study attached, the client was having trouble gaining sales and had convinced themselves their product was harder to sell, it was an impulse buy but just needed better branding. We were told their ideal customer was 55-65, low income and mainly West Coast as a GEO target but after analyzing the client’s current customer database, we found a different story. They had a couple different ideal clients — Mothers 45-65, married or single, income over 40k, best GEO targets were California, Washington, Texas and Michigan and a couple others. The other ideal client is men 35-45, married with children, income $65K and best GEO targets California, Texas, New York, Chicago and some others. This is such an important process because your message needs to be completely different to a married person vs. a single person because you cannot talk the same to a 35 yr. old male as you would a 45 yr. old female. Now we can build a marketing persona — your basic first step in the process.
Since we had already analyzed the data, we are able to tell how clean the client’s data is and often offer our services to clean the data; especially if you have a client who has direct mail campaigns. This could save them thousands of dollars per send by just removing the duplications. Our system uses a property wave algorithm that can determine “Jennifer hart” and “Jenifer Hart” are the same individual and we match these against our database to see what this individual uses most often and that is the record we keep. Next, we run that data against a National Deceased Database to remove anyone on this list up to the last 45 days and finally we append any data with missing information to give our clients the most accurate and complete data files available. Missing data is lost revenue. According to Experian Marketing Services ‘2014 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report, only 0.25% percent of its customer’s records are considered complete, including name, address, email and mobile data. That means that only 25 records out of every 10,000 have complete data. Appending the data is so important to the client so that they do not have unlinked email data or mail data that lives in isolation and makes it near impossible to market to these clients with an Omni-Channel. On the flip side, this can cost a client thousands of marketing dollars by not being able to contribute a sale back to a unique individual so the customer will continue to see “Buy now” ads or retargeting from other channels wasting the client’s marketing budget and irritating the consumer.
The final step in the data process for us now is to increase the customers reach by taking what we currently know to be the ideal market demographic and create modeled data to market too. Now your client has a clean database and missing attributes now filled with correct information and you have well-modeled data to expand the clients reach.
Your ready to start mapping out the customer’s journey, creating good creative’s, content and more importantly how will you keep the conversation moving forward with their customers? The final step in this process is for you to transmit your client’s message. Transmitting is just as important as ID & mapping. You have to consistently optimize as you regularly get new data that can help you to refine, learn and adjust. This ensures that you never stop pivoting and is vital to your companies growth.
As you will see in the case study having the right data with the right process, is so very critical and sets you up for success!
{Case Study}
On-line Retail Sales
A National On-line Retailer with a product that helps with an addiction.
The Problem
A national retailer had regular monthly sales with no growth for approximately 18 consecutive months. Upon review, the client had a marketing company, a third party e-mail and multiple companies and people handling the social accounts.
The Challenge
The product was a health related product. Some health related products come with a lot of restrictions on where you can market them, claims you can make true or not true and content you are allowed to use. These types of products also come with a lot of data protection and fall under HIPAA Privacy Rules; making data not readily available.
What we did
We first we cleaned all the client customer data by removing all the duplications with our patent wave technologies. Next, we appended all remaining data by updating and filling in blank fields such as e-mail address, address, and phone numbers. Finally, analyzed the all the data to discover the client’s most ideal customer. Everything from location, age ranges, sex, marital status, income range, occupation and other fields such as children vs no children. Then we built marketing personas for the different type of individuals we planned on marketing too.
The Solution
We took control of all the creative and content we are assuring that the consumer is viewing, reading or hearing a unified message across all marketing channels.
The message was deployed using a true Omni-Channel approach. The ability to reach a single potential customer with a unified message and to reach that individual on all channels known to be used by this consumer such as email, mail, social, display and remarking ads with the correct cadence.
The Results
Six months into the marketing campaign with the client had significant increases in sales without the aid of discounts or coupons.
500% increase in email open rates
600% increase in click through rates
300% increase in monthly sales
14% decrease in CPA
Having completely clean data with no unlinked data in the marketing process, allowed us to track any action taken by the potential customer, on any channel back to a single record and this allowed the message across all channels to move the conversation forward with that unique individual based on the action they took. This not only allowed increased sales but decreased ad cost due to having the ability to stop ads going to customers whom already have taken action.