Executives have heard the following phrase countless times: marketing needs to get more analytical. The strategies, processes and technologies used to identify, acquire and retain loyal customers, as we know them, are changing. Companies struggle to find out what makes their customers "tick" while budget constraints make finding the best customers and prospects more difficult. Add to this the barrage of an unprecedented volume of messages across every channel and the world of marketing becomes a very difficult place.
The dynamics of today’s marketplace are demanding a new type of analytics platform – one that is truly integrated with the entire marketing process and continually updated and maintained so relevancy is assured for the marketing user. Here are three things that organizations should know about advanced marketing analytics to turn customer data into action.
1) Understand the New Analytic Paradigm
Today marketers need to know more about the customer’s needs and behaviors in general. The idea of developing a model for a campaign or program simply can’t work in today’s environment. To address this, marketers are building up a broad array of advanced analytical knowledge about the customer and are deploying models that provide things like knowledge about a customer’s likeliness to purchase each and every product and knowledge about a customer’s expected churn rate and timeframe.
In other words, statistics are no longer a means to an end for increased lift on a certain campaign, mailer or program. It is now viewed as the mechanism by which marketers must discern or uncover advanced knowledge about a customer’s behavior, and most important, be able to use this knowledge in all marketing and sales activities.
2) Apply this Advanced Knowledge
With this new knowledge, the marketer can better manage the entire marketing lifecycle from planning to measurement. As a result of this new paradigm, a proper platform must be put in place to handle the entire analytical modeling process. Furthermore, the analytical capability and integration must be truly automated, saving the modeler over 80 percent of his/her time dealing with data integration and scoring issues and letting the advanced analytic resource focus on providing value – by developing analytics that can help support and drive the business.
3) Utilize Best Practices with Advanced Marketing Analytics
- Redistribute and Segment: Redistribute contacts from one customer group/segment to another during marketing strategy discussions very early in the marketing planning process. With an integrated analytics platform, marketers can view future contact plans in light of expected response and returns, and redistribute marketing dollars on all outbound channels to address their strategic needs.
- Evaluate Results against Expected Results: During the execution stages of each program and below that campaign, the marketer can evaluate the results against expected results provisioned by the advanced analytical platform, and further reallocate contacts while programs are in market (currently being executed with programs and communications being sent to customers/prospects).
- Optimize Inbound Channels: By leveraging the advanced analytical platform, marketers can now optimize offers on inbound channels like customer service and inbound sales. Our experience shows that optimization using the advanced platform typically creates lifts of over 25 percent and can provide complete justification for the marketing platform in as little as 45 days. Marketers can provide straightforward recommendations to the sales or service representative in the call center or at the retail service desk or cash register.
While the new advanced analytic paradigm requires a different view on analytics and their deployment across the marketing lifecycle, today’s increasing message-oriented world is making it a core necessity for direct marketers. At the same time, firms that deploy this capability with even a few best practices are likely to see payback quickly and, furthermore, be provided a platform that gives the marketing executive a level of confidence and control that cannot be achieved using traditional analytical methods or processes.
By Michael Caccavale, CEO of Pluris. You can reach him at www.plurisinc.com.
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