The effective use of data when running campaigns is essential, and it is a priority to ensure client marketing campaign success. This takes a number of forms—whether it’s the effective structuring of an A/B test or MVT and interpreting results, leveraging a wide variety of prospect and customer data attributes for campaign gains through personalization, or building a predictive model, powered by a multitude of data sources.
Any business that is able to should maintain a customer database. By capturing its customers, their transactions and behavior, a company can focus its efforts on most profitable customers, ultimately delivering both a higher profit to the business and a greater return on marketing investment. It can also determine its “next-best” customers and develop marketing programs designed to move them up the spending ladder.
A business can also profile and survey its best customers, enabling a better understanding of them for targeting and creative purposes. A customer database means there is a way to speak to customers directly—it’s no secret that it’s much easier to retain and grow existing customers than it is to acquire news ones. The quality of the data—or the list—is one of the key factors in driving direct marketing response—a response that obviously needs to be high enough, to justify the costs of creative and production.
It’s no secret that it’s much easier to retain and grow existing customers than it is to acquire news ones.
One of data’s strongest insights is that it allows us to see trends within past results and create best-guesses for future campaigns. This sets the stage for the marketer on not only what works, but what doesn’t. These insights extend beyond one channel, and the development of a predictive model better identifies cross-sell targets. For one financial services client, strategic-data model implementation allowed profiling of the client’s best customers to isolate target audiences that respond and convert at a significantly better rate. It also utilized client data to personalize their creative, making the messaging and images more relevant to customers. They realized a response lift of over 25%. Similarly, for an online marketer, demographic insights and online behaviors were identified, giving insight into how best to target and message their prospects.
Marketing has always been a numbers game for those of us in direct and digital marketing. If a client’s campaign isn’t profitable, future efforts would come to an end. This is quite different from traditional mass media, where multi-million dollar marketing spend decisions were made based on “impressions” and brand “awareness.” But as marketers are increasingly required to produce a positive ROI on all marketing efforts, there is a migration to accountability and measureable programs. Effective data management is a key component of marketing success—without it, we can’t run the most optimal marketing program, and can’t read the results to prove out value.
Effective data management is a key component of marketing success