Four steps to building a data driven marketing strategy: part 4
In this four-part blog series, we looked at the four essential components for building a data driven marketing strategy.
Part one focused on the data you may already hold on your customers, whilst part two looked at what insight third parties can provide. Part three examined the benefits of combining what you know about your customers with what others can tell you.
The final part of our blog series examines the use of combined data and customer profiling to implement data driven marketing and increase your return on investment.
PART FOUR
Generate new business and revenue with data insights
In part three we looked at how customer segmentation can fortify your data insights and provide a clear path to targeting the right customers at the right time.
Leveraging this information gives you the power to make decisions based on facts. You now know much more about your clients, and it’s backed by hard data. Take an honest look at your non-data driven marketing campaigns. Are you seeing results? If not, then using your data to drive more effective campaigns will turn things around.
The following examples* illustrate the benefits of using data to reach the right people:
1. Jones Finance offers a low interest finance package with strict eligibility criteria. Over the past year, they’ve invested money and resources into a direct mail campaign, targeting existing customers and mass mailing households using a public database. A campaign analysis shows only a handful of new leads have been generated and revenue has not increased.
An external data provider is consulted to build a profile of the company’s ideal customer. This is defined as ‘consumers with an appetite for credit, within a high-income bracket, who have an excellent credit history.’ Data from Jones Finance is then combined with third party insights to produce a database of eligible customers. Jones Finance launches the campaign again, using the segmented database, and immediately starts receiving applications from eligible consumers.
The marketing campaign is now reaching those identified as being highly likely to take up the offer.
2. Juice is an electricity provider that has been advertising on Facebook to generate new leads. It’s the company’s first foray into digital marketing and they currently have no control over who sees the advert. Frustration is growing as the company receives an influx of applications from customers who aren’t eligible for the offer. Applicants are either living outside of the area that Juice supplies to, are locked into contracts with other providers – or simply not meeting the credit criteria.
Consultation with an external data provider immediately identifies the need to create an ‘exclusion audience’. Using segmentation practices, algorithms and combined data, the digital campaign can be tweaked to ensure only the right people see the advert. Those who are ineligible are excluded. Juice now has control over who can see the offer, thereby generating real leads and a quicker onboarding process.
3. JJ’s is a cleaning products wholesaler that sells directly to businesses, but sales are down, and the sales team is struggling to reach their targets. The company wants to increase revenue and secure new clients, but traditional marketing campaigns are not producing results.
After consultation with a third-party data provider, JJ’s realise they need to better understand their clients and the sectors within which they operate.
A report is produced for JJ’s which segments clients via sectors, value of sales in each sector, products generating the most profit and much more.
The report uncovers valuable insights to optimise sales. For example, identifying the different needs of clients at different times and missed opportunities to market specific products.
Using a variety of metrics, segmentation and analytics, the external provider can provide JJ’s with new business leads likely to return the greatest value.
JJ's is now equipped with the tools to close any gaps, understand where their core business lies and generate new business.
Measuring returns
Return on investment should be measured after each campaign and data driven campaigns should be tweaked accordingly. Where companies have not used data to drive campaigns before, the results can be assessed against traditional campaigns.
Running multiple data driven campaigns, measuring and fine tuning is key. Using a third-party data provider to measure results and drill down into granular detail takes the hard work out of ROI analysis, ensuring you’re on the right track going forward.
Want to know more?
Download our white paper on customer segmentation for more information.
*The examples used are fictional but are based on real customer outcomes