How marketers can use data technology creatively

“Follow your own lamp”. This famous quotation from Buddha is as pertinent in today’s marketing world as it was in India in the 5th Century BCE.

We marketers get so much advice about how to go about our marketing from companies like the distinguished McKinsey down to blogs on LinkedIn that we need at times to take a step sideways and consider what our own lamp is telling us.

My personal experience from being at the receiving end of marketing communications is that thousands of them often merge into a uniform blur, with very little to take away at the end.

This has been caused by so many marketers not following their own lamps, but rather slavishly following the paths that have been specified for them by the great marketing consensus.

So how can marketers follow their own lamp and use data technology creatively?

One of our clients called Muck Munchers sells bacteria that you can put down your loo if you want to keep a clean flowing septic tank. They have never failed to ‘follow their own lamp’, and their business is growing at an admirable rate.

creative marketing by muck munchers

Read their whole quirky blog here: Muck Munchers Blog

A large part of a marketer’s individuality must certainly be expressed by the creativity they put into their advertising content. However we should not forget that there is also room for considerable creativity in the way we use our technology.

Let me provide a few examples:

– Customers like to be recognised for what they really are, rather than what they have done in the last five seconds on your website; so a dormant customer who after a long absence suddenly appears would be delighted by a ‘welcome back Mr Smith, and we have been saving something special for you’.

– A small amount of customer analysis can tell us who is and who is not a bargain hunter, so why not restrict your sales catalogues to those who are, and leave the rest to carry on happily paying the full price?

– Customers can be frustrated by going right through your website to find the one item they want, only to be told that it’s out of stock; so browsers who leave your website soon after finding this out will be delighted by an email telling them that if it’s not too late the item is now available.

– And there are triggers when it comes to automating communications. Think garden center; the original purchase of a plant could be followed up by plants that go well with the original purchase with weeding tools, with pest control and even with appropriate winter plant protection.

So please do keep your own lamp lit, and don’t feel the need to follow the herd!

And do come and talk to us if you want to discuss how to use marketing technology creatively.

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

What is meant by automating customer marketing?

What do people actually mean when they talk about automating customer marketing?

By ignoring the vast ‘black holes’ of programmatic, social, and other forms of adtech used to recruit customers, we can focus in this paper on automating marketing to existing customers.

This usually happens through three main channels; website, email and direct mail. However, what we would like to consider is not the channel used for the delivery process, but how the automation that applies to that should be set up.

To us automation can normally be applied either when a; a customer event takes place and you want to respond to that trigger, or b; when a campaign is being sent out to large numbers of customers to whom you want to deliver relevant communications that will make a return. In plain English, trigger or batch campaigns.

When planning trigger campaign automation there are always two perspectives to consider; which customer group or segment are we expecting to involve, and what actual trigger should initiate the communication.

When thinking about customer segments, it makes sense to first plan for the different stages in the customer life-cycle. This would be from recruitment to attrition, but also to look at the customers’ context. Are they for instance browsing, enquiring, or having just made their purchase?

Here are some of the segments we like to use:
customer segments involved in trigger campaign automation

Having analysed the segments to use, the next step is to plan the triggers that apply to them. Here some examples:
how to plan campaign automation triggers
Clearly creativity needs to run alongside automation to spot these trigger opportunities, and to provide a sufficiently interesting a response to increase customer propensity to purchase.

Automating batch campaigns is however a very different type of activity, as in effect the marketer is blind to what the customer is actually doing. There is no pressing need to communicate at that point in time, but nevertheless sales must be generated.

For batch campaigns we like to use propensities as our alternative to triggers. Propensity models can for instance tell us the product category that an individual is most likely to purchase next. Whether they are at risk of attrition, if there is likely to be a return from sending them a catalogue, or if they are sensitive to price reductions and more likely to buy from a sale offer.

Just as with triggers, there are no limits to the propensity models that could be developed to score customers, but we have over time developed a short list of some that we find most helpful for batch customer marketing:
batch customer marketing propensity model
There is great value to be obtained from automating customer marketing, and as this paper will have shown, a successful outcome from it is as much a question of creativity in terms of how to go about it, as it is one of technology or data science. In fact, creativity, technology and data science need to work in combination for success.

If you would like to discuss partnering your creativity with our technology and data science please email to arrange a call.

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Post lockdown marketing, did you grasp the moment?

You may recall our post from March where we provided suggestions on what marketers might do during the Covid lockdown. Now, as the lockdown starts to ease and we enter the new normal, we look towards marketing post lockdown.

For our part we have initiated a project concerned with multi-channel marketing mix attribution, working with a small team of graduates from University College London, and Edinburgh University.

Our mission is to find out if we can detect any patterns that hold true for more than one client that help us to understand the effects of timing and sequencing in how events prior to an order combine to contribute to the order actually happening.

So, for instance, is an email a week before an order more of a driver than a catalogue three weeks before, or a social media referral just a day before, and does it matter what order they happen in?

In a multi-channel world these are important questions, and we hope to have some definitive answers for you before too long. If you are interested to discuss this project, and how it might help your marketing post lockdown, please email us.

We have also been pushing full steam ahead with developing our UniFida customer data platform technology including:

  • Redesigning the way you can select audiences for campaigns to make the process much slicker
  • Integrating with Fresh Relevance for website and email personalisation
  • And with Microsoft Power BI for data visualisation

We very much look forward to talking, and even meeting, with you in the post lockdown period as business gets back on its hind legs again!

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.