Campaign metrics Archives

Gain valuable customer insights from fishing in the CDP data ‘reservoir’

In an increasingly customer-centric world, the ability to access and gain valuable customer insights to shape products, solutions and the customer purchasing experience as a whole is critically important. For that reason alone, customer data must be seen as strategic.

For example, by pulling together rich customer profiles and rigorously tracking response rates, marketers can know precisely what types of content and over what channel are likely to have the greatest impact on the bottom line.

To achieve that, the Customer Data Platform (CDP) can not only be a key enabler, but also a marketer’s central knowledge store.

Historic view of customer value

As a CDP builds a single customer view, it also accumulates an historic view of all the visible customer interactions with the company, both online and offline. Over time these accumulate into an invaluable and extraordinarily rich data ‘reservoir’.

The ability to ‘fish’ in this reservoir via a CDP enables marketers to address some fundamentals, including:

how much revenue is coming from existing customers, as opposed to new ones
how much value last year’s recruits provide, compared with those from earlier periods
dividing customers into cohorts defined by time periods or specific recruitment campaigns
establishing the longer term value they bring to the company

In terms of sales, the data reservoir enables you to track the overall monthly trendline from year to year, and dig deeper into the areas that are showing the most potential. You can see if individual customers are spending more or less overall, or spending on particular product categories and, by using history to establish what the seasonal effects are, you can examine the underlying growth trends.

Impact of marketing

The CDP is also a valuable asset when it comes to looking at the true impact of your marketing campaigns on customers. It can help you answer key questions, including:

what is the ROI for each channel for each time period?
how are different groups of customers responding to individual campaigns and which ones are keeping their appeal?
is the pattern of customer journeys changing?
are customers putting more steps in the pathway and spending more time considering their purchase?
are customers increasingly taking their own route to purchase and being less influenced by the campaigns you are sending them?
are customers browsing for longer periods, or dropping more baskets
is this the same across all customer groups?

Segmentation and propensity models

You can also use the data reservoir to build customer segmentations and propensity models – for example, the experience of some customers considered dormant to reactivate will provide the target variable for a reactivation model. Similarly, customer attrition can provide the target variable for an attrition risk model.

The algorithms derived from these models can then be reapplied within the CDP to score individual customers for retention or reactivation campaigns, or to predict next best actions.

So how best to access the reservoir and gain valuable customer insights?

How easy is it to access all this knowledge? Well, there are a number of different approaches that can be taken./ You can:

use data visualisation tools like Microsoft Power BI or Tableau to provide a continuous dashboard of customer performance, with tables bespoked to your specific KPIs
take a copy of the entire data reservoir and use data science tools like R or Python to answer specific questions and to develop predictive models and segmentations
use out of the box capabilities for reporting metrics that have been developed inside your CDP.

Packaged solutions

Here at UniFida we have pre-packaged a large number of customer and marketing metrics within our CDP. For example, we provide multi-channel order attribution that allocates the value of each order back across the steps in the customer journey that led up to it. This means that we can report on the precise value contributed by each channel and each campaign, for any time period and across any segment of customers.

In summary, a key role of a CDP is to build a data reservoir over time to provide an invaluable and irreplaceable source of information about customer behaviour and marketing effectiveness. The reservoir should fill up naturally, and the marketer’s role is to ask the right questions and have the tools either built into the CDP, or applied externally, to obtain the answers.

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. 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. Our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Campaign metrics propensity model

Are customer value metrics the backbone of your marketing?

It’s intuitively obvious that they should be, but what may not be so clear are which actual metrics you need, and how to connect them to different areas of your business decision making processes. Let’s take four key ways in which you can take advantage of customer value metrics.

1. High-level business planning

Your turnover is equal to the sum of the customer value provided in any period. So, to look forward to how your customer value is going to be provided in the future you need to be able to project from your current customer base, remove those that are going to attrite, and add those that you are going to recruit.

The metric to support this is the average value per customer in each year since they were recruited. So how much value in their first, second third year etc. This allows you to very easily roll customer value forward for planning purposes.

When you start from your planned turnover in say next year, you can then tell how much of that is going to be provided by the exiting customer base, and how much will need to be provided by how many new recruits.

You will also want to apply some assumptions about how value is going to be altered by improvements to the way you look after your customers, and then you will have the basics of a customer-based business plan.

2. Understanding which customer groups provide what level of value

You will be very aware that not all customers are equal when it comes to their level of spend with you.

So, you will need to dissect your average customer value by the type of customer they are. Factors such as age, gender, and product categories purchased can all be used to profile the value of your customers.

The benefit then is that you will know what groups to target your recruitment efforts at.

3. Examining the customer value provided by different channels and media

This type of analysis leads you directly to understanding the ROI provided by different channels and media.

Indeed, we like to use a metric which is the amount of longer-term customer value derived from every £1000 spent in a particular recruitment mode.

You can undertake this at a very micro level, such as individual media, or more macro level, such as a channel.

There is though a caveat; many customers are now recruited as a result of contacts from multiple channels. However, this does not prevent you from looking at the customer value obtained from each recruit for whom the channel has played a part.

4. Where to focus retention?

This is a harder question to answer as your higher value customers will often be the most loyal.

What you need to know is which of your higher value customers are more at risk than others.

For this you will need an individual level predictive model for risk of attrition with which to score customers, and find the higher value, higher risk, group.

Some conclusions

Understanding all aspects of longer-term customer value is critical for every successful marketeer.
To achieve this, you need a single customer view that can track customer behaviour through time.
You will then need to be able to obtain the metrics.
It won’t come as a surprise to regular readers of our newsletters that our customer data platform UniFida has been designed to provide most of the metrics we have been describing on demand.

In some cases further analysis will be required, and our data scientists are happy to help with this.

If you would like to talk to us about how to get the customer metrics you need, then please email to say when and how you would like to be contacted.

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.

Can you escape from Analysis Paralysis?

For many marketeers, a significant part of their day is spent pulling together reports from disparate data sources, and then trying to extract from them the metrics they need to unravel how their marketing is actually working. Usually with varying degrees of success and causing what we’ve come to know as analysis paralysis.

Well, if you are one of these people, we have a means of escape!

You may recall that our cloud-based customer data platform, called UniFida, neatly joins together all your online and offline customer information and builds a single customer view. It undertakes identity resolution, and links browsing and ordering activity to individual people.

We originally designed this tool to enable you to send very personalised communications to individual customers. But it also allows us to provide you with a complete set of marketing performance metrics. Serendipity happens!

The metrics we produce cover what we expect are your key concerns:

Customer metrics to tell you about customer acquisition, retention, and longer-term value
Campaign metrics to provide you with the results of all your direct communications with known individuals
And media metrics to show you how each of your media channels are contributing to the orders you are receiving (including social, display, PPC, email, mail, and SMS)

We recognise that you may not at this point in time need the whole suite of UniFida functionality, but you may be interested in UniFida Marketing Metrics as a standalone module, particularly when priced accordingly.

We believe that it can give you nearly all the metrics you need to manage your marketing at a very reasonable cost (and with us taking care of all the set up and configuration).

If you want to discover how you can escape analysis paralysis and get a quick understanding of UniFida, then contact us.

And if you would like to us to arrange a teleconference with you, then please email us with a good time to talk.