B2B Lead Scoring

You know that we’re huge advocates of using statistical techniques to improve marketing performance. So, when I listened to Richard Sharp, VP of Marketing for Marqui speak on the topic of lead scoring at the Innotech e-marketing conference last month, I knew it would be a great session. Richard spoke about how important it is for marketing to qualify leads through an objective scoring system, prior to handing the right leads over to sales.

We couldn’t agree more and we decided to highlight a Marqui client success in today’s post. This success story comes directly from their sales literature.

Background and Client
Strangeloop Networks develops a family of network appliances designed to help businesses optimize the performance of their website or web-based application. Their business clients can then deliver new features and applications faster and at a lower cost without changes to software code or hardware infrastructure.

Challenges
Strangeloop Networks was a newly launched company that needed to hit the ground running. With limited marketing staff and budget, they still had to deliver enough sales-ready leads for their team. They had to transform their website from “brochure-ware” into an active lead generation component. They also had to create lead generation campaigns that could easily plug into their existing Salesforce CRM and Google Analytics web analytics package. They wanted a more effective means of evaluating their marketing programs instead of relying on conflicting anecdotal information from their sales team.

Solution
Strangeloop selected the Marqui Marketing Automation Suite, as it included key features and guaranteed a fast implementation. The Marqui Marketing Automation Suite provided both web content management and marketing campaign tools, offering a single-vendor solution. Total implementation time including training was only a few weeks before they were able to start running their first lead generation campaign.

Results

* Executed campaigns 3x faster
* Reduced budget for external contractors by $14,400 annually
* Increased conversion rate by 10% each onth
* Established automated workflow for managing and approving content
* Ability to track profitability of multi-channel campaigns

All in all, sounds pretty impressive! It’s great to see small businesses succeed by being clever, and by choosing the right technology.

Effective E-Marketing Segmentation

Marketing Sherpa recently published this excellent case study on utilizing segmentation in e-marketing campaigns to grow lists and lift response rates — and all this in a time of economic downturn!

SUMMARY
An e-retailer has been using gender- and store-specific email promotions to lift revenue and grow their customer mailing list.

CHALLENGE
With consumers tightening their spending habits, many email marketers will be happy to see any kind of sales increase this year. James Connell, Senior Director for Ecommerce, Digital Marketing & New Media, Roots, a Canadian-based clothing multichannel retailer, realized late last year that his company might be affected, too. That’s why he and his team decided it was a perfect time to boost the relevancy of their emails.

“We needed to do a much better job of driving people to something that’s relevant,” Connell says. “I had been signing up for our competitors’ emails, and I had been getting mostly messages that didn’t apply to me. That was educational.”

Connell saw more relevancy as a competitive advantage their brand could pounce on. And with response rates dropping and consumer spending falling, he wanted to test some new ideas to optimize their email program.

Connell and his team were already following best practices on privacy and deliverability, but they were essentially sending the same offer to their whole email list over and over again. They knew the next step should be list segmentation … and time was of the essence because of the gloomy economic forecast.

CAMPAIGN
First, Connell began by identifying some key areas where they could improve email relevancy.

Three areas:
o Targeting women and men with gender-specific offers
o Segmenting email lists even further based on their 128 store locations
o Identifying which days of the week were best for email by testing *every* day — not just the industry-proven midweek days

Here are the five major tactics Connell and his team followed:

Tactic #1. Segment customer list by store location and gender
To deliver more targeted messages, Connell organized their list names into separate files according to store locations. They took the ZIP Code attached to each name from past online purchases and then assigned it to the closest store.

Then, he and his team divided the customer list even further into separate files for men and women. They manually went through their customer list to make the new files. For customers without distinctly male or female first names and purchase patterns, they created another file they labeled “undetermined.”

Tactic #2. Identify ‘un-determineds’
They didn’t stop with simply segmenting their customer list. Every ‘un-determined’ name was emailed a survey to get seven data points:
o Name
o Gender
o State/province
o Last purchase date at Roots.com
o Last purchase date in a Roots factory outlet store
o Favorite department
o If they were interested in Roots’ yoga department

The survey of “un-determineds” allowed Connell and his team to further segment their customer files by gender and their 124 Canadian and 4 US stores.

Tactic #3. Promote sign-ups at each store
The survey process also involved creating email sign-up forms for each store. New customers were offered the chance to win various prizes if they signed up. Store managers turned the names into Connell and his team by shop and city location.

Tactic #4. Create segmented offers
In the end, customers received both store- and gender-specific offers that involved printing out an email coupon (usually a discount on an item) to take to the nearby outlet.

• The copy pointed out that the offer was good not only online but also at their local Roots store.
• The address and a directions link were included to encourage redemption at the stores.

If a customer walked into the store without the email coupon but still mentioned the promotion, the stores gave them the same discount. Each store manager was responsible for reporting the number of redemptions back to Connell by phone or email after the promotion expired. There was no digitally computable coupon code.

Customers who were not within driving distance of the stores did not receive these offers. They were put into a separate online-only customer file. They received gender-specific offers that were designed to purely drive online sales.

Tactic #5. Test emailing *every* day of the week
Connell didn’t want to leave any money on the table by taking for granted the industry’s almost de facto ‘best days’ [Monday through Thursday] for emails. So, they tested every day of the week, including Saturday and Sunday.

RESULTS
Connell has no doubt that the segmentation tactics have increased the relevancy of the clothier’s email campaigns. At the same time, email-based sales have increased by 14% compared to the same period the year before.

“We’re happy to be getting a lift in these difficult economical times and expect the percent to continue to grow as we do more segmentation. We are seeing higher opens, click-throughs and better ROI. And because of the increased relevance, our emails get forwarded more often and we are increasing our subscriber base.”

Connell and his team grew their subscriber base by 22% during the first six weeks of the campaign with the in-store email component. “About half the stores have participated in the email promotions so far, and that number is increasing.”

They also saw “a steady 40%” completion rate of the surveys sent to clarify a customer’s gender and local store and they’ve been getting a 15% redemption rate for the email-exclusive offers as reported by the store managers.

Giving discounts to people who mentioned the email offer — without proof that they received an email — also appears to have been the right move. “We encourage email sign-ups in the store, so it makes sense to accept the promotions in that setting to help create more of a multi-channel identity.”

Connell couldn’t offer specific numbers on the best days for emails. But he says Tuesday and Wednesday proved to be their best send days. Still, team members were intrigued by the numbers they received on the Sunday tests.

“We are seeing surprisingly high click-throughs on Sunday emails. There’s a lag time in sends for that day where people open up and click on Monday and even Tuesday. With the click-throughs you see midweek, they happen very quickly or they don’t happen at all.”

Use Personalization with Marketing Analytics to Increase ROI

It’s no secret that in this down economy direct marketers are continuing to find themselves under more and more pressure to do more with less — while at the same time continuing to deliver better results.

Recently, we were talking with a colleague about using more personalized communications when marketing to customers and prospects.  Our colleague, Michael Hurley, works for Imago Digital.  They use personalized marketing — and several forms of it — on their most successful direct marketing campaigns that they create for their clients.  It turns out that this is an excellent idea — you should see some of their response and conversion rates on these personalized campaigns.  They are through the roof when compared to traditional direct mail campaigns.

You may ask “why all the hub-bub on personalized communications?”  Well, to nobody’s surprise, personalized marketing is very customer-focused.  And, being customer-focused works!  In fact, there are many case studies that present success stories when utilizing personalized messaging.  The results of these studies are tied to huge increases in ROI on direct marketing campaigns.

We recommend taking this success to the next level by combining personalization with marketing analytics. And why not combine personalization with known attributes about your customers or prospects?  Doing so can grab hold of the recipient’s attention by communicating the most relevant message to the right groups of people.

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this. First, start out by profiling your customers to better understand what attributes that they possess that make them your customers.  You’ll end up with a good idea of exactly what your buyers look like.  Once you’ve accomplished this for your customers, look at a representative sample of folks who aren’t yet your customers and determine which of them look most like your buyers.  By targeting those prospects that most closely resemble your customers, you’ll be increasing your chances of turning prospects into customers.

Next, you can segment your customer universe to hone in on those groups that share certain characteristics, then design your messages to speak to those characteristics.  As seen in our previous post on creating effective segmentation plans, it’s amazing how effectively you can “speak” to your customers when you better understand who they are financially, ethnically, psychographically, etc.

So, as you are planning future campaigns, think about using personalization along with marketing analytics to really increase your results.  Over time, you’ll notice the profitability of your marketing efforts increasing, along with the products sold and lifetime value of your customer base.  This is a winning scenario that we promise will make you more successful!

Grow Your Customer Relationships

You know you’re getting old when news doesn’t seem like news. You’ve heard it before. Same old story. Can you relate?

It’s certainly how I felt reading this story from DM News: Study says CMOs are failing to use CRM well.

“Marketers worldwide are under-utilizing data and analyt­ics, particularly when it comes to customer retention, according to a recent study released by the Chief Marketing Officer Council.

Only half of marketers have a strategy in place for growing key account relationships, and 45% believe CRM systems are not effective enough. Further, only 15% of companies rated them­selves extremely good or effective at integrating disparate customer data sources, and 6% of marketers reported having “excellent knowl­edge” of customer data such as demographics, psychographics or transactional history.”

The article goes on to talk about how so many companies continue to be focused on new customer acquisition and fall short in developing strategies designed to retain the customer.

In today’s environment of short-term gratification (we must meet sales goals THIS MONTH; we have to report favorable earnings THIS QUARTER), I tend to understand why a long-term, customer-centric strategy might fall by the wayside. Couple the need for immediate results with an ever-shrinking marketing staff and budget, and I start to wonder how any company can think strategically and look at long-term benefits.

But, here’s the kicker–this way of thinking with the customer in mind is a necessity. Customers today are aware of the data and technology that is available to corporations. They see it used to their advantage in their everyday dealings (the classic example is shopping with Amazon). They expect you to know all about them. They want you to anticipate their needs. They need you to serve them the right price plan or the right mix of products. If you won’t do it, you’re in danger of losing that customer.

It may be time to look at your customer touch-points and make sure that you’re doing all you can to keep those customers happy.

Following is a short-list of ideas that might jump-start the evaluation process:

• Have you empowered your call center or customer service folks to really assist customers calling in with issues? Are they able to make real fixes and solve problems?
• Do you have a handle on your customer relationships? Have you done the analysis and database work to understand exactly what products and services each customer is buying from you (or has purchased in the past)?
• Do you have a strategy in-place to make sure that you are maximizing the profit potential from each and every customer? Do you make the right up-sell and cross-sell offers, when the customer is most likely to be shopping?
• Conversely, do you have a strategy in place to ensure that you are not over-serving your customer? For example, are they on a price plan that is too big for their needs, hence they’re paying too much? Trust me, eventually, your customer will realize that they’ve been paying too much for your service, and they’ll leave you. To retain this customer and maximize their lifetime value, perhaps you should be pro-active and “right-size” their plan, before they do…

Luckily, we direct marketers, with our background and experience in data mining and using analytics to understand–and predict–customer behavior, are well-positioned to make a positive impact on customer marketing. Nancy and I have re-focused our direct marketing consulting practice to be centered on analytics and data. It’s that important, we believe.

Perhaps it’s time to become the customer advocate within your organization!

Using Analytics to Unlock the Power of Your Customer Data

One of our pet peeves is unorganized, dirty customer data.  I know — we must lead very sad lives for this to be the case.

However, here’s the scenario we find again and again.  We’re helping a client plan their direct marketing strategy.  We ask them for a sample of their customer data.  We find that it is in such a terrible state of disarray that no one can make heads nor tails of it . . . arghhh!  Or, worse, they have a difficult time finding the actual “owner” of the database.  It can get messy!  But out of disarray comes opportunity — it’s the whole making lemonade out of lemons thing.

I’ve seen many articles lately stating that companies just aren’t getting the most from their customer data.  And, we’ve seen this to be quite true.  And most of the time it’s because of unorganized data.  However, the beauty of a dirty database is that there is such a wealth of opportunity waiting to be unlocked if you bring in an analytic approach.  And, you can start by mining your customer database and uncovering all of the elements that make your customers your customers. Data mining gives you the power to market to your customers more effectively — appealing to their needs and ultimately getting them to respond and buy.

Starting out with data exploration, you’ll begin to see common themes emerge that you never knew existed.  Mining your customer data provides you with the intelligence to set your direct marketing strategy, and really make your products and services appeal to your customers, which in turn, creates a stronger relationship with them.

So, the next time you think that your database is a mess and that you can’t get IT to give you the information that you need in order to conduct your direct marketing campaigns effectively, bring in the data miners.  Unleash them on your data (give us a call — it makes us happy to do this stuff!) and let them help you realize the gold nuggets that have been locked away in your customer database.  We promise that data mining will pay dividends in terms of customer loyalty and response.

Direct Marketing Analytics Valued in Today’s Job Market

In these turbulent economic times, it’s refreshing to see some good news for our industry. It seems that the core skills of database marketing and analytics continue to be valued by employers. From BtoB Online’s Daily Report:

“Two-thirds of marketers (67%) says resources for database and analytics to support online marketing efforts call for the most marketing investment this year, according to Alterian, an enterprise marketing company, which released the results of its fifth annual marketing survey on Tuesday.”

Interesting that this survey calls out “online” marketing, but we’ll take that! Database marketing and analytics expertise are definitely transferable.

We challenge direct marketers to think outside the box and consider how your skills can apply to many different areas of marketing. Even if you’ve only had specific experience in, say, direct mail, so many of the disciplines you use can be translated to online marketing. And, if that is where companies are investing, then it might be a good idea to highlight your resume with examples of how your skills can improve online programs.

Here are a couple of examples that come to mind immediately:

1. Apply segmentation strategies to e-mail campaigns. While e-mail remains an inexpensive channel, it’s no longer good enough to blast the same message to your entire list (and then do it over and over and over again). Increasingly, e-mail marketers are segmenting their customer and prospect lists and presenting the appropriate offer and message. They’re starting to understand the importance of understanding how frequency impacts results. Who better than traditional direct marketers (who may only have segmented a postal mailing list so far) to teach e-mail marketers how to mine their database and understand customer segments?
2. Use ROI techniques to understand and measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns. Like database and analytics, social media is another area that corporations believe that they need to invest in (or miss the boat). As a leader in using numbers and results to justify your direct marketing spending, take those skills over to the world of social marketing. Attempt to quantify every investment (even if it’s only the costs of someone’s time taken to blog, for instance). Articulate to senior management, for example, how your social marketing efforts are targeting your market with pinpoint precision. Simply take your deep understanding of building your ROI for each campaign/program to the world of social marketing, and you’ll be ahead of most of your competitors.

The above are only two examples of how you can migrate your direct marketing expertise to other, potentially more high-growth, areas within your organization.

Think about where your specific skills can apply (or have applied) to high-growth online marketing initiatives. And, please, share them here!

Performance-Based Marketing

There has been a ton of talk on looking at performance-based marketing versus the traditional way of looking at performance by planning direct marketing campaigns based upon how many pieces you can mail at a certain cost per thousand (cpm). Or the number of folks you can call for a certain cost per call. The thinking has been that if you can reach a certain cost per piece, call, campaign, etc., you’ll be spending your dollars most efficiently while meeting your marketing budgetary numbers.

Not so much any more . . . more marketers are now utilizing the concept of performance-based marketing instead of looking at the simple costs of each campaign. The reasoning that I’ve heard for this is that this is the right thing to do “in a time of recession . . .” oh boy, here we go again. Whatever economic state that we happen to be in right now, there is certainly more pressure than ever on marketers to be able to prove that the money that is spent will net in getting money back. I’ve even heard some say that if they spend $100 they want to be sure that they’ll at least get the $100 back. Yikes . . . whatever happened to the good old days when we insisted that we actually made money from our direct marketing efforts?

The truth is that we are still on the hook for making certain that we are squeezing every cent out of our marketing expenditures, and if you’re measuring the results of each marketing campaign because you have to prove that what you are doing is working then you are, very much indeed, involved in performance-based marketing. In fact, I’m not sure when we haven’t been. Again, the beauty of direct marketing is that it can so easily be measured and analyzed so that you can re-group, tweak and refine your campaigns over time.

Granted, there are those companies out there who are lucky enough to be involved in industries where they can blindly market or advertise and continue to make money but these companies are becoming fewer and further between. Most of the companies that we work with need solid proof from us that what we are recommending is positively impacting their bottom line. Trust us when we say that we are relentless as we scan our response rates, conversion rates, open rates, etc.

We analyze our client’s customer bases to ensure that we get the best understanding that can possibly be obtained of who their customers are. Then we scan the marketplace for data that will perform in only the most optimum way for our clients’ direct marketing campaigns. Then, we analyze the data. What is working? What isn’t working? What is working just OK? How can it be changed to increase the response rate?

By intelligently applying the tenets of performance-based marketing, we can ensure that we are increasing the profitability of every customer portfolio consistently. And by the way, while we’re at it, we’re increasing our own profitability, too. It’s a win-win scenario!

Next time you find yourself only looking at the cost per piece . . . really dig down into what that really means and how it will impact your overall profitability. It behooves us all to look at direct marketing expenditures from all perspectives, then blend those ideas that make the most sense for your business into a strategy that will bring you the most profitability.

Adding an Analytical Approach to your Direct Marketing Strategy

I recently read a great blog post that discussed the importance of data mining and the value that it can bring to your business.  The article reminded readers that it doesn’t necessarily have to be an expensive undertaking to conduct a deep dive into your data assets in order to get a better understanding of your customer base.  And, darn it, it’s true!

Certainly there are plenty of companies out there who specialize in working with large corporations with many divisions, many product groupings, many customer interactions, etc.  An analysis of this type would take a lot of planning, time and money — to be sure.  However, if you aren’t that complex of an organization, you can really get a great understanding of your customer base and not have to spend a ton of money to do it.

Just to give you some food for thought, we perform customer profile studies for around $1,000.  OK, granted, there are analytical companies out there bursting out in hysterical laughter over this amount.  Whatever!

But, the truth is it can be done.  We append a full suite of demographic data and compare it to a nationwide sample so that you can really get a good idea of how your customers differ from prospects in the areas in which you market.  We provide a full set of great reports on your customer base that illustrates who your customers really are.  Then, as an added bonus, we provide you with reporting of your customers versus your prospects so you can see how they differ, how penetrated you are in certain areas, and how to plan your next direct marketing campaigns.

This is not an advertisement for our services (I swear, it’s not).  The reason that I’m going into such detail on this subject is to prove to you that you can mine your customer database and profile your customers and it doesn’t have to take your entire marketing budget to do it.

Interestingly enough, there are those who will scoff at this.  How can these people ever accurately profile your customers for $1,000?  Well, we can . . . and truthfully, they could, too.  It’s a paradigm shift that is long overdue.

Enough of my rant . . . just know that you can pull intelligence from the data that you collect on your valuable customers.  And, it can be analyzed so that you can better understand your customer relationships and market much more intelligently without breaking the bank.

If you’ve done this and had success, we’d love to hear your stories!  Toss us a comment.

Using an Analytical Approach to Ride out the Economy, Part Three

To continue on our theme of riding out the economy by utilizing an analytical approach, think about all of the things that you measure.  We’ve already discussed going through and assessing what you are measuring and ensuring that every element does have an impact on overall corporate profitability goals.  Now, let’s dig a little deeper to ensure that we aren’t missing anything that could be important.

Part of the goal of this exercise is not only to ensure that you are capturing everything that is important . . . but also to check out if your systems are tied together in order to link together the information captured and measured efficiently.

So, how to accomplish this? You’ve already taken a hard look at the right things to measure.  Within those things (i.e., each direct marketing campaign), are you measuring all of the aspects that will contribute to your profitability?  Sure, you’re measuring response rates . . . but are you taking it the next step to see how many of those who responded actually converted or spent dollars with you?  Of those that convert, are you looking at what they purchased?  You may have a myriad of product offerings, for example.  So, those responders/converters that were driven to your website and purchased, which product did they buy?  Was it a profitable conversion?

I’m not trying to be a nit-picker, trust me.  However, these are very important questions.  Let me give you a clearer example of what I mean.  Let’s say you sell products on your website that range from $5 to $100.  And, you also offer free information in the form of documents that people can download.  If you received an outstanding response rate of 5%, yet all of those folks that visited your website bought only $5 items and downloaded the free info, your campaign may not have been as profitable as you desired.  It may be that it was — I’m just saying take a look at all of the elements so that you can measure the ROI.  This way, you can accurately report on how successful each campaign was and you can tweak it for the future to make each upcoming campaign even more successful.

Make sense?

Part of this means that you have to ensure that all of your customer touch-point systems work fluidly together.  In other words, if you are driving prospects to your website and to your call center, make sure that you have the analytical tools in place to track that campaign from both places.  This way, when you roll up your results, you can get a true, overall picture of the campaign effectiveness.  In addition, it allows you to measure another piece — which direct marketing channel performed better at getting customers to convert — was it your website or your call center?

Using an Analytical Approach to Ride Out the Economy: Part Two

As promised in our last post, here are a few more analytical marketing ideas that will help all Marketers be successful — no matter what the economic climate.

Here’s the next idea: Get everybody involved. Lots of times, Marketing is accused of operating in a vacuum, not being in touch with sales or corporate objectives. Hence, budgets get cut and marketing resources have to begin to fight for their jobs.

In times like this, plan some meetings — some real meetings.  Schedule time to get an accurate view from your CEO, from IT, from Sales — get their ideas on how they measure marketing effectiveness. They can give you some great ideas as to what metrics they believe need to be put in place. Better yet, align your measurements so that you are all working towards the same or complimentary goals. One of the reasons that Marketing gets a bad rap is because the goals across divisions are not aligned correctly. Thus, one division’s objectives may be in absolute conflict with Marketings objectives. This is not going to result in happy campers in the different divisions.  What it might result in is missed objectives . . . resulting in cut budgets . . . resulting in fewer resources.  You get the idea.

So, go talk to your corporate Leaders. Get a good understanding of their specific corporate objectives and make sure that marketing’s goals and metrics align as exactly as possible with corporate goals.

Next meet with Sales — here is where the most conflict may come from . . . have you ever heard this? “These leads suck!” Yep, in marketing we all have heard this.  And, this is what Sales hears from Marketing: “Sales can’t close any of our leads to save their lives!” Not an environment conducive to success.  Perhaps its just that Marketing and Sales needs to sit down and discuss each other’s objectives. Then, they need to revise those objectives so that they are very closely aligned.  This way, Marketing can go acquire the data that will facilitate sales success in reaching their objectives.

In addition, Sales can provide Marketing with their bird’s eye view of the customer.  Then, Marketing can share with Sales what their customer profile studies have told them. Armed with more complete information, they can better target their customer base, create better messaging that will more likely resonate with their customers, and find the most responsive, targeted prospects for sales to call on.

Who ever thought it would all come down to being able to communicate?  And whoever thought communication would be called analysis?  Well, it isn’t — but an analytical approach can certainly help to facilitate better communication!

Stay tuned to the next post for our final word on this subject!