Multichannel Marketing Data

Video Transcript

Ginger Conlon: So in retail it’s always been location has been most important and of course retail location is still essential, like growing in importance is data. What do you know about the customer? What do you know about the context? What do you know about where they are? In fact I was speaking last week with Lani Stark of Adobe Systems. She’d just given a presentation on trends in multichannel marketing. And she was saying that a business’ location will matter less, customer’s location will matter more. So basically the more you know about your customers, where they are and how you can reach them, where they prefer for you to reach them will help you improve your marketing results. Doesn’t really matter to coach if I go into the store to buy that big, buy it online, click through a display ad. They just want to make the sale.

Now savvy marketers get this. They understand customer’s you know customer’s expectations, they’re increasing. We all know this. So what does that mean? That means you need to be more relevant to stand out and capture your customer’s attention and in fact according to Accenture Interactive, 65% of marketers say that customer expectations for not only relevant offers but relevant interactions have the greatest long term impact on their marketing strategy these days. And that’s followed up by 40% are increasing their spending on web analytics and another 39% are increasing their spending on marketing analytics. So it just goes to show you that yes, it’s really important to understand your customers, where they are, what they are doing and being able to take that information and translate it. So then the question becomes okay, well how can we do that?

And so I’m going to give three case study examples of companies that we’ve written about it in Direct Marketing News and actually I think that eTail provide the slides but if you want these slides, what I did was on every story including the coach one if you just wanted to chuckle. I put a bit of length to the full story so if you want to read more about any of the case studies that I’m talking about or the Accenture study, all those links are in the presentation.

So Office Shoes is the first case study and they’re a UK based shoe retailer, no surprise there. And they know one of their core customer groups was or is millennial women, so girls 18 to 25. And that’s great. They are reaching them but they said you know we sell kids shoes, we sell men’s shoes. Sending one e-mail message or one marketing message out to all of our customers, it’s not really making an impact. We need to speak to our customers differently and we want to use data from across our touch points to be able to do that. So they started with the basic something that you’re probably all are already using, RFM analysis. So they said okay who is spending what? How often? And through that they are able to take a segment of their high value customers. The customers who are spending the most, most frequently pull them aside. Then they looked at e-mail, website data, the retail, transactional data and they said okay, now we can segment based on that information not only on men and women but also on oh, we have parents, we have students, we have parents who love to take their kids to festivals. And so maybe now we can reach out to them around festival time with you know e-mail messages about sneakers or what have you. And really get more targeted with what they are doing by using this data from across the various channels.

So in execution they said all right we’re all about testing. So let’s start with some trial messages, some basic segmentation, male, female, parents, students like I was saying but then they also looked at their inactives, and for them an inactive is someone who has opened an e-mail but hasn’t click through not at all but within a specific amount of times. They’ve set a time frame. You may click later but inactive is if you haven’t clicked in that initial timeframe. So tracking that information e-mail data and store data, they saw that some of these inactives they like the promotions but they prefer to use them in store, not online. So they said all right let’s run a test. So they sent out an e-mail with online exclusive in the subject line and not surprisingly fairly low response rate. Really nothing happening. So a couple of weeks go by and they say all right now let’s drop in the headline based on what we’ve learned about our customer and see if we are right. And they use in-store exclusive in the subject line and open rates skyrocket. Not surprisingly and then sales follow.

Overall due to all of the segmentation they are doing now based on all of the cross channel data that they have, they’ve got 64% increase in open rates and 240% increase in click-through targeted e-mails versus non-targeted based on the multichannel data that they are using. So that’s the first one.

Next is Johnny Cupcakes. Now you may think that it’s you know one of the trendy cupcake stores but it’s not. It’s a graphic apparel company and the CEO thought that he knew who his customers were. To him his customers were Johnny Cupcakes enthusiasts. If they’re going to buy a graphic tee, they’re going to go there first and collectors of graphic tees. So that was who he thought were his two customer groups and he said you know I feel ________ [00:06:17] there’s got to be a growth opportunity beyond those two customer groups. How can I figure this out? So he looked into some technology and implemented a couple of tools that would help him get a little bit deeper. Did some studying of his e-mail data, transactional data and then also social data and found that first of all was able to find out exactly who his die hard collectors were and then also find a couple of other really important segments. First of all, casual customers who they purchase every now and again but when they do purchase, they share it socially. And then also special interest customers, so people who like sports theme t-shirts or characters like Hello Kitty. He said okay now we’ve got some great segments we can go after. And they also them used that information to do look a like modeling so they could go back out across channels via e-mail, via social to try and attract customers, new customers that look like they’re existing best customers. Not only the highest value ones but the ones with the most potential like these casual customers that are sharers.

Additionally they then went into social and they started tracking what people were talking about, what were the hot topics and then using that to inform not only their marketing but also new products. So hey, I have someone who’s talking about this character or this sports team, should we add that as a t-shirt? What should we be adding? And then how do we go reach back out across the appropriate channels to the right customers to get some buzz around those. Again like I said they are tracking all that cross channel data and they’re using it to predict purchase propensity by segment based on what they’ve learned from the customer activity in transactional data, e-mail data and social data.

So how this turned out for them in the recent campaign that they did call midnight snack, they were launching a newline of t-shirts and they said all right well you know we’re not going to send just one message to everyone about these new line of t-shirts. They did some analysis and they sent specific messages to each of those customer groups based on what they be most likely to buy and as a result they got 141% increase in sales and a 42% lift in click through rates. So really great results by paying attention to what their customers–who their customers are and what would–what they would react to from across channels.

Third case study is Half Price Books and what Half Price Books of course being a bookstore, Amazon is going to be one of your main competitors. So you have to be different and you have to go about things differently. Amazon as you know great with customer data. So if you’re going to use data as well, how can you use it in a way that’s going to make you stand out?

So the way Half Price Books went about it was to take their postal data and their e-mail database and combine them. Now for some people that may not seem like a big deal but for them they had that information in two different places. They had 700,000 e-mail addresses and 350,000 postal addresses and they wanted to see you know how does this overlay? Who do we have in common and how can we use that information to do some basic things like geo-targeting? So they started with oh, and then they wanted to weave social media into the marketing mix as well and see how that would play out.

So they started with some basic A/B testing which is always good you know core business practice for direct marketing and they said okay, well option one for example you know do we do 20% off or do we do $5 off $25 purchase. All right well let’s see the 20% off it makes more sense based on the response. Now let’s go back out and do some promotions based on the different targets and things like you know they’re not going to e-mail you if you live in Alabama and there is a store event in Texas. And now like they can actually do that kind of geo-targeting because they have this multichannel data pulled together in one place. They started connecting to Facebook with e-mail and then try to drive engagement back to the store and doing that successfully. And so like I said they are improving their campaign relevancy by combining these various data points.

So in one recent example, they did an e-mail campaign driving people to Facebook for a 20% off deal and you know all the sharing that happened, they were basically able to use that data to track back the Facebook data, the e-mail data and store data to track back and see that they got 36,000 new e-mail subscribers and 14,000 new customers who use brick and mortar outlets. So again some really great response by using that multichannel data.

One of the things that I like to say about using customer data is that think about it like Dory from Finding Nemo right. So think about Dory. She swims around, she’s having a great time but she never remembers anything. Every time she meets you, she’s meeting you for the first time and as excited as she is when you’re the person she’s meeting you’re kind of like yeah, okay. Nice to meet you Dory. Now think about turn that around as a–think of yourself as a customer like all things being equal, you are more likely to purchase from the company that’s using information that you’re giving them whether it’s that you’ve told them you know implicitly or explicitly to give you a more relevant experience. But think about it Don Peppers and Martha Rogers of One To One, they wrote the book One To One Future. They call it a learning relationship. So basically you take the information that you learn about your customers and you apply it. You share it throughout the organization, you use that information and then you share back with your customers how you’ve used it and that maybe directly or indirectly but what you do is you show your customers that they’re actually more to you than just a wallet.

You know we started out with the coach story and some people may find that creepy but because I like coach, I find it kind of cool that they are you know trying to engage with me. Maybe it’s you know a little over the top it’s like everywhere I go there’s coach. But they see that I’m reacting so they’re going to encourage that further. So it’s really important to I mean take what you know about your customers and then use that information in a way that is clear to them because that’s going to help build that engagement. So I actually am done. It took a lot longer when I rehearsed it. I don’t know. I didn’t feel like I was talking that fast but you know what are you all doing since we’ve got some time what are you all doing as far as multichannel like who is using data from multiple channels and actually pulling it together? So what are you doing specifically?

Q: Thank you. Hi, Lisa with Stanley Black & Decker. We are not quite there in a strategic way yet because we don’t have the proper systems right? So we’re kind of doing it using our e-mail system in segmenting that way which is why during another session they mentioned that the e-mail teams are usually the ones who know the most of CRM and segmentation right. But we know that we should, we just need to get a formula or a strategy around how to do that best, how to make sure all the data is in the right place and we can get at it in the right way. So what would you suggest there?

A: Well it seems that e-mail is actually at the core of a lot of these multichannel marketing campaigns and efforts. And so I think if you look at some of the examples that I just gave, what they’re doing is they’re kind of starting small. So even if they don’t have the data in one place like Half Price Books eventually wanted to move their data to one place. They either find tools that can bring the data together just for the analysis. There are a lot of tools that do that now you know or they start small with a little bit of data from somewhere. Maybe it’s just actually someone going in and following what people are saying on the Facebook page and actually coming in and saying you know all of our people are talking about say its Johnny Cupcakes you know a lot of our enthusiasts are talking about Spider Man right now because the new movie is coming out. We should really do a promotion around that. So sometimes I think it comes back to the sneaker network and sometimes it’s finding there’s a lot of cloud solutions, cloud based solutions right now that are looking at bringing data together from multiple sources. Actually there’s a few on the floor out here do have that capability. But like I said I think if you start with some basic focus on e-mail because it’s probably your core and then do some pilots of bringing in a little bit of data from somewhere else and roll out from that way because when you get the I know you’ve heard it before. But it’s like when you get the quick winds, you are able to go out from there because then people really get excited about the results. You show some progress and then you know upper management is more willing to make some investment to do the bigger integrations and brining the more of the data into one place. Any other questions while we’re in question mode?

Q: Hi. Do you find that most of these companies use external CRM type system to pull all of this together or were they using maybe their e-mail marketing platform as the you know database of choice for all of that?

A: It was a mix. One company uses Exact Target, one uses True Lens, one use Salesforce.com I think was something else or I might be mixing up my stories but yeah, they all used external tools to help them with hosting the data, tracking the data.

Any other questions I can answer for you? Is anyone using social right now data to help inform their marketing? No one yet? That’s actually kind of an interesting two of the three companies were doing that. Tracking the social aspect and saying like oh, there’s a lot of conversations about this. Let’s take action on that and actually we’ve written also about Lion Yarn. They do yarn for knitting and crocheting and they are very big on using Facebook to gather information that they then use for–they do a lot of content marketing so videos and such, so they see what the chatter is about and that will help them decide what kind of topics to use for videos, what to do in their marketing communications and what they found also by tracking the conversations in Facebook but also responses to their e-mail campaigns is that, not surprisingly especially if you knit or crochet, these are two very different segments who respond completely differently to messaging and so they’ve taken that cross town information and used it to speak really relevantly and directly to and differently to those two subsets of their customers because they, they don’t crossover really. So any other questions I can answer for you? Yeah. In the back again.

Q: Are there any resources that you would suggest to help us to really learn how to do this well or even you know start always a crawl, walk, run philosophy right. So what resources do you think because we’ve heard about CRM and E-CRM for quite sometime but putting it in place is sometimes a different thing?

A: So what resources can help you get this going? I think definitely you know coming to a conference like this and seeing what companies are doing you know go to sessions that have the best practices and the companies that have done this and try and talk to them, talk to the vendors I mean a lot of them you know maybe you’re not ready to buy yet but to see sometimes they can give you great information on how to prepare for when you are ready to buy. I mean if you think about content marketing, a lot of what companies are doing especially vendors in the marketing space, because they’re probably some of the best at it, is they’re providing information to educate you so that when you are ready to make purchase, you have a lot of information out there. So I would also check online you know at sites like ours but also some of the, if you check around and see some of the vendors here that do kind of cross channeled data, then you can go up to their websites and check out their blogs because they’re going to provide a lot of hopefully not. For the most part the blogs aren’t ________ [00:21:20], some of them are but for the most part a lot of them are pretty informational and they tried and talk about customer successes, they try and give a lot of tips on best practices just for example this isn’t exactly what you are looking for but like Marketo does a whole series of definitive guides on different aspects of marketing and you really fixed stuff where you can you know meaty but kind of like light reading you know. And I know Hub Spot for example does a lot, again this is not exactly what you are looking for but just an example, Hub Spot does a lot on inbound marketing. You want to know about inbound marketing, you read their blog. And the metrics I know they do a lot of multichannel data. They’re actually here. They have a blog, they talk, they do a lot of Q&A’s with experts in various disciplines to get their take and so you can learn from that as well. I think that’s when we’ve talked to our readers about what they want to learn from us, a lot of it is case studies because when you see how other people have succeeded, it gives you maybe you don’t do the exact same thing but it gives you an idea of how you can take what they’ve learned and apply it to you. And how you know you can best use that information and do things you know tweak a little bit to your business. So I hope that helps.