If you are new to the concept of using your data to drive your sales and marketing (usually termed database marketing or data-driven marketing), then the following outline should help you. If you are already an advocate, then you will appreciate the need for flexible and visual data interrogation and analysis tools together with the guidance to use them to maximum effect.
Either way, Tech4T can provide you (or your agency) with one of the best and most sensibly priced data-driven marketing systems around, undertaking any parts of the data planning, analysis, segmentation, targeting and campaign management process for you. We can provide a complete solution - know-how, software, database management, data processing, enrichment data, etc. - and work with you to develop direct marketing strategies that help you get more return from your marketing spend.
Improving Marketing Value
Think of how you currently go about just three of the many sales and marketing challenges:
-
Grouping your product portfolio into sets that can form the basis of brochure, catalogue and website (or micro-site) design, and on which to base cross-selling or up-selling strategies
-
Determining the right offer to reactivate lapsed customers, and when to communicate it
-
Developing and launching a new product or service
No
doubt you have methodologies for each task but ask yourself, could they be
improved to make your sales and marketing more productive?
The answer is undoubtedly yes, but only if you have the right data planning and analysis resources in place.
For instance, take the first challenge above:
If you can:
- identify which unique
combinations of products your
customer purchases
- and most importantly in what
order and when
- or which unique interest
combinations they share
(from web clicks, enquiries,
sales leads etc.), you can:
-
Segment your target market into groups of individuals purchasing or showing interest in similar product/service sets, profile each group (determine their characteristics), filter by value to your business and locate new prospects that have similar profiles on your database
-
Use this intelligence to steer your creative team to create the right theme, setting and content for your promotional material, together with the best offers to test
-
Or use these profiles to determine the most appropriate media (door drop, advertising, mailing or email lists) to use for new customer acquisition, and apply predictive models to target only the most likely responders - thus reducing mailing or marketing costs!
-
Determine the purchasing behaviour and time between purchases to create more appropriate contact strategies and offers, and to drive specific market or product development research
-
See if specific product/service combinations are more predictive in developing high value customers
-
Spot overlap between customer groups purchasing different combinations of product/service, and use the overlaps and non-overlaps to put together more relevant promotions and offers. And much more!
Get the idea? However, to answer these and other questions that can really help drive more profitable marketing and sales strategies, you need reliable and complete customer insight, a planning tool to deliver this intelligence, and the skills to apply 'train of thought' analysis, create the right target market segments and develop the right proposition.
We can help in two ways:
-
First turn your data into reliable, complete and enhanced customer knowledge, through the provision of an appropriate mix of services and/or software that suit how you want to work.
-
Work with you, your creative team/agency, your data planners... to provide a 'train-of-thought' database marketing and targeting solution to analyse your prospects, customers and your operational data, then apply analytical findings to develop and deploy successful data-driven and direct marketing campaign strategies
Solutions can also include implementing transaction processing to and from hand-held devices (or notebooks) for remote data capture - perfect for gathering sales and marketing intelligence, information delivery to remote sales teams, support staff, retail outlets and for payment processing.
To recap
By
enhancing the data planning, visualisation and analytical capability of your
direct marketing system or process, all facets of creative design, product
development, marketing campaign planning and market research can come
together in a 'workbench' that will provide the intelligence needed to drive
business growth in a far more productive way.
This is data-driven marketing... where the combination of your data, structured and free-thinking analysis and creative planning will help you:
-
Identify and acquire new customers of the type that deliver higher profits (win)
-
Maximise the value your existing customers contribute to your business (grow)
-
Retain your more profitable customers and strengthen their loyalty (keep)
-
Kick-start lapsed or in-active customers to start trading with you again (repeat win)
-
Develop more relevant products, services and offers and identify target segments who are likely to be the most responsive towards those offers
-
Predict and increase the response rates from your campaigns and promotions, whilst lowering cost
So, how should you move forward? What is the next step to take?
Well you are bound to be busy with your time at a premium. But really you need to make the time to at least explore the possibilities. Talk to us - by phone initially and then either through a web conference or a face-to-face meeting - and lets work together to review what you are currently doing.
We can then explore if there are better or more cost-effective and time-saving ways to improve your data-driven marketing. It will only cost you some time and where possible we can use some of your own data - at our cost - to demonstrate the benefits of what we can offer!
Call Tech4T now on +44 (0) 1733 890790.
>>>See how our data planning, segmentation and targeting solutions can help<<<
Plan better campaigns and reduce test mailing costs with Tech4T calculators
From our side-bar menu you can access data planning, sales lead and mailing calculators. These are very useful tools to calculate marketing ROI, plan retention (keep), re-activation (repeat win), cross-sell (grow), up-sell (grow), etc. strategies, test mailing sample sizes, etc. What's more, they are FREE!
Please use them as often as you wish. You can also download or request a copy on CD
To see the steps we take to turn your data into customer knowledge >>>click here<<<
Visually explore your prospects with FastStats Discoverer and KbaseT >>>click here<<<
Take a look at our database targeting scenario >>>click here<<<
New to data-driven marketing and interested in understanding how data analysis can be used to improve your bottom line? Get 'The New Direct Marketing' >>>click here<<< for more details.