Gaining Customer Insight

Tech4T can add vision to your data and help provide the marketing intelligence that helps you understand what to measure within your direct marketing process, increase your customer understanding, make justifiable marketing decisions and maximise the value of your customer base.

Most importantly, using the power of analytics we can work with your data to uncover traits that we can then translate into highly structured and targeted marketing campaigns that focus on optimising marketing spend and maximising profitability.

Our analytics will help you answer the crucial marketing questions - 'Who, What, Why, When, How, How Often'

See also: Analysis bureau services

Introduction

Every time a customer makes contact or conducts a transaction, they provide information about themselves.  Merge these details with additional customer, business and marketing data, possibly from disparate systems, apply data mining techniques and the resulting knowledge can:

• Make your marketing budget more effective by grouping customers according to their lifetime value, a major customer relationship management driver. Marketing spend can then be apportioned according to customer worth and the most effective offers in terms of product, pricing and promotion developed.

• Accurately segment and profile your most profitable customers to develop appropriate acquisition strategies. Then continually monitor customer dynamics and take account of their changing needs. Use recency, frequency and value models to develop tailored customer development plans.  

• Improve targeting by predicting the ‘likelihood to purchase’ for all potential customers in a direct mail campaign or sales communication. Then identify those most likely to respond and develop cross-sell, up-sell and affinity strategies.

• Keep your valuable customers by developing retention strategies! Help predict defection by building churn/attrition models. Remember its cheaper to retain or re-activate a customer than recruit a new one!

• Identify those customers that may end up costing you money in the long run to minimise risk with credit scoring and propensity to default analysis. 

• Help you plan promotional activities to take account of regional competition. Competitor analysis and research including customer perception mapping. Your new customers may already belong to your competitors, so how do you acquire them? 

• Develop key performance indicators and triggers to ensure appropriate contact strategies are applied to maximise sales

• Help plan your media buying and reposition sales force or distribution outlets for maximum effect. Using geographic mapping to plot territories, media coverage, your competitors, etc.

Technologies4Targeting - Our approach to data analysis

Tech4T's analytical services span data exploration, statistical analysis, segmentation, profiling, predictive and response modelling, churn, behaviour pattern analysis, market research, forecasting and geographic mapping, then translating the findings into marketing activity.

To ensure a successful outcome to the analysis project, we take a SMART approach to meet your needs. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound

Using specialist data mining and statistical analysis software coupled with our extensive computer processing resource - data files of almost any size can be cleaned, merged, enhanced and transformed for analysis - our data analysis team apply a wealth of hard-won knowledge together with ‘data storming’ techniques to help you meet specific marketing, sales and business analysis objectives.

We use many statistical, pattern detection and data mining techniques, typically including: CHAID; factor and cluster analysis; linear, non-linear and logistic regression; discriminant analysis; neural networks, etc., together with weighted recency, frequency, value scoring (RFM), and predicted weight of evidence scorecard models. For market research and product development we include conjoint analysis, perceptual and geographic mapping.

The software we typically use includes: DBMS/Copy (and DBSM/Compare), the SPSS product family, AnswerTree (inc. CHAID), 4Thought, KbaseT, FastStats and MapPoint. In addition, we may also use Statistica, Kxen, QPSMR and Tactician, and Visualizer, PowerPlay, Ora and MS Excel for reporting.

Note. If appropriate and useful, we can migrate the derived intelligence from the analytics into a KbaseT  targeting solution.

This could include computing new database fields containing propensity scores, activity triggers, re-defined categorical bands, share of spend by product, lifetime values, etc., all of which can be used to simplify the selection process and improve targeting.

Remember, customers' needs change - new tastes, new opportunities

To ensure maximum benefits are derived from data analysis, we encourage clients to adopt a customer focused and on-going ‘Learning’ framework. See diagram.

Tech4T’s Methodology

• Feasibility. Analytical projects commence with a study/assessment to define your marketing goals against the available data, and to determine feasibility for the project and  anticipated business gain.

• Definition. This includes determining data analysis objectives, scope of the project plus any restrictions, the analysis methods to be used and the deliverables - reporting content and format, data file output, presentation, etc., success measurement factors and cost of the project.

• Data Investigation, Enhancement and Preparation for Analysis. This includes optional address enhancement and Postcoding, de-duplication, merging multiple files, de-normalising data to a flat file structure, data transformation, transaction aggregation and possibly enrichment with external data such as lifestyle, business to business, geo-demographic, etc.

• Statistical Analysis and Data Mining. Detailed analysis and intelligence discovery including tests to identify/measure relationships in your data, lifetime value analysis, segmentation, profiling, predictive and response modelling, churn analysis, mapping...

• Project Deliverable. The outcome will be presented and documented.

• Review. Examine and review the key success factors against the deliverables.

These steps help ensure that your expectations are always met or exceeded.

Our staff have undertaken projects for direct marketing service suppliers (on behalf of their clients) and clients direct including: Croner Publications, MBNA, Financial Times, Nestle, Cendant, Centrica, UBM, Royal Mail, Barclays Transpay, TSB, Littlewoods Leisure, RS Components...

Treat Tech4T as your analytical partner and you’ll be surprised just how many marketing, sales and business advantages we can help you derive from your data, whilst at the same time providing a host of new ideas and strategic recommendations.  Call us on 01733 890790 today!