2. The ‘Creep’ factor: how context is different to relevancy
As Australian marketers desire to be more personalised, targeted and timely with how and what they communicate, our U.S counterparts are now grappling with the ‘creep’ factor: the misuse of customer behaviour such as online searches to drive recommended products or services to that customer. A video of a common scenario is found here.
The question that marketers need to keep asking themselves is whether such recommendations will bring value to that customer. Whilst we know personalisation works, it’s easier said than done, but there are some simple methods that you can apply to get you started. That’s for another blog post :)
3. Know how you’ll measure success, in real-time, ahead of campaign kick-off
Gone are the days where initiatives across email marketing, SMS marketing, direct mail and in-store make sense just for the sake of keeping communications going. These days, CMO’s are tightly aligned to corporate performance, so it’s important to track and link campaign performance to the bottom line.
Again, start with what you know: current cost per channel, operational costs (resources and software costs) to run the campaign, and apply tracking techniques such as click-to-convert, click-to-open and conversion tracking pixels to directly relate each sale back to your marketing message. Then using some logic that the business can understand, link these back to critical corporate metrics such as customer lifetime value, ROI and profitability targets.
On achieving real-time insights, reporting is passé: business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Cognos and Dataxen that offer data visualisation, dashboard and drill down capability are empowering U.S marketers to see the bigger picture in one view.
A large financial institution was able to attribute their investment in automated campaigns and process workflow to over $1mil in staff costs, yet achieve response rates that were 3 times higher than before the investment and which then contributed around 25% to the company achieving P&L targets.
4. Rich, multi-channel customer experiences drive higher ROI
Think storytelling, not campaigns. As a large and successful fast moving consumer goods company implicates, walking in the shoes of your customer and thinking about their motives, their lifestyle and needs will build brand love. It gives a brand purpose.
For marketing communications, anticipating the device and environment that your message will be most likely viewed forces you to think holistically about your customer and how they want to best engage with your company, in-store, online and over the phone. Each engagement then becomes purposeful for both the customer and the marketer, in the long term citing heightened advocacy and natural affinity to advocate your product and brand.
The result: reduced acquisition costs, increased engagement, higher customer satisfaction which all contribute to greater ROI.
5. Design your marketing organisation to realise these practices
Taking your marketing communications to the next level doesn’t happen overnight. But what’s critical to success is knowing what capabilities you have in your team, the gaps on skillset and software that will help you take your campaigns to next level, and recognising the arduous process of change management.
A successful airline identified the biggest challenge in evolving to having real-time insights, being data driven and achieving agility in campaign delivery was managing change. This included recognising the need to outsource certain activities such as creative and template design to companies whose talent pool is clearly focused on this as a core competency.
Snippets of the Summit can be found on Twitter under hashtag #teradatasummit. All statistics quoted within this post is sourced from the Teradata Summit, 2014.
Find out more about Salmat's search offering here or call us on 1300 725 628.
image sourced from Teradata
