The Precision Marketing Imperative
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THE PRECISION Tactics for MARKETING Implementing the Precision IMPERATIVE Marketing Framework Written by David Daniels The Relevancy Group, LLC Co-Written by David A. Steinberg and John D. Polcari Zeta Interactive May, 2013 Research Sponsored by The Precision Marketing Imperative Tactics for Implementing the Precision Marketing Framework Written by David Daniels, The Relevancy Group, LLC Co-Written by David Steinberg and John Polcari, Zeta Interactive Introduction Rapid consumer mobile adoption has led to a tectonic shift in how consumers interact with brands, challenging marketers to organize, integrate and household customer data in a new manner. In this new mobile era, it is imperative for brands to adopt Precision Marketing in order to advance message relevancy and marketing performance. Precision Marketing requires marketers to build a Precision CRM (pCRM) centric organization based on customer data management practices that are actionable and rule-based to propel the subscriber across the customer journey to meet predefined engagement and revenue optimization goals. As brands face challenges such as shifting mobile and email interaction, or consolidating disparate data sets, there are still strategic approaches that can be designed. Largely, marketing organizations can be brought together by solutions that provide an approach to Precision Marketing via pCRM services and tools, including cross-channel attribution measurement capabilities. The key to this includes solving data house-holding and hygiene challenges as they impact a marketer’s ability to deliver relevance with precision. Centralizing data will yield its true power by allowing marketers to understand the value of the customer email address, win higher budgets and gain increased respect and authority within the broader marketing organization. Precision Marketing has five distinct steps: Integrate, Organize, Enrich, Automate and Measure. These steps address marketing challenges, improve customer engagement and profitability. As marketers evaluate and approach vendors addressing, these components will be critical to long-term success. Partnering with a vendor that is equipped to empower relevancy and engagement is imperative. Vendor evaluations should include the following aspects: Flexible integration allowing for access to big data across multiple systems, an organized approach to customer data for heightened relevance and enriched and augmented customer profile data. Efficient approach to automation and optimization including reporting and analysis at a pCRM level, specifically allowing for real-time results and attribution. Embracing the Precision Marketing framework through robust vendors, brands can expect to see higher performance and realize a strong return on marketing investment. Furthermore, marketers that implement at least three of the five of the Precision Marketing techniques deliver 5 to 6 times the revenue and profit compared to those who do not. This whitepaper presents the data behind today’s current marketing challenges and some considerations in how marketers can use the Precision Marketing Imperative to solve them. For more information on The Relevancy Group’s services, visit www.therelevancygroup.com, call (877) 972-6886, email [email protected] or on twitter @emaildaniels or @relevancygroup Reproduction by any method or unauthorized circulation is strictly prohibited. The Relevancy Group’s reports are intended for the sole use of clients. For press citations, please adhere to The Relevancy Group citation policy at http://relevancygroup.com/press.htm. All opinions and projects are based on The Relevancy Group’s judgment at the time of the publication and are subject to change. Page | 1 Research Sponsored by Copyright © 2014 The Relevancy Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved. The Cycle of Precision Marketing Precision Marketing has five distinct components that are designed to address the challenges of marketers, improve customer engagement and drive top and bottom line results. Below is an overview of the components (see figure 1). 1. Integrate – Integration is one of the perpetual challenges for marketers, in part because of the aforementioned organizational challenges but mainly because marketers utilize multiple disparate systems. This lack of integration between systems creates undue staffing pressure, as the lack of access to real-time data requires more staffing resources to access and utilize data. It is imperative that marketers work with vendors that can utilize open APIs (Application Programmatic Interface) to access big data and multiple systems. 2. Organize – Marketers must organize their data and ensure proper data hygiene. Only 16% of marketers state that they practice data hygiene or practice data house-holding to understand multiple customer/accounts within a single household. As the name implies, precision marketing requires a precise approach to managing customer data, specifically ensuring that the data is accurate and organized in a way that it recognizes multiple customer records as one. This type of organization improves the relevancy of mailings. 3. Enrich – What don’t marketers know about their customers is endless. While marketers have access to an assortment of data, The Relevancy Group finds that only about half of marketers actually utilize data for segmentation for targeting their audience. Data such as demographic, geographic and customer behavior are all necessary make marketing more precise and relevant. Marketers must work with data partners to enrich their customer profiles, with third-party data, particularly with providers that can augment customer profiles with industry-specific data. 4. Automate – Many of the challenges that marketers encounter are operational in nature. Nearly a quarter (24%) of marketers cite that having adequate staffing resources for marketing programs management is a challenge. Additionally, marketers cite difficulty coordinating campaigns across channels, across brands, as well as managing the frequency of campaigns. In this step of precision marketing, marketers need to identify specific goal- and value-based events to drive revenue and customer worth across a customer journey. Marketers must automate programs to create efficiencies and optimize which customer pathways across channels drive the greatest value. Marketers have a great opportunity to automate and trigger campaigns, as just 18% of marketers state that they utilize such tactics. Page | 2 Research Sponsored by Copyright © 2014 The Relevancy Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved. 5. Measure – It is imperative that marketers understand and a have an efficient view into the effectiveness of their campaigns and in fact which channels, data sources and customers are driving that value. Measurement is not without its challenges. In fact, 26% of marketers’ state that analyzing campaign results is their top challenge. The Relevancy Group finds that marketers often have only a single channel or siloed view of results or have delayed insight because of the lack of data integration and a decentralized organization. Marketers must work with providers that use a Precision CRM approach to measurement and provide services and tools to assist marketers with attribution. The Relevancy Group finds that vendors that can offer services in a follow- the-sun, 24/7 approach can provide the best insight. This allows the services staff to compile results overnight and have the marketing results for the marketer available the following morning. While real-time measurement is necessary to monitor mailing health, most imperative decisions are not made in real-time and time is a necessary component of building an appropriate omnichannel measurement attribution model. Figure 1 – An Overview of Precision Marketing, The Precision Marketing Cycle Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC and Zeta Interactive Page | 3 Research Sponsored by Copyright © 2014 The Relevancy Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Implementing the Precision Marketing Framework Marketers must adopt the Precision Marketing Framework (see figure 2) in phased steps to ensure that specific goals are met and that organizations are not attempting to take on too many items at once. While some of the below phases can occur concurrently, we advise a phased approach versus one that embraces a “boil the ocean” approach. Accordingly marketers must take these steps: Integrate – Foundation for Precision 1. Ensure Data is Actionable – Just 38% of marketers’ state that they maintain a centralized repository for their client data, signaling that data is obscured by and scattered within multiple data silos. This requires that marketers seek solutions where data integration is central to the vendor’s offering. Those who are capturing data are putting it to good use where they can. Thirty-five percent of enterprise marketers are using click stream analysis to target emails based on the web browsing behavior of their customers. Thirty- six percent of enterprise marketers are using dynamic content in their email campaigns tied to data insights. Before marketers can begin to advance their precision and relevancy, it is imperative to organize data through integration. 2. Utilize the latest Open APIs to Access Big Data – Marketers must work with vendors that provide application specific APIs, as well as utilize the latest Open JSON, restful APIs to access the disparate data sources that they use. Marketers must also ensure that they can utilize new types of “big data” including location, Device Id and unstructured