The Analytics Guide to Omni-Channel Marketing. White Paper

Transcription

1 The Analytics Guide to Omni-Channel Marketing White Paper

2 Introduction For more than half a century, companies around the globe have lived and died by the four P s: product, price, promotion and placement. Simply create a product, determine the price consumers are willing to pay for it, promote it with fanfare, and place it where customers will buy it and they will come. But the balance of power in the manufacturer/consumer relationship has shifted from the manufacturer to the consumer, forcing companies to rethink the classic marketing paradigm. Today, consumers own the brand relationship. The advent of social media, the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, and access to limitless data regardless of location have created the always-on, connected consumer. With a few clicks, consumers can compare one company s offerings to competitors worldwide and publish their opinions through social media platforms positively or negatively impacting the perception of your brand at will. Companies must earn the consumer s goodwill with every interaction. What s more, consumers expect the brands they use to understand their desires and preferences and to give them what they want, when and where they want it. As such, they expect timely access to helpful product and service information that s personally relevant, delivered as they move seamlessly in and out of their preferred channels. Simply pushing generic products to consumers without presenting personalized offers turns potential loyal customers away and to a more in-touch competitor. But responding to consumers using all relevant channels in order to create long-term customer loyalty and advocacy is no easy task. The proliferation of customer channels and touchpoints makes it harder than ever to manage and synchronize the customer experience. That s because many of the existing tools to connect with consumers focus on one specific channel, such as , social media, direct mail, or in-store. With marketing messages constantly delivered via disparate platforms, companies find it extremely difficult and time-consuming to connect customer interactions across all channels. Along with an increase in complexity comes a growing demand for accountability and cost-efficiency. Marketers like you, constrained by tighter budgets and compliance requirements, no longer have creative freedom. Against this backdrop, CEOs, CFOs, and shareholders demand greater transparency, efficiency, and proven returns from marketing investments. Without solid evidence to justify spending, you face shrinking budgets and diminished corporate influence. Welcome to the Age of Omni-Channel Marketing Analytics Omni-channel marketing recognizes consumers as more than just faceless transactions and gives companies rich channels to communicate with consumers in a more personal manner than ever before. Omni-channel marketing analytics the integration of customer information, predictive analytics, reporting, and measurement to deliver the best customer offer and achieve the best customer response promises to give you, the marketing professional, what you need to regain the upper hand in the manufacturer/ consumer relationship. Every customer s digital DNA, left in various forms during website visits, responses, online forum involvement, and social media interaction, can supply you with volumes of data and the potential for deeper customer insights and smarter decisionmaking. Omni-channel marketing analytics enables you to unlock the potential of this information. 1

3 To create meaningful, lasting customer relationships built on relevant data insights, you should focus on three key considerations: Data People Technology More than simply allowing you to analyze direct open rates, omnichannel marketing analytics enables you to combine the massive amounts of online data with traditional offline data and then rapidly analyze this data to gain cross-channel insights about your customers. Using this insight, you can create highly personalized and tailored marketing campaigns that reach your customer at their preferred touchpoint at exactly the right time. Moving from Transactions to Interactions While an effective and sustainable omni-channel marketing strategy is essential to your company s success, moving from analyzing customer transactions to taking advantage of customer interactions is often the most difficult piece of the data-driven marketing puzzle. With consumers controlling the brand experience, marketers like you must consider how to create meaningful, lasting customer relationships built on relevant data insights. In general, you should focus on three key considerations: data, people, and technology. Data Customer data massive amounts of it forms the foundation of every successful data-driven marketing strategy. Marketers still rely on and use traditional and relatively easily accessible forms of data, including Point of Sale (POS)/transaction and loyalty card data, to drive marketing initiatives. It is this data that provides critical insight into what each individual customer buys, as well as the frequency and location of these purchases. Source: Alteryx and AbsolutData Survey on Customer Analytics, May In order to better understand individual consumer preferences, you must also take into account demographic and behavioral details. Many companies append third-party information to consumer records to enhance loyalty efforts, tailor s to target prospects more effectively, and conduct research to get feedback on potential new products, pricing strategies, and packaging. But many newer areas of insight, such as social media, cannot be ignored. In today s market, you need to collect and blend social media data, as well as other unstructured data, including complaint data and recorded voice calls captured by customer service departments, with more traditional sources of data if you want to gain truly impactful insights. People In most companies, the data you need for omni-channel marketing analytics exists in more than one location, across many disparate systems, leaving no other option than to ask your IT department to engage in a long and complicated data blending and analytics project. Not only does getting to the root of what s really impacting your customer interactions take a lot of time, more often than not the market has changed by the time you get answers to your questions. Worse yet, the initial questions are no longer relevant. Success in this new world of marketing dictates an evolution of skill sets, strategies, tactics, and processes to offset increasingly limited IT resources and ever-shorter deadlines. Marketing departments must strike a delicate balance between creative and analytical thinkers, with the savviest organizations 2

4 combining creativity and innovation with quantifiable science. Compared with the state of marketing just a few short years ago, where data analysis consisted of simple market segmentation and creating the right message for each segment, today s nontraditional marketers must think outside the box and know how to leverage all the relevant data available for the deepest possible insight. Source: Alteryx and AbsolutData Survey on Customer Analytics, May Despite this evolution, most marketing organizations admit that they still have a long way to go before reaching the level of analytic expertise to effectively compete in today s omni-channel world. In the recent customer analytics survey conducted by Alteryx and AbsolutData, half of the respondents rated their own analytical abilities as either Basic, indicating that they can modify existing analytic reports but not create new reports from scratch, or Limited, admitting that the only analysis they can do is to run existing reports. Fortunately, advances in analytics technology are helping organizations overcome this deficiency and allowing users of all skill levels to generate insight from customer data. Technology Data captured from every interaction you have with your customers has the potential to provide insight into their behavior, attitudes, and opinions and analytics technology is the key to unlocking that potential. But the tools organizations like yours have traditionally used, such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access, along with the literally hundreds of specialized tools to accomplish specific tasks, such as data blending, data cleansing, analytics, and reporting, make getting the answers you need extremely complex and unreliable. Why? Because you must pass data back and forth between each of these tools, putting the validity of your analysis at risk. Inevitably, you turn to the same tools used by your IT department, only to discover that these tools were not designed for marketers. Instead, they require complex coding and have steep learning curves, which is why these tools rarely make it out of the IT organization, where most users have advanced degrees in mathematics or statistics. Source: Alteryx and AbsolutData Survey on Customer Analytics, May More recently, the emergence of sophisticated yet easy-to-use analytics tools enable line-of-business professionals like you to focus on getting the insight you need, quickly and easily, and leave data collection, security, and access to the IT experts. In the recent Alteryx and AbsolutData survey on customer analytics, 95 percent of respondents reported that they plan to spend more on analytics technology in 2014 than they did in What s more, the average respondent plans to increase spending by 21 percent. Getting Started with Omni-Channel Marketing Analytics In today s omni-channel marketplace, organizations like yours must shift their focus from the classic, inward-focused four P s of marketing to a new three-step paradigm focused on the needs and desires of customers: 1. Leveraging all available data and maximizing its value 2. Planning and executing omni-channel marketing strategies 3. Delivering anaytic insight across business units 3

5 With tight integration of these three competencies, you can move from a product-centric marketing strategy to a customer-centric one, analyzing customer interactions instead of transactions, and focusing on profitable, long-term growth. Let s delve into detail on each one of these steps: 1. Leverage All Available Data and Maximize its Value One of the biggest challenges you face is simply getting access to the data you need to analyze. One department collects information about POS records, another collects customer service data, and another looks at inventory levels. Many companies talk about the strides they ve made in cooperation and alignment between their departments, but despite this attention, research finds that inter-departmental alignment still presents a challenge to marketers. Then, assuming you can access the data you need, there s the challenge of actually doing something with it. Often, analysis takes hours or even days, because you try to use tools that weren t designed to handle this amount of data. Plus, differences in data formats, quality, and location exacerbate the problem. Source: Alteryx and AbsolutData Survey on Customer Analytics, May All of these smaller issues add up to the overarching issue actually getting value out of the data. While there are many contributing factors, the first step to overcoming this problem is to leverage all available data in order to get the most comprehensive view of your customers and prospects. Create a Unified View of Customers and Prospects Let s use Alteryx Analytics as an example of how marketers like you can get data ready for analytics. Using data extract, transform and load (ETL) technology, integrated data connectors allow you to pull and process all of the various customer data types from Excel spreadsheets to massive data warehouses no matter where they are housed or who directly manages the flow of information into them. You can also pull data from some of the leading cloud applications, such as CRM and marketing automation systems, as well as from user devices, such as set-top boxes and cell phones. What s more, you can also pull unstructured data from social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, so you can get a read on customer sentiment. After setting up connectors to the various data types, you can use drag-anddrop tools to cleanse and blend all of this data in a single workflow, defining relationships based on common fields, such as customer ID or address. If your data needs a location component, Alteryx includes an integrated geocoder to add spatial insight, such as latitude and longitude, or compute drive times between locations. Enrich Internal Data with External Demographics After blending together your internal data, you can enrich it with third-party data from marketing service providers (MSPs), giving you unprecedented insight about your customers and prospects in ways your data alone cannot provide. This data can also allow you to track the changing dynamics of households over time to help make better strategic decisions. For example, the Experian ConsumerView SM household file includes consumer demographics, life event, direct response, property, and mortgage information for more than 235 million consumers and 113 million households. At the household level, you can append data like mail order buyer preferences, 4

6 mortgage/home purchase details, median family income, estimated income, dwelling type, and presence of children under 18. Plus, at the individual level, you can analyze potential consumers based on marital status, gender, education, and occupation group. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau can also provide insight on more than 3,000 population characteristics, including racial and ethnic information, family/household composition, housing unit details, and consumer spending estimates on everything from cable television to laundry detergent. Segment Prospects by Future Behavior and Potential Customer segmentation data allows you to divide customers into specific segments based on different variables, helping you tailor marketing messages to address key concerns for that segment or identify other potential prospects for a product or service based on consumers with similar demographics that have purchased from you in the past. For example, integrated data from Experian Marketing Services provides you with insight on attitudes, brand preferences, and media use across 71 customer segments, grouped by residential and workplace locations. With current and five-year projections, you can accurately estimate customer demand today, tomorrow, and in the long term. Combining this segmentation data with transaction history and web analytics, you can create buyer personas to help determine the most effective marketing messages and channels. For example, one persona might be for heavy mobile users who research and buy products online, while a second persona might be for people who like to sit on the couch and thumb through a printed catalog and then head into a retail store to make a purchase. Past behavior is usually a good indicator of future activity, but it s important to keep in mind that past behavior is just that. To truly be effective in segmenting customers, predictive analytics can help you segment based on anticipated future activities and future potential. In the process, you can get powerful insight into the actual cost of selling to and serving each customer segment. 2. Plan and Execute Omni-Channel Marketing Strategies Once you have your hands wrapped around as much data about your customers and prospects as possible, it s time to execute! Using predictive analytics as part of your omni-channel marketing strategy, you can transform customer and market data into deep insights that guide decision-making, helping you determine how much time, effort, and resources to put into each segment and if you should invest any time at all. Anticipate Customer Sentiment and Behavior Predictive analytics helps you understand your prospects online interactions with your brand, such as when they click on an , Like your company on Facebook, or visit your company s website. Armed with this context, you can make better business decisions, such as identify the customers with the highest propensity to buy and create highly tailored marketing campaigns to target these individuals using the channels they prefer, rather than inundating customers with irrelevant offers at a time they may not be in the buying mode or using a channel through which they do not typically purchase. While predictive analytics was once the near-exclusive domain of high-end statisticians and data scientists, a more user-friendly generation of predictive and statistical tools based on open source technologies has gained popularity both inside and outside higher education. Companies that once benefited from college graduates having at least some familiarity with predictive analytics 5

7 and statistical tools, such as those from SAS and IBM, are now seeing individuals with a background in a new generation of tools, including the R statistical language. With each passing year, greater numbers of individuals will enter the workforce with a solid understanding of R, enabling line of business users to apply powerful predictive analytic techniques for deep, forward-looking business insight that helps organizations save time and money while making faster business decisions. Deliver Timely Content to Generate Leads While salespeople typically focus on the low-hanging fruit, marketers focus higher up the sales funnel, where lead nurturing ensures that consumers receive the information they need about your product or service, when and how they need it. Using a marketing automation system to nurture leads in conjunction with predictive analytics enables you to create, implement, and optimize marketing campaigns with up-to-the-minute content. For example, with a marketing automation system that automatically sends valuable content to potential customers over time, you can easily nurture these leads closer to a ready-topurchase position, moving them down the funnel from prospect to lowhanging fruit and saving your salespeople time pursuing unquaified leads. What s more, with a marketing automation system that engages in social media listening and website montoring, you can uncover and track new leads that are not on your salespeoples radar. For example, if your system discovers that a prospect visited several different product pages on your website, you could automatically put him or her in the queue for a phone call or an providing more information. When tied to predictive analytics, you can get even more insight by associating the prospect with other information, such as a recent IPO or office move, that would indicate that the prospect s company is in a growth phase and should be contacted immediately. Identify and Retain your Best Customers You understand that marketing s role doesn t end when the customer signs on the dotted line. With direct access to sophisticated predictive analytic capabilities, you can conduct A/B testing, forecasting, and clustering all critical data analysis functions. These tools allow you to predict a customer s future value as well as his or her likelihood to abandon your company and its product or service for that of a competitor. Identifying and reaching out proactively to these at-risk customers to prevent customer churn is critical to your longer-term customer loyalty and revenue objectives. 3. Deliver Analytic Insight across Business Units In today s omni-channel reality, basic marketing decisions which customers to target, which product to market, and which channels to use to communicate with the customer become increasingly complex. To optimize these decisions, you must accurately measure customer responsiveness, customer loyalty, and message effectiveness, and then use these results to allocate your marketing budget for maximum ROI. Unfortunately, as the Alteryx and AbsolutData survey on customer analytics uncovered, 38 percent of the respondents reported that they don t know or can t measure the return on their analytics investment. And, another 9 percent reported that their return was less than their investment. Omni-channel marketing analytics can help you determine exactly which marketing campaigns are generating revenue and which campaigns have had their cost outweigh their revenue and need to be suspended. Using marketing analytics that give you reliable answers about the ROI of your marketing 6

8 efforts, you can make better spending decisions and improve the credibility of your marketing organization as a whole. About Alteryx Alteryx is the leader in data blending and advanced analytics software. Alteryx Analytics provides analysts with an intuitive workflow for data blending and advanced analytics that leads to deeper insights in hours, not the weeks typical of traditional approaches. Analysts love the Alteryx analytics platform because they can deliver deeper insights by seamlessly blending internal, third party, and cloud data, and then analyze it using spatial and predictive drag-anddrop tools. This is all done in a single workflow, with no programming required. More than 300 customers, including Experian, Kaiser, Ford, and McDonald s, and 200,000 + users worldwide rely on Alteryx daily. Visit or call Measure, Report, and Optimize Marketing Investments Measuring the performance and ROI of your marketing investments can lead to deeper insights about customer value and profitability, marketing costs, and future customer behavior. When done consistently and correctly, all of these can contribute to corporate growth and profitability. Unfortunately, it is not easy to accurately link results back to marketing investments. For many companies, the disconnect happens because the various Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing automation, and other systems do not allow you to manage and consolidate the data you need. This makes it hard to connect revenue to marketing activity and marketing expense. By connecting to these various systems using the data connectors described earlier, analytics systems can extract information from all touch points with prospects from the moment of lead generation to the close of the sale. With all of this data at your fingertips, you have everything you need to measure the impact of your marketing efforts, make changes on-the-fly to maximize marketing campaign effectiveness, and improve marketing accountability with senior management. What s more, you can easily measure the impact of a change you made in the past, and then run a series of what-if scenarios to predict the optimal future outcome. Moving to a data-driven model for marketing analytics can also help to keep marketing and sales teams on the same page and ease tensions that often exist regarding the marketing-to-sales handoff, lead quality, lead activity, and more. These same connectors can also write data back to the CRM and marketing automation systems, providing full transparency to sales and marketing activities. Conclusion With the balance of power between manufacturers and consumers shifting to the consumer, you must earn the consumer s goodwill with each interaction. The empowered, always-online consumer leaves plenty of clues behind for you to leverage and develop a deeper, more personal relationship: browsing behavior, social media commentary, click-throughs, and display ad responses. To deliver personalized, tailored experiences for each of your customers and drive revenue growth, you must collect and link together all this data, evolving from simply tracking customer transactions to leveraging omni-channel customer interactions. Are you ready to evolve? If you are, Alteryx can help. Only Alteryx delivers a comprehensive analytics platform that lets you make better, more informed decisions in three critical areas of marketing, including market opportunity and segmentation, customer retention, and product and service mix. By including demographic and segmentation data, an easyto-use graphical interface that makes the R statistical language accessible to everyone, Big Data capabilities that allow you to capture all the data about your customers, and more, Alteryx is the clear choice for leading-edge marketing professionals like you. 230 Commerce, Ste. 250, Irvine, CA To learn more about how Alteryx can help you create an omni-channel marketing strategy, visit Alteryx is a registered trademark of Alteryx, Inc. 3/14