Match Your Marketing Strategy to Your Customers Behaviors

Transcription

1 BOOK 2 Match Your Marketing Strategy to Your Customers Behaviors A TWO-PART SERIES WITH EIGHT WAYS THAT RETAILERS CAN USE MARKETING INTELLIGENCE TO IMPROVE MARKETING ROI AND DRIVE MORE PROFIT SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 1 STOP GUESSING AND START USING YOUR MARKETING INTELLIGENCE

2 INTRODUCTION How this ebook works This quick-to-digest ebook series consists of two sections, each designed to be consumed in less than 15 minutes. Each part is a separate document, but both work together to help you understand how Marketing Intelligence makes you a smarter marketer. It s short, it s to the point, and best of all, it doesn t waste your time with fluff. Oh wait, was that fluffy to say that there s no fluff? Let s get on with it! BOOK 1 WHAT EXACTLY IS MARKETING INTELLIGENCE? DOWNLOAD BOOK 1 BOOK 2 MATCH YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY TO YOUR CUSTOMERS BEHAVIORS MATCH STOP GUESSING YOUR MARKETING AND START STRATEGY USING YOUR TO YOUR MARKETING CUSTOMERS INTELLIGENCE BEHAVIORS SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE x 2

3 GETTING STARTED Your CMO is Screaming, Do this, now! Regardless of which marketing campaigns you run, you obviously have higher-level marketing goals. Whether that s increasing sales or bringing in more new customers or whatever, those marketing goals drive your marketing execution. Marketing intelligence informs and defines the tactics that help you achieve your overall marketing goals. It gives you the insight to know which customers to target, when and where to engage them, and best of all, how to engage them to reach your specific goals. At the highest strategic levels, most retailers focus on getting new customers, keeping current customers, and encouraging current customers to spend more. Let s look at how you can use your marketing intelligence to do just that: get, keep, and grow your customers. SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 3

4 GETTING STARTED #5 Get Getting more new customers in the door is fundamental to all retailing. There s continual churn and attrition and calls for growth, and there s always room for more customers. But just herding people through the door or onto your website isn t usually the best way to reach those new customer goals. WHAT S YOUR GOAL? Do you just want thousands of new customers or do you want specific types of customers? Maybe you need to flush out on-sale items, so you want to target discount shoppers that you ll eventually need to convert into morefrequent buyers of non-discounted items. Or, maybe your long-term goals revolve around increasing loyalty, so you want to attract new customers that are good candidates for becoming loyal customers. Using your marketing intelligence, you can achieve your broader strategies and better attract the right people at the outset. It s not just attracting more customers, it s attracting more of the right customers. An intelligent acquisition strategy helps you attract more of the right customers, which then helps you down the line with keeping those customers loyal. Or, maybe not. Maybe you need to have a spike of new customers and are looking short term. Whatever the strategy, marketing intelligence makes you smarter at customer acquisition. Having that complete view of all of your marketing and customer and sales data shows you which customers are good and connects the dots back to where they originally came from and what brought them in. Maybe display ads for car accessories on sports-related websites were best at bringing in customers who purchased three or more times within three months. Whatever you re looking to achieve, marketing intelligence can help you identify which current customers fit that good mold, then what originally attracted them. Using that intel, you can start devising specific campaigns that focus on attracting similar customers. Again, you should always consider your other marketing goals and keep that in mind. By having that complete marketing intelligence view of customers and marketing and sales, you ll be able to acquire the right customers that make it easier to tackle your other marketing goals. And, oh, by the way, you ll look like the marketing MVP! SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 4

5 GETTING STARTED #6 Keep After that last section, you re now thinking, Sure, getting new customers with my newfound marketing intelligence is easy peasy. But how do I keep them? Again, it all has to do with your marketing intelligence. Shocking, right? After customers arrive, your next job is to keep them coming back. Depending on your category or focus, that might mean one extra shopping trip per year or per week. And, it might be a casual, low-value purchase, or customers might need to shop around, consider prices or styles, and take more time. Whatever the case, using your marketing intelligence to see how other customers behaved and how similar customers reacted to different marketing campaigns points you to your first retention opportunities. With marketing intelligence giving you a complete view, you can start to compare new customers against existing customers, see where they are the same or different, and see what influenced similar customers to stay on in the past. Even more, you can identify which customers are at risk of leaving and what you can do to prevent them from doing so. Again, it all goes back to having all of your marketing and customer and sales data in one place where you, as the marketing genius that you are, can uncover marketing opportunities. If a group of your new customers came in from banner ads on news sites and purchased shoes, look at past customers who came in from banner ads on news sites and purchased shoes and see what they purchased next, what prompted them to do it, and whether they purchased it in a store or online. Use your marketing intelligence to figure out what s worked in the past, then use your marketing experience to start creating campaigns and programs. It s these similarities in new vs. current customers that you can use to craft new campaigns. And it s your marketing experience that helps pull it all together. That s why, way back in the Dig section in Book 1, it s so important to have your hands on the marketing intelligence. You re the one who will recognize the opportunities or ask the probing questions. It s great to get the answer, but it s so much better to be able to explore on your own, see how things change based on your different views, and learn how your marketing works together. You won t get those creative juices flowing if you re just looking at a static report. But, if you can say, Hmm, that s interesting. What about this then you can start to really increase your internal marketing intelligence. SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 5

6 GETTING STARTED #7 Grow You brought in new customers. You got them to stay on as customers. Now what? Well, there s that old saying that it s cheaper to keep customers than find new customers. It s easier, too. For a new customers, you barely know anything about them. For current customers, you already know what they like, where they shop, which marketing programs on which channels they prefer. It s a first date vs. your first wedding anniversary. It s much easier to choose a restaurant for the latter, right? You already know your spouse s likes, dislikes, schedule, willingness to spend, etc. The same is true for existing customers, and that s where your marketing intelligence comes in. Customer development is important for not only an efficiently run marketing machine (you want your customer lifetime value to be high), it s a key component of growth. Sure, new customers are needed for growth, but you also need to pull more value out of your current customers to keep your projections going up and to the right. Guess what can help you here? Yep, your marketing intelligence. It gives you the knowhow across all of your customers to intelligently group them, figure out what might get them to buy more, and figure out the best channel and offer to make it work. Loyalty is a key part of customer development. While it s one thing to get customers to spend more and more often, it s another to consider a customer loyal. And, it s very specific and unique to your business. You might measure loyalty by the standard recency, frequency, and monetary metrics. Or, it may be based on joining your loyalty program, or being a social media promoter of your brand, or buying consumables over and over again. However you measure loyalty, it s your marketing intelligence that s going to help you strategically group and target those customers, dive in to what they like and what prods them to become loyal, and discover what keeps their loyalty going strong. On the other hand, if you re just starting to think about loyalty as a program or an approach, your marketing intelligence can help you define loyalty. Again, with your hands on the wheel, you ll be able to combine your internal marketing smarts with your marketing intelligence to better understand the components of loyalty channels, value, categories, whatever that will best serve your overall marketing goals. SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 6

7 GETTING STARTED #7 Re-engagement Some portion of your customers will always leave you. Yeah, it s sad, but there s always a second chance at getting them back, and maybe a third or fourth! Maybe they just didn t know you well enough. All customers have an initial reason for engaging with you. It might be the beginning of a long and valuable relationship, you might carry an item or brand that they can t find elsewhere, or maybe they just wanted to take advantage of a fleeting offer or a one-time deal. Either way, once you ve engaged, you have marketing intelligence that can be used to re-engage with them. Yet again, it s using the customer and marketing and sales data that you already have to better understand why they originally came, how they got there, and what may have caused them to leave. { For customers who ve had a longer relationship with you more than one purchase maybe it was something that you said or stopped carrying, or maybe someone new came along. Using your marketing intelligence to pinpoint that last or last few activities can help you figure out what pushed them away. Seeing that a group of now-dormant customers unsubscribed from a specific before going dark might be an indicator. Finding that most customers who had abandoned several shopping carts in a row might indicate that a kludgy online checkout process may be to blame. Connecting the dots of a display ad campaign for a particular brand that had a high number of web browsers who left your website for a competitor s may be the reason. Whatever it is, your marketing intelligence can help guide you in not only determining why they left, but in devising a strategy for getting them back. Whatever caused them to leave, you re charged with bringing them back. Merging your sales and marketing and customer data helps you determine their likes, dislikes, preferred channels and other interesting tidbits that you can use as the carrot to dangle in front of them. SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 7

8 BONUS BONUS: Beyond Marketing Marketing intelligence can impact your business well beyond just marketing. Where else are you going to get the pulse of the market and customers, how items are selling and to whom, and what s working (or not) to help drive profits? Merchandisers, category managers, buyers, and others on the customer side of the business are obvious users of marketing intelligence. You can help them get ahead of trends in the market, understand competitive threats, and find opportunities to broaden (or shrink) your offerings. You ll also be the first to see the changing demographics of your customer base, or, conversely, how your customers fit the same mold year after year. Either way, there s opportunity there for marketing as well as where to open new locations or where to expand. Even more, you ll see if your brand image is changing and if store planners or operations has opportunities to capitalize on the changes. All of these insights can also be used in the back office, for inventory management, employee scheduling, assortment planning, store planograms, and more. It all starts with knowing your customers, { what drives their behaviors, and how that impacts your overall business all of which you can see with marketing intelligence. More and more, executives these days are all about the data so your marketing intelligence will equip you with the hard facts on the market and sales and customers, and how changes to any of those items could impact your overall business. Heck, BI or IT may even start coming to you to get reports that can help them answer inventory management, scheduling, allocation, assortment, and other questions. SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 8

9 CONCLUSION What now? HOW MANY CUSTOMER-FACING TOOLS DO YOU CURRENTLY USE? There s , web analytics, your ad server, point-of-sale, maybe a loyalty system, something to track social media, customer service even. For some of those, you might even have multiple systems that overlap. That s where you need to start: How do I get all of my marketing intelligence together in one view? Or, more realistically, how do I get data from two systems into one view, then three systems, then four Each of those has some sort of reporting functionality, which is a good start. However, few of those stand-alone tools go beyond simple reporting. And, few enable marketers to integrate data from multiple systems. As your marketing intelligence grows and you see how it is impacts your marketing, then you can start to make the case for putting more resources into a dedicated marketing intelligence solution. But beware of tools that pull data together by summarizing it, which gives you a cheap and easy way to see big trends, but which blocks you from ever targeting your intelligently-segmented groups of customers. Regardless of what you can do right now, your customer data is becoming bigger by the second. The only way to get a handle on it is to start digging into it ASAP. Understand what you have, what you can do with your current tools, and what else you need to wring out the value. Then, start improving your own marketing intelligence! Oh, and obviously, call SmartFocus and ask how we can help you get started. SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 9

10 FURTHER READING What Can Marketing Intelligence Do for You? Think it s difficult to get to the nirvana that s described above? IT S NOT. Regardless of what you can do next, your customer data is becoming bigger by the second. The only way to get a handle on it is to start digging into it now. What do we suggest? Call SmartFocus, of course. YOU JUST FINISHED DOWNLOAD BOOK 2 MATCH YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY TO YOUR CUSTOMERS BEHAVIORS BOOK 1 WHAT EXACTLY IS MARKETING INTELLIGENCE? SMARTFOCUS EBOOK 2 PAGE 10

11 THIS EBOOK IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SMARTFOCUS The Internet of Everything is the macrotrend of connectedness that s changing the way customers shop. With more than half of online visits and a third of ecommerce transactions now coming from mobile devices, mobile and proximity marketing are more important than ever. At SmartFocus, we have capabilities to provide context-aware marketing for a mobile world. Our technology will help you truly know your customer and engage them with the right message, at the perfect moment, wherever they are in store and online across all of their preferred channels. SmartFocus is the leader and innovator in contextualized and personalized messages. Our platform includes beacon technology that knows when your customer visits a physical store; real-time predictive recommendations generated at the precise moment they open your or visit your site; and powerful insights that use smart analysis of Big Data to effortlessly generate a truly personal experience. For more information, please visit us at: SmartFocus 18 West 18th Street, 11th Floor New York, NY 10011, USA Tel: +1 (212) Fax: +1 (646)