87% of marketers capture basic contact information on subscription but only 28% go on to capture demographic data (age, gender, location etc.

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2 Page 2 As one of the most established online marketing channels, marketing has racked up a longer track record of success than any other digital channel. According to Forrester, is the #1 best returning channel for driving repeat purchasers. 30% of transactions online started with a click on an campaign. And far from being dead, mobile and tablet use of is rising amongst consumers. These are just some of the reasons that almost 80% of marketers say that ROI from is excellent or good. sells. By growing and enriching your database, you can send more s, with more relevant, targeted and personalised content to drive more sales at low cost. So it follows that every online seller should prioritise the capture, hygiene and enrichment of contact and customer data. This report and guide provides step-by-step practical advice, guidance, tips and tricks and best practice for capturing more of that data. You ll learn how to use the data you collect in intelligent ways to turn customer information into successful, profitable communications designed around an individual, instead of campaigns designed around a marketing programme. In 2011, a major study was published showing that even though more than three quarters of marketers claim to use segmentation they tend to be collecting basic-level data. 87% of marketers capture basic contact information on subscription but only 28% go on to capture demographic data (age, gender, location etc.) So almost three-quarters of marketers don t have the data that they need to produce effectively targeted marketing. marketers face common challenges here: Unclean lists Not enough useful data on customers and prospects No time or resources to enrich lists Not enough focus on targeted, personalised content Any of these sound familiar? The systematic approach that follows will help you overcome each of these hurdles and turn data from a problem into an opportunity.

3 Page 3 Step 1: How to map your customer journey and identify data enrichment opportunities Step 2: How to define your data enrichment objectives Step 3: How to decide what s worth knowing with data ranking Step 4: Types of data and how they can be used for targeting, including: Demographic data Interests data Transactional data Social data Behavioural data Step 5: Evaluating data hygiene and how to automate data cleansing Step 6: 14 smart ways to enrich your data Step 7: How to translate data into personalised content, including: Personalisation V Dynamic Content Step 8: Testing and measuring your success

4 Page 4 Research shows that 33% of new customers and 48% of repeat customers visit multiple touch points before purchasing (averaging around 10) and has usually been an influencing factor. Mapping your customer journey starts with listing out each potential touchpoint in the buying cycle, so you can exploit each opportunity to collect key prospect and customer data. Potential customer touch points might include: Your acquisition channels such as search marketing Social media platforms Your content marketing on your website or blog Your online store Via phone, with your customer support or accounts team In person at your retail store 1. Talk to all the people in your business that have contact with your customers whether on the phone, through , through invoicing and through marcomms. 2. Use tools like Google Alerts and Socialmention.com to find out where people are talking about your brand, and go through each of those channels. 3. Use The Conversation Prism to get a view of most potential social touchpoints. 4. Don t forget to check which third parties might play a role, as third-party lists, advertising and partnerships can provide data enrichment opportunities too, particularly for b2b marketers. That said, organically-collected data always out performs 3rd party data. 5. Presenting your customer journey map can get complicated, so keep it as simple as possible. A quick Google image search of Customer journey map shows examples of what a clear journey map looks like. Make sure you have buy-in from the person responsible for each of these touchpoints. Then, create a plan to leverage each customer touchpoint into an opportunity to collect relevant, usable data. Refer to step 6 for a list of ideas for enriching data via existing touchpoints.

5 Page 5 Before writing your segmentation or data enrichment plan, ensure your objectives and how you ll measure them are crystal clear. Write down specific sales and marketing objectives and be clear about the success drivers that get you there. For example, do your customers respond best to price promotions, events and experiences, or instore promotions? A healthier database can help you sell more as you: Build a deeper understanding of current customers You might do this by identifying patterns or behaviours in specific segments. This could help you create predictive campaigns, like cross or up-sells. Increase or maintain engagement so you can reduce list fatigue and unsubscribe rate for a better overall response rate. Reduce the cost of your marketing or better, increase ROI. If your goal is to reduce spend, bear in mind that with cost-per-send being low, the saving incurred by segmenting may not be significant enough on its own to warrant the time and effort involved - there should almost always be another objective. All of this results in far more relevant, targeted and successful campaigns that sell more. Knowing what already works in your marketing will help you focus on the data you should collect. For example, if you know that females are more likely to buy your products around Christmas then make sure you have gender data in time for your Christmas campaigns. And if you know that offering a free glass of champagne to customers in your restaurants on a Tuesday night drives a higher-than-average spend, then make sure you know their postcode so you can invite them to their local restaurant for a free glass of bubbly. In b2b, you may know that businesses with more than 60 employees respond best to your bulk-buy offers. So aim to collect the employee numbers of the businesses in your database.

6 Page 6 By building a picture of the data you already hold and what really drives sales, you can start to identify gaps to prioritise filling. Data ranking is about deciding specifically which data is most valuable to your business. If you re a fashion label, then gender is a key piece of data as it helps you to be very relevant; and it s relatively easy to collect. Therefore, gender would be ranked highly on a fashion retailer s list of data to collect. When ranking data you should ask: 1. Can this piece of data be used as a key sales driver? 2. Are you really going to use it? 3. Is it easy to collect? 4. How can it drive content? 5. Will my customers resist giving me this information? 6. What is the shelf-life of this information? 7. Can it be assumed by proxy? 8. Does it help me understand my customers better? 9. Can this data be combined with what I already know to make my existing data more valuable? a. For example, for a marketer using to drive footfall in-store - who already knows a customer s date of birth, collecting their postcode could allow them to send them a birthday campaign to coax them into a local store. By scoring and ranking your list of variables, you can prioritise a hit list of data to focus on collecting. Some data would be great to have but it s going to be very tough to get it. For example, you may like to know how much your customers earn, so you can target them based on their buying power. For this kind of problem, you might want to collect the data by proxy, by asking them a pertinent question that might indicate their salary, like, how many holidays do you take a year? Only ever collect data that you are going to use. Nice to have data is just that. Stick to the must have data. Make sure there are practical applications for the data you plan to collect. If you re selling PCs to IT managers, does it really matter how old they are, or if they are married or single?

7 Page 7 The list below provides a starting point for your data collection strategy, covering the types of data you can segment by, and how. Once you put segmentation into practice and start testing and measuring, you ll start to discover specific and additional ways to segment, based on the characteristics of your audience and your industry. Demographics-based segmentation is the simplest and most commonly used method for segmenting s. Many people are using a form of demographic-based segmentation without realising. If you consider the common fields that online sellers hold for their customers within their database and start to separate those customers into groups based on that data, then you have a perfectly viable and often successful segmentation model. In b2c, this might be data such as: What do they look like? What do they like? What do they do? In b2b, this might be data such as: Decision maker job titles If the client themselves is b2b or b2c Number of employees the company has Other demographics commonly used for demographics-based segmentation include: Age Many businesses can see very different customer habits that can easily defined by age groups. Capturing date of birth (as opposed to just age) presents the opportunity to understand and take advantage of age segments and trigger birthday campaigns too. Gender Sending a male and female version of an is one of the most commonly used and successful methods for segmenting but don t forget that many cross-gender purchases are made - for example, in

8 Page 8 the fashion sector. If you identify gender, use the segment more intelligently than just cutting out opposite-gender targeted-products. For example, you could test re-including them around seasons. Location By knowing where your clients and prospects are based, you can direct them to their nearest store; notifying them of local offers or events. This is particularly powerful for holiday companies where departure airport is key to a sale, as well as for cross-sells, such as airport transfers. Date-based An upcoming event such as a subscription renewal or product use-by date can also help to profile your database. Birthdays are also a great opportunity to send customers personalised s with birthday greetings and tailored offers. Equally, if a customer has purchased with gift wrap, note the date of the purchase. A gift campaign could be sent around the same time the following year. Simply asking what your audience are interested in via preference centre can give you insight that would have been difficult to obtain otherwise. Furthermore you can trust this data - if you d collected implied interests, say from link clicks they re assumed and could be fluke. Bear in mind that if you re asking your audience to take the time to tell you what they want to receive, you re setting the expectation that you re going to send them what they have asked for. Don t let them down. Think carefully about wording your questions for the response that ll be most valuable to you and avoids response bias. For example, you may decide that you want to know what kind of holidays your customers like. You could ask specifically if they like beach holidays, safaris, etc. Or you might ask if they enjoy winter holidays for a less specific answer that gives you the opportunity to send multiple types of winter holiday messages. These messages may not be less relevant - it s your call. Recent research study shows that repeat customers spend the most, and are heavily influenced by . Targeting customers based on past purchase activity can help you take advantage of this. Once you re armed with this data, you can focus on turning small spenders or infrequent purchasers into big spenders, purchasing regularly. For example, you might want to group customers: With a high lifetime value, who interacted frequently with at one time, but not recently and have not purchased recently. If the client themselves is b2b or b2c Who frequently engage with your campaigns, but there is a clear opportunity to increase their frequency of purchase.

9 Page 9 Who used to engage frequently, but have lapsed and not purchased recently. Who regularly purchase, but with a lower than average AOV (Average Order Value). Who regularly purchase at a higher-than-average AOV Alternatively, you might segment those who d purchased more than 4 times in the last 12 months, calling this segment loyal current customers. Depending on your product cycle you could make an educated guess that they are likely to purchase again within say, the next 3 months, and create an appropriate nurturing campaign to ensure that purchase is with your brand and not a competitor s. The smart marketers at a major entertainment business use this technique to target cinema goers too - they ll look at a clients ticket purchase history in detail - the type of films they ve bought tickets for, how frequently, and where they go. Taking the customer s loyalty profile into account too, they are able to send extremely targeted campaigns that are highly personalised and successful. Some marketers are using public data scraped from social networks appended to addresses to create a fuller profile of a customer. Marketers purchasing social data appending services currently report a miss rate of around 60%, so you re better off collecting social IDs yourself. Before you do this, survey your database to discover which social networks your customers use and in what contexts. Use tools like Tweetdeck, Social Mention and Google Alerts to monitor conversations relevant to your brand. And check out The Conversation Prism for a view of the social networks to consider. Of course you can use social platforms to ask for data, too. dotmailer generates script that lets you capture and append data straight from your Facebook and blog pages into your lists. A simple method for segmenting your customers could be on campaign activity, such as opens or clicks. At a basic level, if you define the date of the last interaction you easily build a number of segments which enable you to target and analyse customers based on how recently they engaged. It can be as simple as: A-List: engaged within 30 days B-List: engaged within 1-5 months

10 Page 10 C-List: engaged within 6-9 months D-List: engaged more than 9 months ago Two key strategies that can be implemented using this kind of behavioural-based segment are: 1. Engage with A-list customers on a regular basis, giving them the VIP treatment they deserve and will appreciate, to keep them A-list. 2. Re-engage the customers that have lapsed. These users i.e. list D, should be treated differently. They were once interested in your content but are not engaging now, so develop your strongest proposition to move them into the C-list, then to the B-list, and so on. To do this, you might ask: i. Have they been ed too often? ii. What is the quality of the data I hold on these customers? iii. What was the nature of the original engagement? 1. For example, D-list customers who purchased once with gift wrap (indicating they d purchased for someone else) may not be likely regular customers, but can be targeted around seasons with gift opportunities.

11 Page 11 Having a clean, fully populated and up-to-date list will make running data-driven programmes much easier and much more effective for you. To understand the hygiene of your data, consider: What fields you hold within your database What per cent of your database you hold that data on, in particular the data you ranked as priority in step 3. Who opted-in to receive marketing messages and who hasn t? When was that data collected? What s the shelf life of that data? What other areas of your business hold data that you can access? This can include: o o o o CRM Systems Your customer service database POS data Loyalty program data Can you see who is a customer and who is a prospect? Do you have an indication of my customer s interests? Do you have shopping information available for each customer? Can you see when they visited your website and what they looked at? What piece of data about each customer would help you provide the most relevant to them? Are you able to match up people across two databases (do they share a key)? Who has addresses that have consistently bounced? Who has unsubscribed altogether?

12 Page 12 You can streamline and automate the data cleansing process to minimise the time and resource you need to invest. A great example of this is a campaign run by a luxury car retailer s marketing team. The client used dotmailer to segment their contact s data to identify empty data fields so they could easily identify the gaps in their customer data that needed filling. We then looked at the data fields they used that didn t have a shelf-life, for example, the customer s birth date, and those that may need updating, like postcode. They then used an automated programme in dotmailer to send an annual please update your details , 12 months after each individual s sign up date, based on the date those records were added to their database. The campaign produced great results an 80% open rate and 58% click through rate on their campaigns has helped them clean data, capture more of it and have confidence in their database. And having a cleaner list increases the efficiency of their standard programmes too.

13 Page 13 With the right incentive, you can collect whichever data you like on your online forms and data capture surveys. Just make sure the incentive is strong enough to share the requested information (such as a competition or prize draw) and that it relates back to your products or services or you ll annoy users. Inviting customers and prospects to sign up to some form of communication can be highly effective for all types of business. Make sure the newsletter sign-up call-to-action is clearly and prominently displayed on your website on the homepage above the fold and make sure it clearly displays all of your most visited web pages. Make it easy for people to sign up, and only collect the data you need at that first touchpoint. Adding and removing fields may affect the abandonment rate of your form and the quality of the data captured. You can split-test this using Google Experiments to measure the effect of adding additional fields to the form for collecting richer data. Create new customer touchpoints by setting up automated thank you s sent to your contacts when they sign up to your newsletter, complete an online survey or engage with you in any way online. A dotmailer client selling furniture online uses its thank you to show its appreciation and collect additional, extra rich data. After signing up for their newsletter, a campaign is triggered driving the recipient to an incentivised survey designed to capture further data. This helps them tailor future s with dynamic content. Retain information on referral websites and browsing preferences so you understand where your customers are online before they reach you. In addition, you can store the type of ad they responded to, such as ad copy and message, in order to target the content you push to them in future. The keywords used by a website visitor can tell you a lot about purchase intent and stage in the buying cycle to be used for planning and targeting content.

14 Page 14 In addition, Google has recently made available to some advertisers a subscribe PPC ad extension that allows you to collect subscribers from search results as shown below. This extension means you capture data without your customers having to click on the result, visit your homepage, find the signup link and complete the form. Users would have previously abandoned at each of those stages this problem is eliminated with the subscribe ad extension Meeting your customers face to face is another opportunity to collect data. For event attendees, collect information upon check-in. Offer freebies, samples or other incentives to sign up to events and you ll capture more data and grow your events too. As well as collecting addresses of purchasers at the point of sale, and remembering their local store, you can use an SMS data capture prompt combined with an incentive, as shown below. With dotmailer, this data feeds directly into your database so you can automate campaigns based on SMS activities too. Subscribe for offers and news Text TEN and your address to 6585 for an instant 10% off code by reply! A London football club Crystal Palace FC recently used dotmailer in this way. During half time on the giant display screen, and in the match day programme, supporters were incentivised to sign up to the club s newsletter via SMS, with a confirmation automated to each subscriber. This provided fresh data that could be used to generate sales. Collect addresses on business cards (there are card scanners who will read business card data). Your sales people can also input this directly into your CRM during sales calls and after meetings or networking events. Although the forward to a friend link is rarely used, people do regularly share s via the forward button, so ensure new readers can subscribe to your newsletter by including a sign up link. Again, incentives to share and sign up work so if you can, provide them. Leverage your partners lists by placing display ads in their newsletters. For example, a display ad with the call-to-action Click here to subscribe to Acme Inc. s newsletter could link to a pre-filled form, where a customer could just click submit to subscribe.

15 Page 15 Just make sure the third party use dynamic content or segmentation to send a different advert to the contacts that are already opted-in to your database. You can prompt your followers on social media to sign up via social media, as long as you re also sharing plenty of other relevant content so it doesn t feel like spam. Use WordPress and Facebook signup apps (such as dotmailer s) to send data from your blog or Facebook page straight back to dotmailer. Use content marketing and viral campaigns to collect data. If you re in b2b then undertake some hot new research or commission a useful whitepaper to help your prospects succeed at work and trade this for some data in your website download form. Ensure you know which content has been content consumed by which prospects, including format preferences. If there s valuable content, or some other incentive, users will share data. Basic entry competitions still work well, as do those encouraging users to forward to a friend, but we ve seen particular success with enter and share -style competitions whereby you collect data and count each social share or refererred as another entry for the original entrant, increasing the probability of a win, and of the campaign going viral. Using dotmailer, one example of this was used by a major skincare retailer, proving that social media really can work to enrich your data. Once a competition entry is submitted, the entrant receives a unique URL to send via or share on their social networks to enable others to enter. Every time someone enters the competition using that unique URL, the original referrer gets another entry into the competition, for an extra chance to win the big prize. The client ran this competition over Christmas and captured an additional 7,500 addresses and have been running it successfully ever since. Clearly in conversations with customer service, resolving any issues must be the number one priority, but once this has been done successfully, ask your customer service team to collect data when they speak to customers.

16 Page 16 The most effective campaigns will depend on your ability to tailor your campaign to your customer s needs. If you followed the advice in the previous steps: You are now armed with clean and enriched data you can be confident in. You have clear objectives on what you want to achieve with this new data. From interests to demographics, you understand your options for segmenting your lists You re ready to begin building detailed segments to drive content that s relevant and personalised. If for example you defined your objective as selling more women s footwear in-store and identified search and your newsletter subscribe form as touchpoints that could provide key data. Then, you might identify that specifically PPC keyword data is a powerful indicator of purchase intent, and postcode data indicates a local store. You can capture postcode data on signup and add keyword data with the right integration (speak to your account manager), appending it straight into dotmailer against a contact. This would arm you with the data required to send a footwear campaign driving customers in store. You d just need to build two simple segments. Segment 1: All contacts where key phrase used contains footwear related term A OR footwear related term B. This is your list for your footwear campaign. Segment 2: If postcode starts with postcode, show local store. This can be applied as a rule in your dynamic content to show the most relevant store. Then you have a targeted list and personalised content for your campaign. You may be looking at small data samples, but the beauty is that this can also be automated so that once that keyword data hits your database and no purchase is made within a specified period, such a campaign is triggered this makes it an extremely efficient way of targeting. Make the segments specific as you ll get better, clearer results and be able to confidently re-target that group with new variables.

17 Page 17 Ensure there is a clear link between the segments and the content of your campaign. There are two methods that make your messages targeted. Personalisation, and Dynamic Content. Uses values that already exist in your database, e.g. a contact s name, hometown, or birth date. Is pre-created content that changed in each recipient s campaign, based on database rules. Uses blocks of HTML, not fields from the database. Only one needs to be sent, that may render in an unlimited of different ways This results in an entirely customised message for each recipient of your campaign Any piece of data in your database can be used as personalisation. But dynamic content offers far more flexibility and scope for personalising and targeting messages than personalisation, as it is not restricted to content held in your database. Any piece of content within your template can be made dynamic. Dynamic content is often used to create custom: Offers Incentives Calls-to-action Images Links Testimonials Products Recommendations Landing pages Both personalisation and dynamic content help dramatically to increase opens and response rates by ramping up relevancy and helping you target the right message to the right person with pinpoint precision.

18 Page 18 As with all marketing activities, the best way to learn what works is by testing. The beauty of marketing is how measurable it is. The same simple testing theories for batch and blast campaigns work for segmented lists, but will give you more specific insight and hopefully actionable results. By testing variables such as subject lines, from address, call-to-actions, hero shots, and almost any creative element incrementally, you can learn a great deal about what makes your segment tick. Here s an example of some campaign variables to test against your segments: Headline copy, style and placement Other copy length, style and placement Campaign widths, layout and style Style and quantity of product images Price and categories of products shown Style of (and whether to include) hero shots Text versus buttons for calls-to-action In addition you can test: From address Subject line Landing pages You could also test an entirely redesigned template or landing page. This would be helpful in determining, for example, whether an or site redesign is on the right track. We d recommend starting simple and specific so results will be as clear as possible, so you ll have a better chance of understanding exactly what worked better, which gives you a better chance of understanding why. The terms of service of each social network and data protection laws should always be followed.