RedEye DATA: THE UGLY BABY OF MULTI-CHANNEL PERSONALISATION MATTHEW KELLEHER - CCO

RedEye DATA: THE UGLY BABY OF MULTI-CHANNEL PERSONALISATION MATTHEW KELLEHER - CCO

CONTENTS Introduction What are you trying to achieve? pg 3 Multi-Channel Personalisation What is it? pg 4 Building Blocks for Successful Multi-Channel Personalisation pg 5 a. Data Collection b. Customer Data Platform c. Segmentation and Analytics d. Content e. Automation f. Creating the Customer Experience It s all about the data pg 7 a. Web b. In Store c. Loyalty Cards d. Contextual Data e. Transactions f. Microsites g. Call Centre h. Syndicated or 3rd Party i. Channels Next Steps Data Integration and Predictive Analytics pg 11 2

INTRODUCTION WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO ACHIEVE? 2015 is the year of data driven marketing. We know this because even the BBC is telling their readers this is the case. 2015: The Personalised Data-Driven Future is Here screamed a New Year headline in their Technology section 1. Finally! Many of us, shall we say, more mature marketers having been waiting for this for a long time. The 1 to 1 Future was envisioned by Peppers and Rogers in 1996, and by others before that. As a result, the online community is finally accepting the fact that using data is essential to drive more relevant and engaging communications. Organisations are awash with data; indeed the volume of data available is not the issue. The issues are have we got the right data?, how do we make actionable decisions with this data? and, a subject for another day, how do we bring all this data together to make decisions? The goal for RedEye clients has always been to deliver relevant content to increase return on investment (ROI) but the game has changed. Our mission encompasses a new goal. We will deliver relevant content on whatever device, whatever the channel and work tirelessly to help our client coordinate that message into a single customer experience. Our clients want to deliver an omni-channel experience for the customers and RedEye s role is to manage the data to ensure this happens. This is embodied in the product Multi-Channel Personalisation. 1: Graham, F. (2015). Lookahead 2015: The personalised data-driven future is here. Available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30537476. 3

MULTI-CHANNEL PERSONALISATION WHAT IS IT? To encapsulate this in a single sentence, multi-channel personalisation is the goal of delivering a single experience for customers based on the data that every organisation holds for each individual customer. As members of the vast majority of consumers in the UK, we accept that emails advertise discounts on products we don t want; texts push information we don t care about; when we visit a website we have to find our own way back to a product that they we ve browsed three times in the last 24 hours; and that emails are usually selling different stuff from banner ads and neither can be found directly on the website. That is the norm. But today s consumers want things to be easy, they want to be rewarded for their purchases, to be recognised as an individual and indeed expect to be appreciated by the brands they shop with. It is the same feeling as walking into a coffee shop and being recognised by the barista who asks Your usual?. Shopping online or in-store is an intensely personal experience and consumers will happily trade their loyalty for that experience. Multi-channel personalisation is the embodiment of that trade-off. Online marketers are finally waking up to the fact that this is not simply the act of regularly giving offers or voucher codes or of making the effort to address the customer by their first name, but has become about treating the customer on a personal level. Multi-channel personalisation is the art of using all the valuable data a business holds about a customer to ensure that not only are communications as relevant as they can be, ie personalised to the maximum capability, but to ensure that this personalisation, or experience, is delivered simultaneously on whatever channel or devise the customer engages. The smartest vendors are now extending this to predicting future requirements of that customer through predictive analytics. Of course, this is not simply an altruistic exercise. By personalising a customer s experience with your brand you will invariably increase sales. I hope nobody reading this paper will dispute that communications based on knowledge of the customer will outperform standard single message mass communications. If you do, then you should stop reading now and question what you are doing in Marketing. This is a basic premise of this paper. 4

BUILDING BLOCKS FOR SUCCESSFUL MULTI-CHANNEL PERSONALISATION Before considering the data required to build an effective multi-channel personalisation strategy, it is necessary to review the building blocks of that strategy. Every business will find barriers to achieving multi-channel personalisation if they didn t, everyone would be doing it. The goal here is to recognise these barriers and find a vendor who will help you overcome them. a. Data Collection. Data collection is no longer a by-product of marketing activities. Organisations now require a Data Strategy that maps the business s needs and goals with available data; targets gaps in that information; plots ways to fill these gaps and ensures a truly strategic approach to what is required. After all, it is the life-force of a progressive modern business. b. Customer Data Platform (CDP). Legacy data systems, siloed data repositories and single customer views that do not readily coordinate with campaign management systems are all problems that affect the vast majority of businesses. It is typical that businesses build up, over time, silos of data that do not interact with other data silos leading to a fractured view of the customer. This issue is often exacerbated with attempts to build Single Customer View (SCV) databases that do not effectively integrate with channel distribution platforms. In other words, what is the point of a SCV database that has manual data feeds into individual channel platforms? Consequently, you then have to craft messages separately. Personalisation cannot be built on such a foundation and CDPs provide a platform on which to combine data with channel tools from email to web personalisation. Customer Data Platforms solve these issues. Multi-Channel Personalisation requires a single interface to combine knowledge of the customer with content to craft the message in any channel 5

BUILDING BLOCKS FOR SUCCESSFUL MULTI-CHANNEL PERSONALISATION c. Segmentation and Analytics. Segmentation is a contentious word in the personalisation space. Purists argue that there is no place for segmentation in a personalisation world in which the individual is the target; that ultimately the two are mutually exclusive. Pragmatists believe that you cannot marshal the volumes of data without some level of segmentation. But no one is in any doubt that data analytics is critical to delivering insights and actionable information and that predictive analytics must be the goal for forward planning businesses. e. Automation. Manual processes are the enemy of a multi-channel marketer. Multi-channel personalisation creates an indefinite number of combinations.therefore, none of this can happen without a marketing automation solution that allows the user to ensure that the correct decision is made based on changes to customer behaviours. The key to any multi-channel personalisation strategy is an automation system that removes all on-going manual intervention and allows for ongoing optimisation of all messaging. d. Content. As a building block for multi-channel personalisation, content is obviously essential but sometimes overlooked. Crafting a multi-channel personalisation strategy is pointless if you do not have the content to populate the communications. Does your business have the capability to deliver personalised content for each of your engaged customers? The key to any Multi- Channel Personalisation strategy is an automation system that removes all on-going manual intervention and allows for ongoing optimisation of all messaging f. Creating the Customer Experience. Finally, any strategy for multichannel personalisation requires a single interface to combine knowledge of the customer with content to craft the message in any channel. Firstly, you need an interface that allows you to craft messages across multiple channels and combine these with your customer data. Secondly, you need customer experience experts; people skilled in understanding and crafting communication strategies across all channels, whether it be web, email or catalogue to different types of customer. 6

IT S ALL ABOUT THE DATA Data. It s not sexy, but it is pivotal! Decisions about customers that drive personalised communications cannot be made without data. As discussed earlier, key to any multi-channel personalisation strategy is a Data Collection Strategy. Data is the starting line and the fuel for your strategy, without data there is no personalisation. A data collection strategy is an analysis that reviews business intentions and CRM goals. It reviews the availability of the data, plots resolutions to fill any gaps in that data and identifies key mechanisms to make that data available to a Customer Data Platform. Every business has an array of data available to it. Very often it is not the data that is the issue, but key gaps and the ability to integrate that data is the key barrier to progression. Data analytics is critical to delivering insights and actionable information and that predictive analytics are the goal for forward planning businessess In this section you ll find a summary of potentially valuable sources of data to enable personalisation of the customer experience. Individual businesses may weigh different sources more heavily, or simply disregard areas of data that are not (or not yet) relevant to them. For instance, an insurance company will care less for geo-location or contextual data that would appeal to a retail organisation. 7

IT S ALL ABOUT THE DATA a. Web. Nothing has changed either consumer behaviour or the data landscape like the internet. Managing this data is often likened to drinking from a fire hydrant. But as every year passes the volume of available data grows, whilst the cost of processing and managing that data reduces. Ever more complex decisions about consumers and their possible behaviours are created. Web data gives you real context on a mass scale, with nearly half of all transactions now either made, or researched, online (a differentiator every business needs to understand in a multi-channel world). And for ecommerce businesses web data gives you the most valuable element of data browsing behaviour. Pre-internet, the most valuable data available for personalisation and propensity modelling was the most recent product purchased, the last interaction with the brand - recency was king. Today, the website gives you a customer s intentions. No one browses products that they re not interested in and very often the products and categories we browse reflect an intention to buy either in the short or long term. In terms of a commercial view of personalisation, there is no more effective data. b. In-Store. In terms of customer activity and therefore information on which to personalise communications to the customer, there is no more important source of data than in-store. With retail brands reporting that in-store activity accounts for between 50% and 90% of purchase behaviour, this is an area that is seeing some of the most interesting innovations currently. A number of retail businesses are trialling the impact of ibeacons that allow organisations to provide in-store personalisation to mobile devices and internet receipt systems that capture purchase information directly with email address and thereby a key multi-channel identifier. Indeed, it is critical to note that email addresses are now the key online identifier for personalisation. c. Loyalty Cards. Loyalty and reward card data provides insights into shopper behaviour by providing a mechanism for businesses to collate primarily in-store behaviour with the customer database. By collecting points or rewards, the individual customer provides a mechanism for combining multiple purchase and brand interaction behaviour. 8

IT S ALL ABOUT THE DATA d. Contextual Data. Contextual marketing is effectively next generation, or multi-channel, geolocation marketing and is best illustrated by an example. Many organisations target abandoned baskets but most use email as the primary tool. Contextual marketing identifies an individual s mobile device near a store and in real time makes the decision to send an offer to the mobile device to suggest that the customer go in-store to complete the purchase. This has been extended recently to include the context of the individual are they at work? Is it raining? what time of day is it? As well as other issues that can alter or impact that individuals decision making. e. Transactions. Recency, Frequency and Monetary data (RFM) is the historical view of customers that allows organisations to build a foundation for understanding customers and the area in which segmentation places a key role. By giving the marketer the knowledge of how often and how much a customer spends on what products, RFM data allows for appropriate targeting of products and marketing in the future. An obvious example of this is that businesses want to treat their best customers differently from prospects and therefore it is necessary to understand who the loyal customers are and who have never purchased but shown interest. This is core to the personalisation challenge - a customer will expect to be treated differently if they are new to a web site or a brand as opposed to being a loyal or regular customer. A key failing of organisations when trying to personalise, is failing to recognise a loyal customer and treating them as if they are unknown because of a flaw in the system that does not tie the data together. f. Microsites. Microsites and surveys provide one valuable area of data for personalisation that you rarely get from anywhere else direct customer information. This is rare, but also not without potential flaws, as whilst answers to specific questions may not be deliberately misleading, they can be aspirational. g. Call Centre. Often a black hole for data, call centres are the one place where information could be gathered during or immediately following a person to person interaction. But many marketers feel that addressing this issue is a step too far due to the pressures on cost management of call centres. Adding a single question to a script, for instance, will reduce the number of calls each operative can make in an allocated time period. However, on the other hand, call centres offer a chance for a real interaction (albeit ear-to-ear rather than face-to-face) which could be used to generate a small amount of very valuable data, even if it is only an email address and permission for marketing. Alternatively, it is critical to the multi-channel solution that an operator recognise the individual, thereby the call centre becomes a key part of the omni-channel experience. 9

IT S ALL ABOUT THE DATA h. Syndicated or 3rd Party. In certain market sectors, syndicated data is available that could provide insight into an individual customers shopping behaviour in the wider market place. For example, in the Retail & Catalogue market space companies such as Abacus and Transactis maintain syndicated databases that can tell you whether your customer is a regular catalogue purchaser or not. This type of 3rd party data, if available, can help you craft your customer s personalised journeys in the omni-channel world. i. Channels. There are two overriding reasons why channel data is absolutely key. Firstly, the interaction of the consumer with a specific channel, and in the case of mobile with a particular device, is key in building up an understanding of consumer behaviour and planning a strategy for various interactions. It also allows for segmentation and analytics on an individual customers channel preference. 10

NEXT STEPS DATA INTEGRATION AND PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS Once you have identified your available data that you want to use to drive your multi-channel personalisation strategy, your journey has begun. So what to do next? Firstly, complete your data strategy. Map your marketing needs and goals with your available data, target gaps in that information and plot ways to fill these gaps. Secondly, understand where you will hold this data in a fashion that effectively makes it available to your channels, or at least your primary channels and finally explore how you can allow analytics to drive value from your data. These are subjects for another day. But the data in your business, and getting access to it, is the first step on the road to building a multi-channel personalisation strategy. Data is the starting line and the fuel for your strategy, without data there is no personalisation. 11