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 Issue 9 - February 2010 |
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eCRM STATS
78% also list "other," indicating that there are many ways to break down a customer file. Source: Internet Retailer (2006) ASK THE EXPERT Q. We have a lot of behavioral data on our customers but are struggling with how to leverage it for customer communications across channels. Where's the best place to start? Armed with a disciplined approach to data asset discovery, solid process and action plan, data integration for targeting is certainly attainable. The first step is to think strategically about Data Readiness, or what you'll need to effectively leverage the data you have. Then develop an action plan. There are essentially four questions you'll need to ask yourself about data readiness:
As you go through this process, you may find out that you're closer to data integration than you thought! Have a question about anything related to eCRM or email marketing? Send questions to
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How Well Do You Know Your Customers?
At the heart of great marketing lies an integrated view of the customer. How much information you are able to leverage about each of your customers can make a significant difference to the effectiveness of your program. What is customer data worth - and how much does it cost to expand on it? Are there valuable sources of data buried in silos within your own organization? How well are you managing your data, and how much of it is actionable? Learn how to answer these crucial questions in this month's eCRM Advisor. The Cost of Data There really isn't much we can't find out about you as an individual consumer today. If I have your email address, I can reverse append your home address, tie that to your income range, more than likely your FICO score, marital status, presence of children, type of vehicle, home ownership, educational level, consumption patterns, memberships, affiliations and possibly even your shoe size.
TECHNICAL CORNER How many disparate systems in your organization are collecting customer data? Here is a brief list: call center, retail, ecommerce, ad serving, site-side personalization, email, SMS … there could be more. Each of these systems has its own supporting databases tracking specific subsets of a customer's profile data. The call center's CRM database may track all calls to and from the customer and any support tickets logged. The retail systems may log all in-store purchases tied to a loyalty program. Ecommerce has a record of all online transactions. Ad serving and site-side personalization may track site visitors' browsing behaviors. The email platform has records of all emails sent and interactions with those messages, as does the SMS platform. Consider a large hospitality business with web sites, call centers, email promotions, SMS offers and aggressive online advertising. If each of these systems does not share data, there is no comprehensive view of the customer. The site-side personalization database shows customer X has a tendency to look for luxury suites. Yet that same customer responded "YES" to a discount room offer by SMS and subscribed to the "Last Minute Discount" email notices but has never booked a room online; they prefer to call their sales representative. Customer X is now in a position to be receiving conflicting offers and messages online, by email, by SMS and even from the call center when they call in to book rooms or entertainment. Independently, the managers of each of these marketing programs – ecommerce, email, SMS, call center – may feel that they do not have enough data to effectively communicate with their customer maximizing cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. They may be searching for data append services or creating customer surveys in an attempt to build out more robust profiles. This is a result of customer data residing with different groups within the organization. There is a blurry line between Sales, Marketing and IT when it comes to customer data. The Master Database If all of the customer data is combined in a master customer record/database then some real opportunities open up. All communication channels can deliver complementary messages. The customer who was browsing luxury suites online can receive an email or SMS reinforcing the benefits of those suites and urging the customer to call (remember, customer X has never booked online). Having this complete picture of the customer and their interactions with the organization also enables more extensive modeling of customer behaviors and segment definitions for future communication planning. There are very real costs and challenges to creating this master customer profile. It may be that one system already being used to track a subset of customer data can be built out to host the master customer records, or a new CRM platform that enables multichannel planning and communication may need to be purchased and implemented. In either case, the organization must define all the data being collected and how best to store that data for future query and analysis. It’s imperative to know what types of communications this system will need to enable, so that specific data attributes can be defined to support those programs. For example, if Marketing wants to display an offer online based on a customer’s offer code, there needs to be a field to store that code as well as business rules and processes in place to update that field. Synchronizing records Once the system of record is identified, then a plan needs to be implemented for syncing data from the disparate databases to update the master customer profile. This may be required to happen nightly, hourly or real-time. The systems may not even reside on the same network so updates may happen by batch update delivered via SFTP, an HTTP post or XML data feed. The schedule for the profile updates becomes very important for the communication planning process. A cart abandonment message sent 12 hours after the customer failed to complete an order online may not make sense if the purchase data is only updated once every 24 hours – the customer could have called in to place their order just minutes after browsing online. And, of course, unsubscribes from any channel should be honored as quickly as possible. CAN-SPAM says an unsubscribe request must be honored within 10 days. The customer doesn't care about CAN-SPAM. If they said they don't want your messages, they don't want your messages. So, there must be a solid process to honor unsubscribes from every channel and have the data synced to the master customer profiles as quickly as systematically possible. Your organization may already own a wealth of data on each of your customers and not even be aware of it because Sales, Marketing and IT are on different branches of the org chart. Before looking to an outside service to complete your customer profiles, take the time to look at your existing systems and how they can communicate to build a complete story about each customer.
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For years, marketers have been trying to aggregate as much about the consumer as possible, some self-disclosed and some appended. But in most cases, the cost to do this in scale and at the individual level has been the barrier. If you went to your vice president of marketing and said, "I'd like to append my customer file with five fields of data," he or she would ask the obvious question: "What is the return on this investment and how often will we need to do this append?" It's