As we wind into holiday season, we often press to squeeze the last fruits of the year by working long hours right before the break.  So it is again at Conclusive this year, as we are working at the last minute to finalize a White Paper on Trigger Marketing with the Aberdeen Group.

The Aberdeen research examines the components and performance of different types of event based marketing triggers, including life stage triggers, transaction and interaction behavioral triggers, as well as different stage of deployment, from event identification to response execution.  Preliminary results indicate that Best-in-Class organization benefit greatly from their investment in trigger marketing; with over 80% of the firms enjoying increased customer profitability, over 85% greater cross-sell and upsell, and approximately 95% with greater performance in precision marketing. 

In past research, Gartner has predicted a future of mass automated interactions – the Aberdeen Group confirms that it is well on its way.  Conclusive is convinced that the coming age of trigger marketing interactions are inevitable as well, and has been bonding the elements of such a solution for several years. 

The company’s foundation is in fact, based on automated marketing technology – Conclusive’s own listcleanup.com was delivering NCOA, list rentals and enhancements over the web while the concepts of marketing automation were still a twinkle in most of our eyes.  

In recent years, after the acquisition of Synapse Technology and Conclusive Strategies in 2006, and progressing with the adoption of the MicroStrategy business intelligence platform in 2007, we’ve accelerated our automated triggered marketing platform to emerge as a Best-in-Class solution.  We accept input from many different data providers, ranging from top tier consumer list and marketing data providers such as Acxiom and Experian, along with as well as other commercial off-the-shelf and/or proprietary sources, align rules for interpreting appropriate marketing communications for each data event, and invoke Conclusive’s long-established data delivery platform for delivery via direct mail, email, text messaging, or routing priority customer/prospect records to call centers.  Particularly our event driven marketing solutions in banking and with agency partner GSMarketing for Toyota have received acclaim as leading edge, forward-thinking trigger-based  solutions.
 

The core benefits of this integrated marketing platform are pinpoint timing and brutally efficient marketing.  The tentative title of Aberdeen’s report, in fact, states a major feature simply and to the point: “Timing is Everything”.  
 

Now as we finally hit the brakes and skid into the holidays, that same adage seems to also apply to our personal lives.  Thanksgiving is special every year, but this year, amid the hectic pace that surrounded our presidential election, amid the rock and roll of the stock market and amid the tension of global economic uncertainty, well, Thanksgiving just seems a little more so special and a little more “just in time” to save us from burnout. 

The Thanksgiving break seems to offer the perfect anecdote for the chaotic year – a solution, per se, that gives us a time out, a chance to enjoy a full bodied meal and reflect on the very many blessings that we enjoy as citizens of these great States, even despite the setbacks and challenges we might encounter along the way.  Our family will set aside a few hours this afternoon serving meals at an Austin homeless shelter, and then cook up that perfect Thanksgiving meal with friends tomorrow night. Looking ahead, I can sense that it will be the perfect solution, at just the right time. 

Here’s hoping that you enjoy the perfect Just in Time Thanksgiving as well.

The Value of a Customer

There is an old saying – “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is”  this saying along with “You get what you pay for” are truths many of us have had to learn the hard way.   With the new USPS mandated Move Update deadline rapidly approaching, many companies are looking at their options for purchasing NCOALink^® and alternative Move Update services. 

Some NCOA vendors are offering (including Listcleanup.com) an all you can eat at one price option.   Now, shopping for the cheapest price seems like a logical solution, except when you consider the value of a customer.   Given the significant increases in NCOA volumes projected by the addition of Standard Mail in the new requirements, is it not logical that some vendors are going to have challenges in delivering on advertised turn times?    If the average mail house or lettershop’s monthly mail volume is traditionally 80% Standard Mail, then volumes for many of the NCOA providers could be quadrupling over the previous First Class volumes.  

So, when your customer calls and wants to know why their mailing went out later than promised, do you think they are going to be satisfied with the answer  - our company selected the lowest cost NCOA provider and they failed to return the file to us when promised?

At the DMA Conference in Las Vegas this week, I heard a common question.  "Why set up a Marketing Database?  We have a CRM platform."  Then I begin to ask the questions.  How long does it take to get data from IT to complete the data processing for your marketing campaigns?  How difficult is it to utilize business intelligence to develop campaign triggers or report on marketing results? Where does the marketing information reside in your CRM platform?  I often hear "by the time our business intelligence group recieves data and completes data analysis the relevance of the marketing opportunity discovered by our market research has passed!"  The reason this is happening is simple;  you have data management occuring at the enterprise level in order to run the back-end of the business, not specifically marketing data that captures the essence of the customer interaction required for integrated marketing activities. We service several Fortune 500 clients, those with a true marketing database are able to successfully execute campaign management, triggered marketing and deliver great marketing ROI.  Those of our clients that rely on enterprise level information management are only able to manage campaigns as "one-offs,"  the results often a fraction of those with a true marketing database.  It is a simple question with a simpler answer, in order to optimize marketing ROI you must have a database built for that purpose.

Marketing has undergone a paradigm shift. New tools, new technologies, new approaches and new data have opened marketers’ eyes that there is indeed a cause and effect and predictability in customer’s actions. It is discernable in the marketing data, as Davenport notes: “Most business functions, even those, like marketing, that have historically depended on art rather than science—can be improved with sophisticated quantitative techniques.” ¹ In a paper, “CRM from ‘art to science’” Jackson² sets forth a new framework for treating marketing as a science:

Early research and methods concerning customer relationship work often focus on more intuitive approaches to customer management. Many of the initial theories, such as one to one marketing and value-based management, were less analytical in their approach. Likewise, too often companies that have implemented customer relationship management (CRM) systems have done so with an unstructured approach (art) as opposed to a structured and by-the-numbers approach (science).

Sophisticated new automated marketing systems designed by Conclusive aspire to reflect the highest form of marketing prowess—selecting and executing communications for customers as if your best sales representative was always there. 

That description (as if your best representative were there) might sound a bit "Back to the Future," but think about it—advertising and marketing departments have for years sought to present the best marketing communiciations possible to their customers, but have historically issued a relatively small number of messages and imagery in their communications in order to be realistically economic. For years we've recognized that type of communication strategy was suboptimal, if only because one or a small number of communications could never speak adequately, much less optimally, to all the members of a large customer base. To communicate most effectively with a customer base, one would have to be prepared with a nearly limitless set of communication options for each individual consumer. It would be as if [indeed] your best sales representative(s) was on the virtual showfloor greeting each customer, selecting their messages according to the very wide set of factors that might be influencing each of those customers' choices.

What might the "best" sales representatives be looking for? Well, they'd be observing each consumer as they enter the store, recognizing how they dress, what they drive, whether they had children at their side . . . they'd notice what seemed to interest each consumer and they'd align their own efforts to sell the store products that most closely matched the combination of the consumer's interest and situation (i.e. factors that might lead them away from their initial interest, such as what they wore, what they drove, and those children . . . ). Frankly this is how the best sales and marketing departments operated a century ago—they just had no scaleability to apply their "best practices" to more than a consumer or two at a time!

So advertising and marketing evolved to determine central messages that could appeal more economically to larger numbers of consumers. Hence mass marketing flourished. The trouble was, that evolution brought the messages further and further from each individual consumers' interest. Now with the emergence of deep databases and technology that position us to more elegantly overcome marketing's "scale" issues, its time to evolve back!—back toward "human" marketing that lets us conduct careful and thoughtful custom communications for  thousands upon thousands upon thousands of individual customers as if we were meeting each individually on our virtual showfloor.

What is Conclusive's plan for this marketing future? The key is structuring marketing solutions to simulate human practices—leveraging any and all knowledge known to the marketeer, building "rules" that can determine the most appropriate communications to issue each consumer based on their interactions with us, and enslaving technologies that can execute those predetermined communications automatically when customer interactions are detected. Conclusive have meaningful assets in all these areas and has begun building an as-yet-to-be-named next generation solution that captures the essence of the "best" salesperson in a scaleable marketing automation platform. 

On our website, we call the ingredients Data Management, Data Intelligence and Data Delivery. Together, it can also be called Event Driven Marketing, Knowledge-based Marketing or Interaction-based Marketing. Funny though, to me (despite all the new terms) all this sounds so old as to be new.