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.

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.

With marketing dollars declining, it is more important than ever to communicate to customers and prospects most likely to purchase.  Your customer base is your best resource for generating additional revenue and determining your best possible prospects.  In order to utilize this valuable resource, your must learn as much as possible about them.

Third party data providers can determine important facts about your customers by simply matching your database of names and addresses to theirs.  Types of information available are age, income, education, marital status, presence of children, credit score, and on and on.  Once these details are known, data analysis can be used to determine what a customer of your product “looks like”.  This data intelligence will enable you to create a customer profile for each product in your portfolio. 

Customer profiles create the ability of a company to increase sales in a couple of ways.  The first way is to cross-sell to current customers.  By using the profiles of customers currently purchasing certain combinations of products in your portfolio you can determine the next best product to sell to each customer.  Secondly, these profiles also give you guidelines for acquiring prospects.  Third party data providers can provide prospect lists based on detailed demographics that you determine through the customer profiling.  In essence you are determining the next product to sell your customers and the next prospect to sell your product.  Follow up with lead management processes such as direct mail marketing and both approaches translate into additional revenue.

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).

Not only is fly-fishing on a beautiful, cold water stream relaxing, it is the challenge of imitating nature in it's most pure form that makes me feel alive. Stealthily entering the water you envision the fish in their gin clear world, facing upstream, patiently waiting for the almost invisible aquatic insect to catch their attention. The reaction so sudden, yet so cautious, if you blink you have missed the moment; the opportunity. Imitating the natural environment with a perfect presentation, tremendous focus and the willingness to try variations; different flies, angles, tippets and times of day all make the sport so rewarding when finally you feel the fish on your line. You have succeeded despite the noise of others enjoying the river in their own way, splashing and thrashing, throwing rocks, hitting canoes with paddles...sometimes seeming like they do not care that they are creating havoc for the river residents.

Producing Marketing ROI holds the same challenge for me, both the art and the science of direct marketing must combine perfectly to create the opportunity to generate leads, acquire and retain business and ultimately ROI. The marketer, like the fly-fisherman, is faced with environmental factors that can determine the outcome despite a perfect presentation. Customers can be spooked by the economy, by their unique personal situation or even by disruptive competitive practices that create noise that mask the well-designed and timed marketing communication, to the perfect database, you have so carefully delivered.

So how can the marketer evolve campaigns to create a higher probability of success? Just like in fishing, one must discover the most fertile waters (data and business intelligence) and then deliver a consistent, relevant and timely message that cuts through the noise and restores the natural order. The marketer must enjoy the refinement of all aspects of the marketing continuum in order to be successful. The variables and iterations are endless; therefore the supporting tools and solutions must be just as robust. Think of Conclusive Marketing as your "Marketing Outfitter," providing unique marketing solutions that allow you to consistently capture the attention of the finicky consumer.

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.

In addition to collecting back taxes, the IRS also applies interest and penalties against those who do not follow the rules. The United States Postal Service^® (USPS^®) needs to take a page from the IRS book and apply more strict consequences for those who choose to cheat the Move Update rules.

Claiming postal discounts for using an NCOA^LINK® service, but never applying the changes to your list is illegal.

It is not that the USPS^® lacks authority to consistently apply strong consequences, but historically it has not taken full advantage of this authority. In fact, the Move Update form states  “I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits information requested on this form may be subject to criminal and/or civil penalties, including fines and imprisonment.”

Yes, there have been periodic reports of Move Update audits finding companies not in compliance, but the scarcity of these reports and the relatively light consequences does little to deter would-be cheaters. However, let the word spread that some executives are going to jail and the USPS^® now hands out penalties and interest charges amounting to five times the illegally claimed postal discounts and the mailing industry will take notice.

Specifically, NCOA^LINK® crooks are costing all of us higher postal rates. They place multiple financial burdens on the USPS^® by claiming discounts not earned and then depositing a higher percentage of Undeliverable As Addressed (UAA) mail into the system. This costs the USPS^® (and ultimately us) twice.

With the coming Intelligent Mail Barcode, the USPS^® will be in a very good position to more easily see which mailers have the highest UAA mail. With this information, increasing the number of audit teams and publicizing ‘busts’ will quickly pay for any increase in required manpower.

Let’s stop subsidizing the cheaters!