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.

Despite the dark cloud over the financial markets, it's an exciting time to attend the November 18-20 Bank Administration Institute (BAI) conference in Orlando.  World markets have been in a tailspin, a wide assortment of industry acquisitions, bailouts and bankruptcies are in abundance, while the consumer lending crisis seems to be at the center of an economic firestorm. Attendees will be eager to hear Colin Powell's comments, as well as an impressive array of other speakers ranging from George Stephanopoulos to Arkadi Kuhlmann (President/CEO of ING Direct) to Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company.  

Conclusive Marketing will exhibiting at the show highlighting our data management, data intelligence and data delivery proficiencies, alongside MicroStrategy, our chosen vendor for business intelligence and data analysis solutions.  The timing seems ripe for the industry to respond to a very challenging marketing environment whereby there must be marketing integration to ensure that all facets of programs work together to achieve the highest possible return on investment.

Conclusive's Event Driven Marketing platform provides a compelling option for banks to identify and prioritize customers who are in the midst of anomalistic transaction behavior; while our data delivery services offers banks tightly integrated methods of ensuring that each customer meriting communication receives communication.  Our relationship with MicroStrategy adds an extra array of value added solutions for the banking industry, solutions that particularly ensure  management can attentively monitor key customer-facing metrics.

If you are out in Orlando for the show, drop by to booth 1251 and let's trade thoughts about the changes you are facing, and what the perspectives of our keynotes and colleague presenters imply for these dynamic times. 

October the 21st Conclusive Marketing (www.conclusivemarketing.com) and MicroStrategy (www.microstrategy.com) released a press release announcing how Conclusive is adopting MicroStrategy technology to put Business Intelligence ("BI") right in the middle of our services. 

To the casual onlooker that might look like a ho-hum technology announcement, but in the marketing services arena this is a meaningful signal how marketing paradigms are shifting from simply executing communications to continuously searching for improved ROI by analyzing programs.  Its not enough to outfit tomorrow's marketer to simply perform direct marketing, they need to be properly tooled to view the macro and micro condition of their programs.  We believe in a highly automated data-driven future and Conclusive is seriously investing to ensure that our clients can transition into this paradigm with us. 

Without recent tools like MicroStrategy, firms' analyzing marketing programs have all too often relied on one or two staff who know both how to think about marketing analysis and also how to engineer the data for analysis.   With MicroStrategy, however, the data engineering is out of the way and all the analysts can actually focus on, (catch this!) analysis.  The MicroStrategy report and charting options are attractive and easy to use by anyone in the marketing department.   And the impact can be dramatic. 



One client, an agency for a major automotive OEM, reports that it now takes them 10 minutes to examine data that used to take 8-10 hours to digest.  More of their team members can contribute to the analytic process, as the task of doing so is now focused on viewing, as opposed to managing the data.  And with the time savings, the resources now have the "luxury" of digging deeper into analysis.

So there is now definitely some BI in the middle of Conclusive Marketing.  MicroStrategy could be our middle name.
 

What times we live in  ... the cover title of DIRECT magazine proclaims "Mad Money" in August 2008 and "What Downturn?" in September 2008 as Wall Street registers its first dip below 10,000 in years just a week before the October 2008 DMA Conference.

How is it that those headlines could co-mingle?  Were the circumstances related to the DIRECT articles simply darting in and out to be replaced by an economy that arrived as quick as the season's first turn in weather?  Was data on the Dow's decline misleading?  Or were there people at Wall Street or DIRECT that simply missed the story?

As practictioners of direct marketing, and particularly as experts with data analysis, we are much better positioned than our public to make sense of these paradoxical times.  We recognize that both our headlines are true -- the economic downturn is striking, but there is still room for success if we can cull through data and identify that event, that moment in time, that each consumer returns to purchase products.  

Of course our margin for error is getting smaller - a lot smaller. To be prepared for precision marketing, we need to sharpen our data management - search for new sources, perform thorough data processing to cleanse it more thoroughly, incorporate data analysis services to elevate our knowledge about consumers and generally do all we can to optimize our marketing information.

Recognizing the challenge suggested by today's headlines, the vital ingredient is to conduct integrated marketing, to link all that data management to the point in time that clean data is relevant -- the seemingly narrower and narrowing point in time that each consumers' purchasing window is actually open.  And that, dear reader, implies that marketing must evolve to event driven marketing solutions. 

Mad Money will be on display at the DMA next week when the convention center opens its Starbucks and $4 coffee stands right in front of marketers, marketers who are staring this economy straight in the face.  But the product will be right, the prospects will be thirsty and the timing will be right.  Marketers will smell the coffee and buy that event driven solution.  Now, we just need to fix that Dow ...

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.