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.

Okay, returning to the headache. The USPS has hopefully relieved some of their pain, but now many in the mailing business are starting to feel more than a little discomfort, trying to wrap their brains around the regulations, the costs, the PAF forms that are required, explaining these new requirements to their Standard mailers, managing the time required, and a host of issues.. Well at the risk of extending this whole headache analogy too far, Listcleanup.com can be your aspirin or Tylenol, depending on how much pain you may be in at the moment.

We been helping people migrate through NCOA^Link™, and move update qualifications since the whole thing started back in 1997. For more than a decade, over 2,500 companies have trusted us for timely, efficient and cost-effective solutions. Along the way, we've added other services, tailored to provide our direct marketing clients an edge over their competition. Yet through it all, there are a few core values that have never wavered; a focus on customer service, sales and IT support, a seamless online order process that insures reliable, timely delivery of your orders and flexible pricing .

As my colleague, Bill Brennan, mentioned in a recent post, should you take on an in-house solution given all variables that will come into play, before speaking with us first? We have the answers, we can make this whole move update “challenge” simple, easy, and even better, we can show you how to earn revenue providing this service to your client.

Why bother with the headache, when you can call us.

Today the focus was on the move update changes, just around the corner. Down the road we’ll look into the range of data management services we can provide, all pointed in the same direction, what can we do to improve your direct mail bottom line ?

http://www.listcleanup.com/content/Default.aspx

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?

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.

Forecasting the need for standalone online NCOA services is a function of five intersecting variables: USPS regulations, ACS Options, Software Integration, Internalization, and competitive offerings. 

The largest impact on NCOA services in the last 10 years is the USPS’s change to the Move Update regulations.   Beginning in November of this year, the new regulations will add Standard Mail and double the frequency requirement to 95 days.

With this projected increase in demand comes more options and changing economics.    For some larger mailers, the regulation may make it cost effective to bring the processing in house.  These larger mailers are also more likely to have already purchased industry specific software that includes integrated flat rate NCOA services.   Finally, the changing options with ACS services may be optimal for some clients who don’t need to clean a list before it is mailed.

However, for the vast majority of smaller to medium size mailers, nothing is easier or less costly than using an on demand, online NCOA service.    No software to buy, no hardware to buy, no agreements to sign, and no payments in advance.    Combine these benefits with sub 10 minute turn times (coming in December) and the benefits of advanced bundled services, and nothing is simpler or less costly for the small to medium size mailer.    Make sure you ask for a competitive rate, and see why even some of the industry's largest mailers still prefer the benefits of working with an independent online list hygiene company.

The Ethics of NCOA Move Update®

Scenario – I own a mailing service and in preparation for the new Move Update regulations coming in November of 2008, I have just signed up for an ‘all you can eat’ NCOALink® 18 month service (NCOA-18), or maybe I have even invested to get my own USPS® NCOALink® license.

Now, as a business owner, I realize the more clients I can run through NCOA-18, with its fixed costs, the more profit I can make.   On the other hand, many of my clients have historically been using the 48 month version of NCOALink (NCOA-48), because it catches more moves and cost only fractionally more than the NCOA-18 service.

As a business owner, do I arbitrarily decide to run all new orders through NCOA-18, justifying it by saying I am sure all the client wants is to secure the postal discount…they are not really that interested in catching the maximum number of moves?   Do I ask the client in such a way that steers them to the answer I want, i.e. “Your primary interest is in saving money and securing the postal discounts, correct?” Or, do I sit down with the client and go over the pros and cons of both NCOA-48 and NCOA-18 and help the client make an informed decision, thereby setting up client specific guidelines for when a file would be processed through NCOA-18 and when it would go to NCOA-48?

Some providers suggest to a client that they run their list through NCOA-48 the first time and NCOA-18 after that.  On the surface, this sounds logical, but if you don’t ask the client what percent of their file is changing/updated every month and how old are the input sources being used to update the file, then this advice may be provided erroneously.

That fact is, a third more moves are caught by NCOA-48 than NCOA-18, and as we all know, the USPS created the Move Update regulations to reduce the amount of Undeliverable As Addressed mail.

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.

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!