Use Big Data to Make Big Impressions with Consumers in 3 Easy Steps

As a consultant, it is important to evaluate the state of your customer's database. The amount and breadth of information available can drastically change the strategy behind customer service, marketing and even product development. As a graduate student studying Integrated Marketing Communications at the Medill School at Northwestern University, I have found two articles that address the ways that business can use customer data improve service, engage their customers and start taking steps into the big data world.

In 5 ways companies are using big data to help their customers, VentureBeat gives a great overview on how companies should be using big data to help predict customer needs and how utilize feedback to improve pain points. They also note how you can improve customer service interactions by having more robust information such as how the customer has engaged with the company socially or any past purchases. For businesses with a customer services focus, making sure the service metrics are being plugged into your database can help you identify trends as they happen, so you can know what to focus your energies on the most important opportunities in real time.

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Still at a loss on how you can make big data work for you? Nicole Fallon of Business News Daily instructs businesses to leverage their internal information to build out customer loyalty programs in her article Boosting Customer Loyalty with Big Data. The loyalty programs, or even a baseline customer newsletter can help engage customers to buy more of your products and boost sentiments towards your brand. This is excellent advice as most business are probably not utilizing their customer data to its fullest and even simple analysis can help you identify customer that could spend more if they were part of a loyalty program.

After analyzing these two articles, here are three action items you need to implement to start tapping the power of big data:

1. Get your data in order

The usefulness of big data can be hindered by what information you have available on your customers. From contact information to purchase history, be sure that you have an accurate and reliable database solution and try to maintain as much information about the customer journey as possible.

2. Listen to your customers

Now that you have some quantitative data on purchase history, work to include qualitative points based on customer feedback to help move your business forward. You can gain insights from surveys, social media monitoring and even service representatives if available. These insights can help make your products and service better for returning and new customers alike.

3. Communicate with your customers

For the majority of small business, more than half of their annual revenue comes from repeat buyers, which makes cross selling your other products key. In addition to introducing new products and services, useful news and best practices for your specific industry can help create value for your brand. Be sure to set goals attached to your outreach, whether they be to increase sales or even just to improve engagement.

Big data can seem daunting depending upon where you are in the process, but by taking small steps you can get headed in path to better utilizing information you already have. If you haven’t gotten started yet though, consider this your wake up call. If you won’t take action and use data to improve your customers interactions with you company, your competitors certainly will.

Jay Hover is the Senior Manager of Customer Engagement at Rakuten Marketing, an ecommerce marketing services firm specializing in affiliate, display, search and retargeting. He oversees internal client communications and is responsible for engaging more than 2,000,000 partners. Jay is currently pursuing his M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications from the Medill School at Northwestern University and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Follow him on Twitter @jmhover or connect via LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaymhover/.

Technology Marketers: Finding the Right Path to Effective Database Marketing

As marketing practitioners in technology industry, one of the topics of great concern for you is how to manage the customer database properly, so as to better allocate resources and turn numbers into helpful insights about your customers. As a graduate student from the Medill IMC program in Northwestern University, I did research on database marketing and discovered two articles that provide insightful ideas on managing quality data.

In his article How to Waste Money and Be Ineffective at Database Marketing, Brad Nelson talks about five things that should be avoided by marketers in doing database marketing. As he points out, to maintain a healthy and effective customer database, it is essential for marketers to attach importance to database hygiene and target distinct customer segments in different manner based on reasonable segmentation within the database. Moreover, since the cost of acquiring new customers is much higher than maintaining existing ones, more efforts should be taken to develop loyalty programs rather than attract new customers, given the tight marketing budgets. Marketers should also put emphasis on testing and set strategies in doing database marketing, so that they can have a better control of their campaigns and keep on a consistent track throughout the process. 

                                    (Source: http://bdapac.com/blog/tag/database/)


A problem facing marketing data analysts actually lies in the quality content. According to Martin Doyle, data of poor quality can be harmful to brands, while decisions made based on high quality data helps raise the reputation of brands (Why Data Quality Is a Marketing Problem). He argues that poor data quality tend to have a negative impact on marketers’ balancing act. Launching marketing activities based on the poor quality data, marketers may target the wrong group of customers with ineffective method, which will finally lead to a waste of resources and even damage to the brand image. Only data with high quality can provide meaningful hints on customer recruitment and retention.

Based on the two articles regarding database marketing, there are three actions you need to take now to better manage their customer data.

 

1.     Establish Quality Measures – Get rid of irrelevant and out-of-date data which would have negative impact on the overall quality of the database. This helps to make the database clean and organized, preventing the interference of data that are irrelevant or misleading.

2.    Maintain Data Consistency – Create certain criteria to standardize data in preparation for further analysis. By doing so, the customer data will be consistent, which will improve the efficiency of data filtering and processing. 

3.   Align with Marketing Objectives – Make the database an important tool to achieve the marketing objectives. Alignment between the database and the marketing objectives will keep marketers on the right track and prevent them from being distracted.  

The era of big data brings both opportunities and challenges for modern marketers. While database marketing allows you to have a comprehensive view of the customers, it at the same time poses problem on data quality. As a Data Manager, you need to keep it a relevant, accurate, and focused asset for your company. Following the actions above, you will find a right path to effectively manage your customer data.

Mo Chen is a Master of Science candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University with focus on digital analytics. She had previous working experience in media companies and public relations agencies.

Questions and comments? Contact me on Twitter @MoChen_IMC or LinkedIn.

Want to Deepen Your Customer Engagement? Gamification is the key.

According to “The State of Loyalty Programs 2013”, a report from Forrester Research, more than half of companies value their loyalty programs as strategic priorities but the bottom line is that only 16% of their customer bases are motivated by loyalty rewards. For senior executives in the marketing field, the focus of loyalty programs should be shifting from offers and discounts to engagement and emotion. As a graduate student in Northwestern University’s Medill IMC program, I have been exploring the values and strategies of integrating “Gamification” concept into loyalty programs. I found two interesting articles about the “Gamification” concept and made three suggestions for executives who want to gamify your loyalty programs strategically.

Perka post: Five factors that turn your loyalty program into a successful game

Recently, Perka post posted a great article by Zach Grossman: How to “Gamify” Your Customer Loyalty Program. It gave a definition to the “Gamification” concept and also examined the five psychological motivations that made the concept compelling: 1) the social communal factor; 2) the recognition factor; 3) the time factor; 4) the challenge factor; 5) the fun factor. Adding “game mechanics” to the loyalty programs means deeper engagement and measurable changes in customer behavior that impact the bottom line.

Loyalty360^TM: Too many loyalty programs look alike and there needs to be differentiation spearheaded by engaging experiences.

Loyalty 360^TM recently put up an article: Gamification Isn’t About “Slapping Badges on Everything”, about the inspirational speech given by Kirk, Senior Director Digital Strategy, for Bunchball, at the 6th annual Loyalty Expo. “Gamification” should be a fun thing, Kirk said. He also gave a definition to the economics of fun. According to him, a fun thing should have five key elements: a certain level of difficulty, a certain amount of friends, a certain amount of interesting strangers, a certain amount of reward, and a certain amount of opportunity.

Three Suggestions for Marketing Executives to Gamify Your Loyalty Programs Strategically

 As I digged into these two articles and analyzed other industry “Gamification” practices, I come up with three actionable suggestions that marketing executives need to consider while integrating the concept into your loyalty programs in a strategy way.

1.     It’s not about a game. It’s about engagement.

“Gamification” does not replace your content with a game like Candy Crush. It is about leveraging the psychological motivations of “game mechanics” to engage people with your product in a way that highlights the product’s benefits and adds real value. It just refines the way people interact with your content.

2.     “Gamification” cannot come stand-alone. The “reward” offers should be personalized to reflect customer’s real interest.

To a company, having a loyalty program is just like sitting on the gold line of consumer data. “Reward” offer is not just about transactions and discounts but also presents an opportunity for consumers to experience what they want.

3.     Engagement Measurement and Optimization

The final step is to measure the performance through selected KPIs and identify the areas that could be further refined. Does the game-like interface trigger more responses or viral spread of messages among consumers? Does the personalized offer create real values for the consumers? By answering these questions, you can further maximize your customer engagement.

Engagement is the currency of a digital world. Gamification + loyalty program = maximum engagement. So why still wait? Take actions now and gain an edge over your competitors.

Jessie Guo is a MS candidate in Northwestern’s Integrated Marketing Communications program and anticipates receiving her degree in December 2013. She is passionate about crafting stories based on data analysis and is now seeking job opportunities in marketing analytics and research, especially database marketing/CRM, loyalty marketing, multi-channel marketing/E-commerce and email marketing. Follow her on twitter @jesieguoxiaoxi. 

Photo source: http://blog.getperka.com/perkapost/gamify