We recently were speaking with a potential travel client and were asked to look into why they weren’t seeing the desired engagement from their spend. Once we’d looked into this we realised that the reason for this was quite simply that they were targeting the wrong people. They were targeting big spend clients which in theory makes sense, however following closer examination of the data we found that these were one off ‘big’ spenders that never came back to the site after the first transaction.
In the case of this client, you could see that, by targeting the biggest spenders they were missing out those who spent less per transaction but delivered a higher life time value than the one off spenders. For other brands, the issue is that they know who their target audience should be, but they don’t know how to reach them, and are often investing significant amounts of money in marketing efforts but spending it in the wrong place. Many of us will have been the recipient of the poorly targeted, or timed, marketing message at some point, the email from your travel provider advertising the holiday destination you’ve just returned from, or the piece of DM for the former occupant of your property.
How do you fix this?
Your data needs to be connected across all platforms. First things first, you need to cleanse your data to make sure it’s relevant and up to date before you do anything with it. It’s nothing new to say this, but there really is no point in jumping in neck deep into your direct and digital marketing campaign if half the people you’re trying to contact/ have no interest in you or your product or may not even be the ones receiving the message.
You need specialists in data to review this data to help you understand:
- What your customers looks like
- Who your most profitable customer is
- What is the life time value of a customer and how does that differ through different mediums
- How much do you want to/ do you spend per customer acquisitions
- How does your customer like to interact with you
- What devices your customers interacts with you
- What time of day does your customer interact with you
- How does customers interact with you on what device at what time of day on what platform
Make sure you segment your data and create user profiles, when you’re collecting data make sure you’re focusing on the quality not the quantity and focus on just one campaign at a time!
We deal with so many clients at different levels of maturity and more often than not I’m terrified at the contrast. Below is an example of how you can measure your clients/ your maturity in dealing with data.
- Those that describe and summarise data but do absolutely nothing with it, they can say what happened, why did it happen and ask what’s happening now.
- Those who can categorise their customers data by looking at patterns and trends so they ask based on “X” what is likely to happen?
- Those that can use their customers data to predict what their customer is going to do next
- Finally, those who are prescriptive with data and can predict and pre-empt what their customers will do. They use advanced machine learning to predict the potential outcomes based on complex data from a verity of sources.
There’s nothing wrong with being on the early part of this scale, everyone’s journey starts somewhere but we need to make sure you can walk before you can run!
Tools you should use
- Google Analytics
- Amazon Web Services
- IBM Watson
- Dell
- Microsoft Azure
- Oracle
I use the first 3 but the others are good too.
So how does this all help my site?
Well in short you can Interpret the trends of your customers and use that to predict the future. If I told you that you could potentially have predicted Southgate’s waistcoat, fidget spinners and Pokemon Go wouldn’t you have wanted to know? The how is really simple, we can combined information from social media, ad-buying data, customer habits and even the economy to help you find what is the next must have item.
We can use data to Optimise your pricing. Our data can help you keep real time updates on the best prices on for your products. Walmart does this really well to the point that a single product might not be selling well but when they pair it with another product, the overall sales increase!
You always need data to do your forecasting. Using your data, you can predict traffic to your site, what products will sell well, you can even factor in the holidays seasons. This something Amazon do really well using their Amazon Web Services.
Last but by no means least, data can help you get more sales. Not just in the ways I’ve described throughout but with the biggest killer in eCommerce, cart abandonment. Worldwide cart abandonment accounts for $3.38 trillion of forfeited sales! (Apple x3 + 1/3!) and the UK makes up £2.1 million of that! The average cart abandonment worldwide over all industries is 76% and most of this can be avoided just by using your data, how? By using the data you’ve collected on your customer to reengage with your customer. Because you know how, when and where your customer likes to be interacted with, you can reengage with them and reduce your cart abandonment by at least 47%. Not only that but by interacting with your customer in a positive way, you raise your brand profile and strength with your customers.
Any of these points hitting home? Your struggling with? or you’d like some more information?