While 94 percent of surveyed marketers agree that personalized marketing would result in better performance, only 16 percent of best-in-class companies actually execute one-to-one direct marketing campaigns, according to Aberdeen Group. A fundamental reason for the low rate of implementation is the lack of data quality disciplines and the limited personal attributes on file to support personalized marketing communications.
Is your marketing database ready for customized marketing messaging? Can you transform your customer database to support personalized marketing? The following will provide some answers to these questions as well as helpful tips for getting the execution right.
Personalization, 2010-Style
Advanced personalization has gone far beyond greetings and salutations. Targeted marketing includes personalized copy, creative, channel and timing decisions based on each individual's situation. The 84 percent of the best-in-class companies not executing personalized marketing campaigns carry the ball down to the 90-yard line but don't cross the relevancy goal line. They model and screen to a highly targeted base of prospects, and then they develop copy, creative, offers, etc., with little to no knowledge of the personal situation of each prospect. Hence, the incremental lift in performance is never realized.
Data quality drives attribute append rates. Append rates drive model performance. And model performance drives ROI. Personalization delivers incremental ROI, beyond model performance. If you are optimizing these disciplines, you are ready to achieve an incremental performance of up to 200 percent by implementing personalization.
Completeness, Accuracy and Currency
A number of fundamentals, when optimized, increase the likelihood of success with personalization:
- Refreshing your marketing database, at least monthly, for all records, attributes and campaign history.
- Separating your targeting practices for customers, contacts and prospects to fully exploit the transactional data across contacts and customers.
- Reaching the correct person within each household.
- Constructing response and conversion models with the most current channel-specific campaign history.
- Omitting "no hopes" or outliers from the modeled base.
- Reaching prospects via their preferred channels.
- Synthesizing modeled bases with response lists.
- Ensuring you approach customers, contacts and prospects differently.
In addition, implementing database quality management disciplines paves the way for more relevant communications. For example, be sure to consolidate customer and prospect information from all channels and establish a unique ID per customer regardless of the purchase location or method. A typical customer database contains up to 15 percent duplicate records. Cleaning and consolidating your database should take place at the individual and household levels. Key components of a successful matching process and unique ID
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The Business of Database Marketing
