If you are looking for improvements to your marketing campaigns, predictive modeling can oftentimes give you just the lift you need.  If you have the time, the data and the money, a custom predictive model will usually yield the best results. For the rest of you, a product-specific shelf model may be just the ticket.

First, what is a shelf model?  A shelf model is a predictive model built on product or channel-specific data that can be used by any company for their direct marketing campaigns.  Shelf models are best used in customer acquisition, customer cross-sell and customer attrition scenarios.

The best aspect about shelf models is they can be deployed immediately and the initial cost is just the cost of the data (mailing list or email list).  On the other hand, custom models can take weeks to develop (most of our custom models are completed in less than 2 weeks) and even longer to validate and perfect.

At Altair, we have had success in banking models for home equity, checking and auto lending, in insurance for auto, home, mortgage insurance, Medicare Advantage and long-term care, in mortgage for prime refinance, FHA/VA in the market, and reverse mortgages.

Another great benefit for shelf models is to bridge the time between completion of a custom model.  By employing a crawl, walk, run strategy, you can start with shelf models and move into custom models much quicker than just waiting on a custom model.

They made a lot of people angry. A lot of people left, or downgraded their service. They took a beating in the stock market and lost shareholders a ton of cash. How did they justify these moves? With research. They said their research told them more people used the streaming service (or were moving that direction), and the DVD business would soon be obsolete. Therefore, in order to keep what might one day be a dying business from tearing down a profitable one, they separated them. It all sounds good on paper, but they forgot one thing – their customer’s opinions.

Sometimes we need to look past what the data is telling us, and listen closely to our customers. Had Netflix done this, they might have realized that their customers weren’t upset just over a price hike, but more over the perceived value (or lack thereof) of the service. The rate hike may have made sense on paper, but wasn’t justified when their customers already felt they weren’t getting the best deal.

Remember that part of great marketing is knowing your customer – not just the transactions, but the needs, behaviors and attitudes as well. Before you make the next big decision, consider that along with the financial data. It will be wiser and more informed.

This survey appears to be about use – which is only a portion of what loyalty is to a brand. I, too, use online sites more often when there is a discount.  That doesn’t mean I’m loyal. At best, it means I’m a mercenary trying to get the best price on something. Loyalty is “choosing one brand above another regardless of price based on how that brand performs for you, fits into your life, or even aligns with your aspirations.”

How do you measure that? Simple. Ask them questions. To develop a sense of who your loyal customers are, and why they are loyal, you have to ask them. Ask them questions in these categories:

• Overall satisfaction with the brand
• Product-level satisfaction
• Timeliness of delivery
• Customer service process satisfaction
• Returns and exchange process satisfaction

True loyalty indicators come from questions about:

• Interest in new potential products and services
• Willingness to repurchase
• Willingness to recommend
• What influenced the purchase

When you combine the attitudes and behaviors from a survey, data from your client file, and outside data, that is how you end up with the best way to discern loyalty.  You will weed out mercenaries and focus on the consumers that truly engage with your brand.

The other day, I was shopping at Harris Teeter.  Okay, I confess—there is no ATM in my neighborhood, so I ran into the store with my son and grabbed the first decent thing I saw.  It just happened to be a pack of Double Stuff Oreos.  The Halloween edition with the Orange filling instead of white.  So, my son and I head over to the self-pay check-0ut line.  I dutifully scan my Harris Teeter VIC Card—I’m sure Harris Teeter spent many hours and dollars coming up with the name VIC, but I have no idea what it stands for other than I have to use it to get great discounts.  Anyway, after scanning my VIC card and letting my son scan the barcode on our soon to be devoured pack of Oreos, the register asks me “Do you have any coupons?”  My son hit the No button.  Next, the screen asks me “Are you eligible for our Over 60 discounts?”

Whoa!!??  Hold everything.  Why is this cash register wondering if I’m 60?  Do I look 60?  And why, after many trips to this Harris Teeter did they just now decide to ask me if I’m 60 years old?  Do a lot of 60 year olds buy Halloween Double Stuff Oreos?  This is all going through my mind in a flash.  I must admit, I was a bit offended.  I don’t know if any other Harris Teeter customers are feeling the same way or not, but it made me wonder.

Age is an easily obtained demographic.  First, you could just ask for it on your loyalty application.  Or you could simply append it from voter, drivers license, and self-reported data.  It is the most accurate compiled demographic category–other than gender.  The great thing about age is it’s not going to change.  So, once you apply it to your file, you have it.  Then, you can begin offering discounts–like Harris Teeter is–based on age without making some customers feel left out.  Also, you can begin segmenting your customers by age based on purchased habits and begin targeting your marketing better based on what your customer wants.

One final thought.  Can you imagine having your store clerks ask your customers, “Excuse me sir, are you 60 years old?  I want to see if you are eligible for our 60 Rewards Club.”  If you can’t foresee having your clerks ask, don’t have your cash register or kiosk ask either.  There are much better ways of getting the information you need.  Oh yeah, and drivers license data doesn’t lie!

This model allows brands to truly leverage the strength of peer recommendations.  We’ll all trust someone we know over a generic add or celebrity endorsement.  Audi, Disney, Popchips and Lot18 all are using Klout Perks for the launch of products.  It makes total sense!

Not only will your product be supported by people who are trusted by peers you’ll be collecting enormous amounts of data that will help you better understand why they like it, what influences the purchase by the peers, what purchases are made and for how much, and the ability to align the reward accordingly. Integrating this with offline data only makes your profiling, segmenting and predictive capabilities stronger.

Brilliant!

While the advertising element is still there, three very crucial elements are now at stake: Credibility, timeliness and relationship. Do you think more, or less of the companies that you now know have incorrect information? On a credibility scale, these companies have dropped a notch or two in most recipients’ books, simply because their data is wrong. If they can’t get your name right, can you trust them?

Let’s turn the tables around for a minute and move from the prospect’s perspective, to a business perspective. Obviously data integrity is of utmost importance with any mail campaign, and many companies have become more aware of NCOA processing, mainly due to more stringent regulations set by the USPS since 2008 (and of course, the postal discounts that come with that coveted NCOA certificate).

But the benefits of NCOA processing go far beyond a postal discount.

While maybe you suppress your current customers from your upcoming mail campaign, do you still know where your current customers live?

With Altair Customer Intelligence’s unique product line-up, we cater to client’s needs by outlining NCOA specifics. Here are some key elements that you should always ask when it comes to NCOA:

1. What is your NCOA time-frame window?

NCOA tracks moves in blocks by months. Most NCOA processing tracks moves within the past 18 months. Anything beyond may or may not be captured. While 48 –month processing is available, it is not typically the standard.

2. Should I NCOA my customer file?

You should always NCOA your customer file for a mail campaign, but it is at your discrepancy whether or not to NCOA the file for suppression purposes. There are many moves that might not have a forwarding address. At Altair we give the option to retain original addresses as well as new addresses in order to reduce the chance of re-prospecting your customers.

3. When was my data file processed through NCOA?

This is important to receive the postal discount. The current USPS standard is that your data file be processed through NCOA in the past 90 days.

4. What happens to the records that match in NCOA (the movers)?

This is an important aspect of the NCOA processing. Depending on your product and projected prospect group, the decision to keep or drop these records is an important decision. At Altair our experienced sales team can coach you through these decisions in order to achieve your goal. While a New Mover campaign would benefit from keeping the records with new addresses, a Home Refinance campaign might not. There are many ways that this processing could also work as a suppression step when trying to eliminate movers within a certain timeframe.

Most companies collect enormous amounts of data about their customers but few use this data effectively to improve their marketing efforts.  Data about the results of marketing campaigns is often not turned into actionable reports and even then it often does not make it to an audience that can utilize the information.  Luckily it is easier today to discover which half of your budget is being wasted.

Tools to analyze data and create interactive reports for distribution to wide audience have made it possible to make sense of the piles of data collected by companies.  Until recently these tools were out of the price range of all but the largest users.  Now with the advent of software as a service (SaaS) these powerful tools can fit into even the smallest budget.

Altair has partnered with one of the leading BI reporting tool providers to add online analytics and reporting to our suite of marketing services.  Sonar provides the best information at the correct level, from the executive to the analyst. We have a proven track record of rolling out analytical dashboards that allow users to easily drill into the data and find where their marketing dollars are being misspent and how to place marketing budget effectively.

Make the most of the content generated by linking it to your “offline” data.  Including Social Data in the CDI mix takes more finesse than traditional CDI.  Some data such as comments and reviews generated by users with shared information on your brand site or Facebook page can be directly linked while other content will need categories or buckets built to collect them such as using the combination of channel, location and/or product.  Knowing this will allow you to optimize your communication and SEO.

The Infographic below is a study conducted by beyond, www.bynd.com.  Understanding this is step 1, step 2 is integrating the data, and step 3 is taking action!

Social Data

Even if there was a lower income stream wouldn’t it be better than no income stream?  The data tells us this customer is ripe to refinance. I’m not advocating that banks lose money to make customers happy but the potential to keep customers and have insane referral rates seems like a very high potential.  I know I’d tell everyone of my friends that my lender put me in a lower rate because I qualified.

At the moment that hasn’t happened and when the need or ability arises for me to refinance, my current lender isn’t my first choice.

You’ve done your QC along the way and everything is checking out.  You expect the output file to be correct but simple practice of opening the file and looking at it can sometimes expose errors that no one thought would slip by in the processing.  This is especially true when processing systems run in one format and output files are created in another.

Performing some simple analysis on the output file such as running min and max frequencies on the output fields can determine if correct criteria was used in the selection process as well as validate the data in that field.   Looking at each frequency with the expectation of what is possible provides the verification necessary to ensure proper validation.  At Altair we require our Operations team to supply our QC team with output reports that are used in the verification that file was run correctly.  Having this focus on the output, as one of many QC points, adds an extra level of security for both Altair and our clients.