We’ve all heard the analogy of using a “rifle” approach to marketing as opposed to a “shotgun” approach. In other words, make sure your message, though broad in its reach, resonates with the most targeted group of people possible. How can we apply this to direct mail? Well, it may mean you are sending out different offers, or even different collateral, rather than the same piece to everyone on your list.

Here’s an example. Customer A spends more with you than Customer B. You want to reward the loyalty of Customer A while enticing Customer B to spend more. The solution for most marketers is to send a 20% off coupon to everyone. While this will probably make both customers happy, a more effective approach would be to justify it differently with different terminology. Customer A would get a piece thanking them for their loyalty and offering the discount for such. Customer B would get a piece that tells them you want to see more of them, hence the discount. Both customers get the reward, but the message would be specific to the individual.

The problem is making it easy to identify each customer, and is how much they spend the best way to divide them up? Other ways to identify customer segments, and therefore potential offers, might be:

• How long have they been a customer
• Income levels
• Home owners vs. renters
• Urban vs. suburban residence
• Age
• Presence of children
• Education level
• And many more…

At Altair Customer Intelligence, we specialize in helping you reach your customers and maximizing your message to each segment. We can analyze your customer database and break them into segments that make sense. You can then target your message to your customers in a unique way, so that each customer gets a message that means the most to them, increasing the likelihood they will act on the offer.

Is real-time customer intelligence a necessity or just nice to have? That is the question you need to ask yourself. There is no question that real-time will be more expensive, and can be more cumbersome, if it’s not set-up and automated properly. One of the key applications where real-time customer intelligence is necessary is website lead scoring. Here is an example where real-time customer intelligence was used effectively for website lead scoring:

A national car manufacturer that generates 10′s of thousands of leads per month that were distributed to their dealers wanted to prioritize the leads. Of course, in the automobile purchase category, time was very important. On the other hand, as many as 70% of leads generated never purchased. Dealers were getting discouraged claiming that leads were not good, thus driving the conversion rate even lower.

To solve this problem, we took lead activity for the past 90 days and built a series of models that predicted likelihood to buy in the next 30 days and ability to qualify or pay. A ranking score was developed based on the manufacturers needs to help prioritize leads for the dealers. As leads came in, in real time, they passed through a routine that cleaned the data, appended additional external data, ran the model, and applied the lead score. The leads were then returned to the customer to be distributed to dealers. The result of the program was a 42% increase in conversions of leads to purchase.

With the right mix of strategy, technology, and analytics you can leverage customer intelligence in real-time to make quicker, better, decisions. If you have specific questions about your particular application, and if real-time CI is right for you, contact us for a free consultation on real-time analytics and scoring.

Who hasn’t seen a P90X infomercial and Tony Horton talk about muscle confusion to remove the plateau effect of weight training?  The concept is you change your routine to not allow your muscles to adapt to the effort and therefore continually improve.  Customer Intelligence removes that plateau effect or lag within a company’s marketing, product development and business strategy.  Customer Intelligence crosses business silos using data from throughout your company in conjunction with external information to derive insights and strategy that keep pace with your customers.  Keeping pace with your customers requires vigilance in updating the data, analyzing it and making decisions in the most automated fashion possible.

Automation of this process is a key contributor to the success. It removes the plateau/lag you see in traditional measurement solutions.   The Information Age is a two-way street; your customer is better informed than ever before.  What this means is if you aren’t communicating via the channels your customers use in a voice they will listen to you will not have their attention.  Customer Intelligence informs you on channel, the behavior of customers within that channel as well as the benefits and features they are most likely to care about.  With every change in technology the consumer has seen an exponential jump in the number of marketing touches they experience in a day.  These touch technologies require information gathering, analysis and decisioning.  Your CI system will be the repository and engine behind your success.

Once in place your CI system will improve acquisition results, grow your customer’s product usage and retain customers longer.  This shift is exactly like the example P90X uses to show you the effects of their training system.

Remove the plateau