A Joint White Paper from Experian Marketing Services and Alteryx

Five Tips to EngageAlways-On

Consumers

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Let’s face it — omnichannel engagement is a reality, and it’s here to stay. Today’s customers no longer interact with organizations through a single channel. With 60 percent of consumers browsing online before making an in-store purchase1, and mobile devices responsible for 48 percent of all online traffic2, it’s easy to see that the traditional customer funnel is dead. Consumers are now making initial purchasing decisions before stepping foot in store.

These revelations make it difficult to continue conducting business as usual. In fact, expectations for omnichannel engagement have increased. Personalization is no longer an added bonus for consumers; it’s a requirement, compelling companies to acquire more insights about their customers than ever before. Furthermore, customers expect you to optimize outreach through their preferred channels. As hyperconnected consumers are inundated with competing offers and messages across multiple channels, they will pay attention to the ones that deliver the right message, via their preferred medium. This begs the question: How much do you really know about your customers?

The modern consumer is blessed with choices and pressed for time. For many marketers, the always-on consumer is an enigma. How do you even begin to catch their attention, let alone build loyalty?

The good news is you’re not alone. Here are five tips to successfully engage always-on consumers.

1 Nielsen Global Survey of E-commerce, Q1 20142 IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, Dec., 2013

The traditional customer funnel is dead.

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1The first step to engaging with today’s consumer starts with understanding who they are. For example, it’s important to know that the same customer who was surfing your website from his or her tablet yesterday, also returned merchandise in person to your store last week, or provided product reviews on social media this morning. As marketers, we tend to see all of these activities as separate events, not connecting them to the same customer or a buying event. To consumers, however, these are just ways in which they engage. The true challenge for the omnichannel marketer is to identify these multiple touch-points as interactions by a single customer and to remove disconnects that frequently occur in communication. However, how do you get started when your data is housed in multiple systems, lacks standardization or is even incomplete?

Build a single customer view

Access and blend your data across various systems Siloed systems mean different departments working off different data. The key to keeping all stakeholders happy is to identify where the insight may reside both inside and outside your organization, and blend all the data together to build a foundation for a unified customer view. During the process, you’ll shed light on your own operations and company performance, and gain more consistent insights to help improve decision making.

Ensure the quality of your data Poor-quality data and duplicate records are a waste of your time and budget. By standardizing data in different systems, eliminating duplicate records and expunging common data errors, you can reduce duplicate promotional materials and mailing errors that cost you precious budget dollars, and erode customer confidence and loyalty.

Enrich your organizational data with third-party insights Your own transactional data only gives you limited insight about your customers. Augmenting organizational data with third-party information such as trade area demographics and customer location data can provide richer insights to help localize product assortments, determine customers’ propensity to respond to in-store promotions based on drive times, and optimize site selection.

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Belk Inc., a southern US retailer with more than 300 midrange and upscale department stores found itself struggling to leverage the vast amount of customer data it collected across multiple channels. The challenge? Pull together data from more than 10 disparate databases and use the insights to improve its marketing reach and the customer experience. Using Alteryx, the company quickly blended together the different data types and enriched them with third-party demographic, geospatial and census data to get a single, unified view of the customer including his or her path to purchase, product and channel affinities, and spend levels. Third-party data such as census data for ethnicity information, IRS data for population migration and immigration patterns of a trade area enabled the company to optimize its marketing, make better store opening/closing decisions, personalize marketing interactions and more.

CASE STUDY

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2Once you’ve integrated your customers’ cross-channel data successfully to build a single customer view, it’s time to gain insights. Wheras a single customer view will help bring together the disparate data and systems involved, customer segmentation will help improve your messaging and communication strategy, customer acquisition, cross-sell/up-sell, and retention programs. This will give you a complete and comprehensive understanding of your consumers for accurate targeting and marketing effectiveness.

Segment integrated channel customers

Identify your best customers and find more of them With the right analytical solution, marketers can segment consumers based on attributes that matter most to their business, and analyze those segments to understand that particular audience better. This is imperative in an omnichannel world where organizations are fighting for a consumer’s attention. By gaining a deeper understanding of your organization’s best (and most profitable) customers, you can target segments with similar attributes effectively.

Prioritize and focus dollars on your most value-generating activities Savvy marketers know how to identify the best channels for reaching a specific consumer segment. They also know how to prioritize spending based on different types of marketing programs. The key is to be able to do both successfully. For some segments, this may mean more dollars spent towards improving customer loyalty and retention, while for others, it may require introducing new products and services to address unmet needs.

Unify channels, platforms and processes with a common customer language Improve your customers’ experience across all touch-points with a framework that classifies, describes and targets consumers with a clear, consistent and unified customer value proposition. Communicating this value proposition consistently across all channels will help attract, grow and retain profitable customers and link together campaigns intelligently through newly gained insights.

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CASE STUDY

Room & Board, a nationwide home furnishing retailer, wanted to increase market share by strengthening a loyal customer base, acquiring new customers, and improving short- and long-term productivity. The challenge was discerning the best ways to grow. By using Alteryx and harnessing rich third-party insights from Experian, Room & Board was able to blend and analyze its customer data to determine ideal segments for growth. Today, Room & Board targets 10 key market segments that collectively represent over half of its customers. One of these segments is the Urban Edge segment from Experian’s Mosaic® USA solution. This segment includes younger, up-and-coming singles living big-city lifestyles within the nation’s largest metro areas. By layering this type of segment identifier onto a recent promotional offer targeted to top prospects, the company was able to generate more revenue within the first six weeks of the campaign than was realized in four months from a similar prospecting campaign launched a year prior. By understanding its customers’ product preferences, buying habits and social affinities, Room & Board has been able to target households more accurately and open new stores in competitive locations.

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3The customer’s shopping journey is more complex to navigate with channel proliferation and the always-engaged consumer. With so many different messages and communications channels, marketers need to ensure that messaging and creative designs resonate with their desired audience. To avoid getting drowned in the noise, make sure your messaging stands out. Understand your customers’ product preferences, channel affinity, values, reference base and more to personalize content and optimize product recommendations.

Identify preferred channels for engagement Keeping things top of mind means communicating with customers on their terms, whether that’s direct mail, email, mobile, display or other channels. This is important for any marketer who wants to build a cross-channel communication strategy and improve advertising placement. Use analytically driven insights about your customer preferences to optimize budget allocation across channels and maximize return on investment.

Optimize content and creative decision makingEffectively communicating with always-on consumers means delivering the right messages in the right context. For example, Experian’s TrueTouchSM solution is a content and contact engagement tool that identifies consumer response and motivational messages, and preferred channels for engagement and transacting. TrueTouch touch-points help marketers optimize content and creative decisioning by identifying 11 unique communication themes when delivering motivational messages to your audience.

Test and iterateOnce you’ve identified preferred channels for engagement and optimized messaging, it’s time for testing. Through predictive modeling of customer behavior, you can identify your customers’ propensity to attrite or respond to a campaign. By harnessing the ability to track online data and other assets that are causing sales lifts (or cart abandonment), you can optimize your channel and campaign mix effectively.

Personalize content, messaging and product recommendations

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Using Alteryx and Experian insights from transactional data, a national catalog and online retailer of women’s clothing and accessories was able to partition its customer base into multiple segments. A sizeable group of customers was found to be extremely “price sensitive” with a focus on scoring a great deal. Conversely, another subset of customers was labeled as “image shoppers” who identified with specific brands. In both cases, these customers were further subdivided based on their frequency of purchases. To test overall responsiveness, the retailer varied its messages and offers depending on the most appropriate trigger — price, or image — as identified by Experian TrueTouch. For example, customers who were considered “price sensitive” received marketing messages promoting sales and discounts, while those considered “image shoppers” received a message emphasizing the latest styles without promotional offers that might be perceived as cheapening the brand.

CASE STUDY

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4After building a unified customer view, and segmenting and personalizing your data, it’s time to measure your results. Though sales conversions are often the most valued metrics for marketers, don’t be fooled into thinking they are the only indication of a successful omnichannel strategy. At the end of the day, not every marketing interaction will result in sales, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Remember to include overall customer engagement and quality of experience when reporting results.

Don’t devalue soft metrics “Soft” metrics — such as lifetime value (LTV) of customers, website visits, level of social engagement and interaction experience drivers, like the number of call transfers can be just as valuable as hard metrics, like conversions and call time resolution.

Start with an outcome in sight Many analytic projects fail due to the lack of a clear outcome-based strategy. It’s important to know that you can’t measure all types of things at the same time. Start with a small project focused on base metrics and use the success there to get executive buy-in. Then, add resources and more complex analyses. This will allow you to provide faster insights and quick proof points to executives.

Invest in the right toolsWith the right analytics tools, you can streamline the sharing of data results and insights throughout your organization by integrating powerful reporting and file output capabilities into the same intuitive workflow used for data blending and advanced analytics. Whether your decision makers want static graphs and charts, or rich, interactive data visualizations in Tableau, Qlik or Microsoft Power BI, be sure to select a solution that gives you the flexibility you need to ensure the adoption of analytics throughout your organization.

Measure results, but don’t focus solely on sales

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CASE STUDY

A leading travel and hospitality company wanted to identify promising segments to target based on previous marketing campaign results. These segments were to be utilized to drive additional bookings in an upcoming media campaign. Using a statistical procedure based on decision trees, the company identified several customer characteristics associated with higher booking rates. The results of the tree analysis were not only used to establish a preferred target audience for the addressable media campaign, but also provided future guidance to marketing managers. Testing and learning this way helped the company identify promising segments that were initially hidden from view and likely to change over time.

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5Acquiring new customers can be expensive. It’s simply easier (and cheaper) to retain existing ones. Industry veterans know the best way to do so is by running an effective reactivation campaign. Targeting inactive or dormant customers not only increases revenue without high marketing spend, but also reduces customer churn.

Analyze customer data Analyzing your customer data can help you identify and target at risk to churn segments and create appropriate campaign strategies. Use data to help answer questions such as: Which customers respond to our campaigns? What is the level of engagement for responders? Who has purchased from us in the past?

Identify customer activityOnce you’ve analyzed your customer data, segment it based on activity level. Activities may range from store visits to purchases, or even account transactions, depending on your industry. Here are a few standard segments to consider:

• High risk — customers that account for no activity within the last 12 months, and have greatly reduced their overall level of activity (e.g., trading down subscriptions, reducing account balances)

• Low risk — customers that have no recorded activity during the last 12 months but have not reduced their overall level of activity

Develop messaging strategiesUse your analysis to create highly relevant and compelling offers, messaging, and imagery, as part of your reactivation campaigns. These strategies will differ depending upon the segment you choose to target — meaning it’s just as important to test and iterate now as it was in Tip 3.

Reactivate and re-engage

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Summary

To engage always-on consumers effectively, you need to execute an omnichannel strategy that leverages the power of analytics using your own organizational and third-party data. Doing so requires not only the right analytics solution, but also the right third-party data. Enter Alteryx and Experian.

Alteryx gives analysts the power of sophisticated yet easy-to-use data blending and analytic capabilities at their fingertips. Combined with enriched third-party insights from Experian, you can now engage hard-to-pin-down consumers on their terms and achieve your organization’s growth objectives with a comprehensive omnichannel strategy.

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Why Alteryx and Experian?

Access complete, high-quality dataEliminate data chaos with help from Alteryx and Experian by blending all relevant data across various systems into a single, consolidated view. By improving the quality of your data through name and address standardization, house-holding, duplicate records elimination, and other data error-fixes, you can stop wasting money and annoying customers with redundant promotional materials. Plus, Alteryx can come prepackaged with Experian household, demographic and segmentation data to give you deeper insights into your customers and market.

Gain an intuitive solution that delivers results fastIT resources are scarce, and data scientists are difficult to come by. With Alteryx and Experian, you no longer have to worry about specialist programmers or burden IT. Built specifically for line-of-business analysts and managers, Alteryx provides an intuitive workflow for data blending, analytics and reporting that allows analysts to get the insight they need in minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks. With pre-built data connectors that help you access and integrate virtually any data source, plus easy-to-use spatial and predictive analytics tools, Alteryx simplifies the complex tasks of gathering and blending relevant data and building advanced analytics to help you quickly answer your complicated business questions.

Create a single workflow for data blending and advanced analytics Instead of cobbling together multiple tools from various vendors to get the functionality you require, Alteryx and Experian deliver everything you need in a single, integrated solution, from data blending and enrichment to advanced analytics and reporting. Optimize your marketing without incurring expensive integration and implementation costs, or delaying analysis due to dependence on specialized programmers.

Share analytic results in the format that works Streamline the sharing of insights throughout your organization by integrating powerful reporting and file-output capabilities into the same intuitive workflow used for data blending and advanced analytics. This allows you to present analytic results to each stakeholder in the way he or she understands it best. Whether your decision makers want static reports with graphs and charts, interactive data visualizations in Tableau, Qlik, or Microsoft Power BI or analytic apps to customize their analytic queries, Alteryx and Experian give you the flexibility you need to ensure the adoption of analytics in your organization.

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About Alteryx Alteryx is the leader in data blending and advanced analytics software. Alteryx Analytics provides analysts with an intuitive workflow for data blending and advanced analytics that leads to deeper insights in hours, not the weeks typical of traditional approaches. Analysts love the Alteryx analytics platform because they can deliver deeper insights by seamlessly blending internal, third party, and cloud data, and then analyze it using spatial and predictive drag-and-drop tools. This is all done in a single workflow, with no programming required. Thousands of data analysts worldwide rely on Alteryx daily.

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About Experian Marketing ServicesExperian Marketing Services is a leader in data-driven marketing and cloud-based marketing technology. Experian is the only company in the world to offer a comprehensive Marketing Suite that unites customer insights, analytics, data quality and cross-channel marketing technology into a single platform. Backed by the industry’s highest-rated client services team and the world’s largest consumer database, we provide more than 10,000 brands in over 30 countries with unique competitive advantages through marketing services and technology. Our extended legacy in data security, management and consumer privacy has earned the trust of organizations and consumers from around the world for more than three decades.

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November 2015

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