Contact strategy: Let data be your guide

Reaching consumers with personalised messages and campaigns that help them make purchases is a goal all marketers strive for. In today’s digital environment, where consumers are inundated with more than 5,000 brand exposures per day, marketers risk over-connecting with consumers. It is important to take a step back and evaluate response data to ensure that you are making the right connections with consumers, with the right vehicle, when they are ready to be communicated to and in the moments that matter.

It’s imperative marketers develop and implement a knowledge-based contact strategy that leverages intelligence to guide the cadence and content of messaging across channels.

So how can you gain this intelligence? It starts with data. Performing a segmentation analysis gives marketers insights into engagement recency and frequency, channel-specific purchase data and enables smart segmentation.

From working with a variety of retailers, I’ve seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t. Recently, I had the opportunity to perform a data analysis on a health and beauty supply retailer, which resulted in three recommendations for the retailer. These recommendations, backed by data insights, included:

• An increase in lifecycle and personalised messaging
• Prioritisation of converting single-channel shoppers to multichannel shoppers
• Exploration of varied treatment for dormant subscribers versus the brand's standard approach of a nine-month rolling suppression.

We learned that 44 percent of new subscribers do not engage, and 71 percent have yet to make a purchase. This insightful data guided the retailer’s future marketing decisions.

Communication strategies must be fluid and adapt in real-time based on the needs and desires of an audience. Each audience has different needs and it’s now more important than ever that marketers understand these needs and differences between groups.

It’s important to understand these individual needs and their purchase behaviours. For example, we use detected behaviour to define four key segments:

• Most valuable customer (opener or clicker at least five times in the past three months)
• Superstar (opener or clicker in the past three months)
• Napper (opener in the last four to nine months or clicker in the last four to 12 months)
• Dormant (no open in more than nine months or no click in more than 12 months)

It’s about identifying what the consumers are doing with the brand given the communication connection, and it applies to any channel. Once the data is appended to the consumer's profile, you can establish patterns leading to the placement of customers into a variety of segments. Then, you can identify how to best communicate with the individual segments based on their behaviour (and what we know about them).

Having this knowledge enables marketers to plan communication strategy based on data—the facts. It removes the guesswork and the ‘one-size-fits-all approach’ while enabling smart segmentation.

Stacie Tureson is vice president and general manager at Epsilon