Predictive marketing analytics
Just like last year, there was lots of focus on this area. The idea is based on “Attract, grow, retain and risk”.
Attract: Look at your current customers, who are the good ones that you would like more of, identify their characteristics and try to attract more of the same kind.
Grow: It is cheaper to up sell to current client than to recruit a new. Look at your customers, who has scope to buy more/other services from you? Are you currently categorising your customer, A,B, C? Are you using your time on the right group, who can be pushed to move up a category?
Retain: In the current economic climate lots of companies are loosing customers. Talk to the customers who have left you, identify why they left and based on this you can predict who else is likely to abandon your services due to the same reasons. This of course gives you the opportunity to “fix” the problem before they leave.
Risk: Everyone has bad customers! Those who don’t pay well, those who always complain, those who only buy the special offers and don’t generate any £profit for you. Identify who they are, and actually it might be better to gently let them go…
Content and landing pages
Lots of talk about content and landing pages! Emphasis on presenting customers with exactly the content relevant to them, which makes them more likely to convert. Lots of money is being spent trying to identify what content would be best to show to individual users, in “Amazon style” where they serve up the content it believes is most relevant to you.
For email campaigns, everyone emphasises the importance of making them very targeted and using targeted landing pages and sub sites when people click through from your email. If you say “Dear Joe” in your email, when people click through your web site should still recognise “Joe”.
When designing your landing pages, keep in mind that 95% of the visitors to the page probably won’t convert here and now, so give them something else to looks at, come back to, encourage them with…
Make sure to re-send your email to anyone who didn’t open it the first time, this can easily increase your opening rate with 50%. Of course to do this you must use some kind of software to measure your opening rates etc.
Targeted, behavioural marketing
This isn’t new, but the message gets ever stronger: you must make your marketing as targeted as possible!
However, what is slightly new, is that there is a move from the old traditional segmentation methods of looking at your age, post code and type of car to actually trying to identify quite personal preferences.
Companies are now studying what customers are talking about in emails and chats, looking through the call centre notes, looking at which specific links they clicked in your email marketing, which links they clicked on the web site to find out their opinion about things, to identify their new desires and preferences.
This kind of data analysis may be unrealistic for very small companies, but it is worth keeping in mind that this is what the big companies are now doing!
Mobile – this is the year
When is mobile marketing really going to get big? It is big, and 2010 is forecasted to be a really big year for this! 100,000 facebook users access their account via their mobile every day. The big names like Oasis, Coast and Warehouse are using mobile systems where you send a txt in store to get a discount on the purchase, txt messages are used more and more for sending booking reminders to people which substantially reduces the amount on “no –show” people. There are endless opportunities with mobile coming out and it is something you should think about for your business.
Social media
We were told that Foursquare could become the next big thing, anyone hear of this??? You can list your venue and encourage people to visit you and give them rewards for visiting you lots. For example if you are a coffee shop you might give a free coffee to people the 10th time they visit you, or your most frequent visitor becomes “Mayor” of your venue. It is all linked to mobile technology which can for example prompt people in the area to come and visit your venue. It all looks quite American at the moment, but you can find out more on their web site http://foursquare.com/
Dave Chaffey
Dave Chaffey was one of the Key Note speakers and gave a very interesting talk about “Optimising the digital marketing mix. We have included his slides below, but you can also visit his new web site for more resources http://www.smartinsights.com/
Dave is an author, consultant and trainer specialising in E-commerce and E-marketing education and guidance. We are very excited that we also managed to quickly talk to Dave after his presentation and we are exploring the opportunities for him to come as a guess speaker at one of our eBusiness Champions events.
You can now view all the presentations, including the key note speakers from the day online http://www.seminarstreams.com/TFM&A-2010.asp
