This is a common scenario for retailers because they do not have a 360° view of their customers across all digital channels, and therefore, are lacking an understanding of their customers’ behaviors. If the retailer was able to identify who my friend was across all channels and recognize that he had already made the appliance purchase, wouldn’t it have made more sense to send him an offer for something else — or at the very least, not show him a discounted price on the item he’d just purchased? What if that retailer was able to connect his purchase (he gave them his name, terrestrial address and email address when he bought the appliance) to their customer database and make the distinction before the discounted email went out?  An email thanking him for his purchase would have made much more sense, and he might have appreciated an offer for an accessory that he hadn’t initially purchased.

Marketers today face unprecedented challenges when it comes to creating and maintaining a holistic view of their customers across their marketing ecosystem. It seems that customer interaction points, particularly in the digital world, continue to multiply on a daily basis. Add in the pressure of customers expecting highly relevant communications when and where they want them, and the business goals of increasing the lifetime value (LTV), and it equates to an increasingly difficult environment in which marketers must work. Finding, consolidating and analyzing data to achieve optimal customer interaction has never been further from us — and yet has never been so close.

With a plethora of tools available, marketers can reach their customers through emails, online profiles, loyalty programs, social network profiles and more. What hasn’t been readily available is the ability to link these digital profiles together, reducing duplication in marketing databases, giving marketers a clear understanding of active and inactive customers, plus who is buying from them, where they are shopping and how they want to be interacted with.

On the surface, this kind of customer information integration seems like a fairly simple task. Underneath however, there are several nuances within customer identity resolution that make this a profoundly difficult task. This isn’t about appending data; it’s about using the data a company already has, housed in multiple databases, and linking it all together through sophisticated matching algorithms that leverage a rich repository of referential data.

To make an integrated marketing strategy work, you need to be able to:

1. Validate contact data in real time, as it is entered online, in-store and over the phone

2. Create linkage of disparate identities and data sets, using merely a single piece of personally identifiable information for any customer

3. Enhance your data with a 360-degree view of your customers

4. Cleanse your data to remove duplicates or inaccurate information

5. Profile your best customers and understand how they want to be reached: mobile, email, catalog, social and more

6. Identify more customers like your best customers

Organizations can build this infrastructure in-house, however the process necessitates a large investment in technology and resources. In addition, the ability to resolve identities would be limited to the pieces of information collected by the organization. By working with an experienced partner who can resolve your customer and prospect identities across mediums, marketers create consistent and coordinated messaging strategies, understand the optimal path to purchase activities, maximize return on marketing investment and create memorable experiences for their customers.

Key take-aways:

• Including the word “exclusive” in email subject lines boosts unique open rates by 14% in promotional mailings
• Emails asking customers to rate and review items they’ve purchased have 32% higher revenue per email
• 85% of real-time welcome emails get opened and have a click rate of 29%
• 91% of online adults are using social media regularly
• Pinterest is the third most visited U.S. social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter
• 28% of 6-11 year olds own a cell phone
• Paid search and banner ads will garner nearly 73% of all U.S. online ad spending in 2012

By leveraging Experian Marketing Services’ targeting solutions such as Experian Hitwise and Audience IQ, Axcess Financial was able to overcome the following challenges:

• Understand which channels and keywords are most effective in driving low cost, qualified traffic to their website
• Identify the segments of consumers with the highest on-site conversion rates
• Understand how their key competitors drive converting traffic
• Find a solution that would ensure display ads were only shown to their target audience segments in precise geographies
• More profitably acquire new customers

Axcess Financial was able to develop a winning online marketing program with outstanding results. in fact, they grew their business by 450% over two years and successfully lower their cost per acquisition (CPA) by 71%.

To learn more, download our latest case study.

These lessons have taken some time to be adopted in the expanding world of digital marketing. From broadcast emails to placing banner ads to capture  eyeballs, the metrics have gravitated towards something new, including actions, conversion, click-throughs and even amount of purchase. Different companies, and even internal groups within companies, use different metrics to determine success. The metrics can be proactive based on strategy, or reactive based on other internal or external factors. Sometimes the approach is forced by competitive pressure, in other cases by the need  to track performance against broader objectives such as budgets or margins. As businesses become more used to the digital arena, segmentation and profiling play an increasingly important role in targeted campaigns.

Enter the new frontier of social marketing. Many questions arise for marketers, generating much discussion in industry groups and conferences: Which platform should I use? Which metrics should be tracked? What is the ROI? What does it drive? Also growing in complexity is the issue of revenue attribution in a multi-channel marketing world, and the role social media campaigns play in overall results. All valid questions, but a big challenge is that many seem to be forgetting a very fundamental question in marketing, regardless of channel, and that is: exactly who we are targeting? What is the difference between the 10 or 10,000 people who ”Like” your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter?

What is the difference between the 10 or 10,000 people who ”Like” your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter?

This is an important question because it raises the issue of relevancy. Look at the marketing efforts in other channels. Do we show the same ad on all channels? What about print ads in magazines? Is every customer or prospect sent the same piece of direct mail? The same offer? How about email? Even web pages are providing different experiences to different visitors based on what we know about them, including something as simple as a winter clothing offer that’s based on the IP address of the customer. It’s clear that marketing efforts are becoming more finely tuned and targeted.

One key strength of social media marketing is the ability to engage an audience, though this can be marginalized due to the one size fits all approach for social engagement efforts. The troubling question is: At what point does this approach become irrelevant noise or social spam? If I have one page for customers to like, in an attempt to speak to all of them I may not be speaking to any of them. The only case in which all messages are relevant to all the fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter is if they are essentially alike because I have a very narrow product offering. Let me describe the issue with social spam using a simple example. A national clothing retailer has customers who differ by age, gender and geographical regions. At the most basic level, the factors that segment the customers would be:

1. Gender: 2 groups – male and female
2. Region: 4 groups – West, East, Central and South
3. Age: 3 groups -18-25, 26-34, 35-44

Potentially there are 24 different segments of audience (2x4x3 = 24). It is late Fall and if the retailer is sharing updates once daily on its Facebook page, how often will it post something that is relevant to a 19 year old male living on the West Coast? Say the posting on Monday is for light Fall jackets targeted for teenage girls on the West Coast. Tuesday it is for heavier jackets targeted for 30-something males in the colder East Coast, Wednesday the message is for 35-44 age women in South for accessories, and so on.

At what point should that message targeted to a 19 year old male living in the West Coast show up? Until that message is delivered, the other messages might be seen as irrelevant noise or even be considered social spam. By attempting to engage fans and customers the retailer could be sending the wrong signals ¾ i.e., you are just a number. How long until this customer/target/fan stops paying attention due to irrelevant messaging day after day? It takes one simple click to stop seeing all or most of the retailer’s updates thereby losing the attention of someone who at one time was interested enough to like the retailer’s Facebook page.

So what is the answer? We have to go back to the basic principles of marketing. A social strategy has to be targeted and customized. We must be able to answer basic questions like: Who is our ideal customer? How much do we know about this person, and what is or is not of interest to them? This will help fine tune all aspects of our social channel efforts, segmentation and, eventually, drive strong results.

Profiling and segmentation are critical. We don’t send the same direct mailer or email, or offer the same landing page to all customers, so why force them to the same feed on a social media channel? The answer is to have more specific feeds, whether it’s pages, accounts or albums. The good news is that the right information is available to be able to segment. This includes all kinds of syndicated consumer information, as well as information available specifically in the social channel itself. There are many views and approaches to calculating the value of a “Like” on Facebook or a follower on Twitter, but regardless of how the value is calculated, the more specific your messaging is to the customer the higher the value will be. Remember the channel or tool may provide additional capabilities but the fundamentals have to be followed to make the best use of any channel.

It is impossible for a marketer to ignore technology’s ever-growing role in the customer’s life. Mobile apps and tablets are just two examples of how emerging digital tools can create fundamentally new marketing channels. Luckily, on the technology side, audience targeting has evolved in tandem so advertisers can better connect with customers in this increasingly fragmented digital world.

Now, with the advent of data-driven online display advertising, multi-channel marketers can convey the same tailored offline message through any digital channel, whether online, television, mobile, tablet or social. This discipline is often referred to as “addressable advertising.”

Addressable advertising campaigns run by Experian Marketing Services have demonstrated that data-driven display ads yield uplift not just in Internet sales channels, but also in mail-order and retail channels.

Addressable advertising campaigns run by Experian Marketing Services have demonstrated that data-driven display ads yield uplift not just in Internet sales channels, but also in mail-order and retail channels. This is of significant interest because it demonstrates the positive multi-channel effect of display ads and the ability to tie online exposure to offline sales.

It may sound a little complicated, but running an addressable advertising campaign is not daunting, particularly when working with an experienced provider.

There are four basic steps to run an addressable campaign:

1. The advertiser selects the criteria for its target audience, whether it’s traditional demographics or psychographics, or perhaps overlaid with more relevant attributes derived from its own customer file.
2. A trusted marketing services provider, like Experian, matches the target audience attributes to their digital addressable audience database in a privacy compliant, de-identified manner.
3. Customized display ads are shown to target audience recipients via various digital channels.
4. The marketing services provider generates multi-channel attribution metrics to quantify the campaign lift.

It’s as simple as taking the basic principles of direct marketing and applying them online. Seek addressable advertising platforms that rely on the proven principles of direct marketing in order to ensure the flexible implementation of integrated marketing programs, as well as to harness strong measurement capabilities. These new advertising platforms should be coupled with advanced media-delivery technologies to help reach customers online, on television and on mobile devices in an efficient and privacy-centric manner.

Pre-order the 2012 Digital Marketer, set to release in April, and check back weekly for more exciting previews of what’s to come. If you missed our earlier posts, click here to read them now.

Display Advertising! Solutions such as Experian’s Audience IQ^SM recognize the changing behavior of digitally-savvy consumers, and supplements email marketing campaigns with data-driven display ads. What this means is that you have more than one opportunity to engage your consumers in making a lasting impression.

For example, you can create different use cases based on what actions the consumer takes regarding the email.

• If the email is opened but the consumer didn’t click through, a similarly-themed display ad with a more aggressive offer can be shown.
• If the email is not opened, then a display ad featuring a different product and offer can be shown.

Data- driven advertising allows marketers to coordinate messages to the same consumer segment so that a particular ad campaign shows up in their inbox, and also on the websites they are visiting. This kind of synergy can drive website traffic by up to 4x if executed correctly.

Marketers are projected to spend $77 billion (or 26% of all advertising) on interactive advertising by 2016.¹ For context, the 2011 marketing projection for interactive advertising is $35 billion. So take this opportunity to review this year’s marketing programs to determine how to improve your future digital advertising spend.

• Nail down your KPIs: By charting your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) quarter after quarter, you’ll be able to assess how each marketing channel is performing relative to advertising spend. This gives you the historical data necessary to tweak your marketing mix.
• Think holistically: Do you ever feel that your marketing programs are piecemealed together? Plan your campaigns and structure them around the anchors of digital marketing: display, search, email, TV, and social media to build a solid communication platform.
• The perils of last-click measurement: It’s been several years since attribution has been the buzzword, but have you moved away from measuring the success of your campaigns through click-through rates? Studies have shown that 4% of internet clicks account for nearly 70% of all clicks.² This means that if you focus on clicks, you ignore the vast majority of your online audience. Thus, look for improved attribution solutions to allow you to measure lift in what really matters (engagement and sales), instead of a mouse-click.

Footnote 1: Forrester Interactive Marketing Forecast, November 2011

Footnote 2: iMedia Brand Summit, 2009

On Wednesday, December 7, I’ll be participating on a session at the Email Insider Summit about integrating email campaigns with display advertising. For those of you who cannot attend, or for those that plan to attend but want a sneak preview, here are a few key points I’ll be making about the future of these integrated campaigns:

1. Emailers have always used pixels and cookies to better analyze open or click-through activity, or more recently with transaction reporting and remarketing efforts. In addition, most emailers have tested or implemented third party tools using pixels for analytics or creative optimization. So adding a new third party pixel to email campaigns for display advertising can be easily understood and implemented.
2. Many online marketers have integrated website re-targeting into their suite of display advertising efforts, and leveraging email pixels to enable re-targeting is similar to using a web based pixel. This is bolstered by the fact that most email recipients are now using web-based programs, which can render this type of pixel (and associated cookie) for use with display ads. However, as with any re-targeting effort, this type of display advertising is considered to be ‘behavioral’ and falls under the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising . As a result, marketers must make sure their privacy policies reflect this practice, and provide advertising recipients with in-ad notice and choice through the ‘AdChoices’ icon.
3. The benefits of integrated campaigns are many, and include consistent messaging across channels, improved relevancy for online display ads, and increasing performance of re-targeting efforts by extending the reach to email recipients who may not be visiting your website. In addition, future integrated display ad campaigns will be able to leverage the same segmentation schema as with email, transactional data, and addressable demographic or psychographic data, all of which in a privacy-centric way.
4. The potential drawbacks of these campaigns includes making sure you are working with a large enough display ad partner to be able to reach these types of ad recipients , making the investment of time and resources to upgrade your privacy positioning, and avoiding over-personalization with display ad creative.

I look forward to sharing more with you in the future about this exciting topic, and welcome your comments or questions. Learn more about Experian Digital Advertising Services.

With your holiday marketing spending going on full-speed soon, you’ll want to ensure that every dollar of spend is utilized efficiently with maximum return on ad spend.

Below are three things to consider now for a stress-free holiday season:

• Does your campaign have the right blend of search and display ads?
  Studies have shown that a display buy can increase search lift by up to 155%. Here’s how it works: if a consumer searches for something related to your product and reaches your landing page and abandons, you’ve lost the consumer through search. But through display re-targeting you can find that same consumer elsewhere online and show display ads to them. This tactic helps keep the consumer engaged across multiple channels and helps you convert those previously “wasted” clicks.

• Are you using a real-time bidded ad exchange for your media buys?An eConsultancy survey published in September 2011 cited that 48% of respondents indicated that improved performance is a benefit of real-time bidding (RTB). Another 42% indicated that reduced media wastage, better targeting capabilities, and lower cost pre acquisition were benefits of RTB.With your holiday marketing spending going on full-speed soon, you’ll want to ensure that every dollar of spend is utilized efficiently with maximum return on ad spend. Take the time to research real-time bidding to determine how it can increase the impact of your marketing efforts.

• How are you determining success?
  In today’s age of digital attribution, it may appear simple that a high CTR indicates success. But to ensure you have a comprehensive view of your multi-channel marketing campaign, you’ll  want to combine your digital and offline efforts into one holistic view. This will give you the ability to perform cross-channel attribution and review global ad metrics.Remember, the holidays come once a year, and next year you’ll want to leverage the learnings from this year and not start from scratch.

The holidays are a time of good cheer, but online retail will be a fierce battleground consumer attention.  Advertisers who understand the online marketing landscape and are able to nimbly change course can obtain a huge advantage over other competitors.

Consumers are in a spending mood, and the prospects for retail e-commerce this coming holiday season are bright.

This kind of news can make a marketer’s eyes light up like a child’s on Christmas morning, but big opportunities also mean big challenges. Consumer spending trends and behaviors are constantly changing, and you’ll need the right strategy and technologies to optimize your media buying.

A recent Coremetrics report predicts another record-breaking season with 21 percent of online shoppers expected to spend more on the Web in 2011.:

1. Pinpoint your target audience.  The key is precision and depth in developing your demographic profiles.  Think beyond gender, age, marital status and income to other characteristics such as life-event triggers and attitudinal motivators.
2. Consider doing a trial run. Allow the campaign to start a week or two before the peak holiday shopping season. This will give you more insights into consumer behaviors, which will help you establish the campaign’s broad framework and fine-tune the creative, channel strategy and other marketing components.
3. Take advantage of real-time bidding (RTB). Buying patterns and costs change by the hour. RTB dynamically analyzes creative, consumer, and contextual parameters to make automated decisions that optimize your value/price ratio. Remember, however, that RTB technology does not discriminate, so you will need to work with your provider to develop a “blacklist” of sites where your ad won’t run.
4. Be open to allowing your home page to be re-pixeled. This strategy can be used to constantly improve algorithms and enhance a campaign’s retargeting efforts.
5. Personalize the customer experience. Match offers to complement consumers buying preferences and needs by combining real-time data with advanced lifestyle segmentation systems.

The value and importance of responding to real time data increase exponentially during the holiday shopping season. Preparation, the right strategy and RTB solutions can give you an edge in the fierce online battleground for tens of billions of dollars.