Mark your calendars! Experian and Oxford Economics will present key findings in the latest Main Street Report for Q3 2022 during the Quarterly Business Credit Review. Ryan Sweet, Oxford’s U.S. Chief Economist will share his take on Experian’s most recent small business credit data and a macroeconomic outlook for the coming quarter. Brodie Oldham, Experian’s V.P. of Commercial Data Science, will cover commercial credit trends. Our Presenters Brodie Oldham, V.P. Commercial Data ScienceExperian Ryan Sweet, U.S. Chief EconomistOxford Economics Q3 2022 Main Street Report The Q3 2022 Experian/Oxford Economics Main Street report will release at the end of November. If you are not already subscribed to thought leadership updates, be sure to sign up for updates on our Commercial Insights Hub. Event Details Date: Tuesday, December 6th, 2022Time: 10:00 a.m. (Pacific), 1:00 p.m. (Eastern) Why you should attend: Leading Experts on Commercial and Macro-Economic TrendsCredit insights and trends on 30+ Million active businessesAsk our panel questions in real-timeIndustry Hot Topics Covered (Inclusive of Business Owner and Small Business Data)Commercial Insights you cannot get anywhere elsePeer Insights with Interactive Polls (Participate)Discover and understand small business trends to make informed decisionsActionable takeaways based on recent credit performance Save My Seat

The Pandemic drove a tidal wave of small business creation, with over 5.4 million new small businesses in 2021 alone, and millions more this year.  Now, the U.S. economy is continuing to change, but becoming more uncertain amid rising interest rates and worries over inflation. With the cost of money rising for small businesses, many are turning to different credit offerings to keep the cash flowing. Application fraud on the rise Some borrowers don’t always have good intentions, and credit issuers struggle to control fraud rates.  If you manage risk for a financial institution, trade credit issuer or just want to understand the persistent wave of fraudulent small business applications you should attend our upcoming webinar. Attend our webinar A Perfect Storm for Business Credit RiskDate: Tuesday, November 29th, 2022Time: 10 a.m. Pacific | 1p.m. Eastern. In this talk, Experian's Fraud Products lead, Li Mao, is joined by Sr. Analytical Consultant Emily Garrett and Brian Stack, Experian's V.P. of Engineering Services, to discuss the fraud problem and what to do about it. Li Mao, Sr. Product Manager, Experian Fraud Solutions Emily Garrett, Sr. Analytical Consultant Manager, Experian Brian Stack, V.P. Engineering Services, Experian We'll cover: New business formation, how to assess younger businessesEconomic pressures on B2B's that you are not yet reading aboutStatistics on the gathering fraud storm3 tips for smooth sailing in your credit operations Register to attend

We are pleased to announce the publication of our Fall 2022 Beyond the Trends report. The Sales are coming!! Small businesses have been building inventory over the last year driven by fears that the global supply chain could break down at any moment. This anxiety created an environment of pre-ordering behavior intended to elevate the worry felt during the height of the pandemic that their business would fail not due to a lack of shoppers, but an empty shelf. Global economic environments change quickly, and our world is seeing heightened inflation. This increase in the price of goods and services is leading to softened consumer demand. Will holiday sales keep small business afloat before consumer behavior changes. Tough challenges for newer businesses and lenders Forty percent of small business have been operating for less than 1 year. These new businesses will be challenged by a tightening credit market, rising costs, and softening consumer demand. Commercial lenders are originating 13% less high risk subprime accounts since the 2021 even as through the door high risk inquiries have increased by 59%. Average credit lines on new commercial originations dropped 3% since the beginning of the pandemic as lenders look for growth while limiting exposure. In Q22022 those lines rose 1.4% as 40% less small businesses were accessing commercial credit. Download Fall 2022 Beyond the Trends Report

The team from Experian is very excited to be attending the TRMA 2022 Fall Conference in Louisville, Kentucky October 18-20th. As a Gold Sponsor, we can't wait to meet with you in person to hear your challenges, your goals and to share some of the things we have been working on. Please reach out and connect with us on LinkedIn to get a conversation started. Beth Bayer Neal Rogers Meg Wilson Mathew Robey James Brezack Don't miss Neal Rogers breakout session on Oct 20th at 10:45: Data-driven strategies to deliver consistent growth and maintain positive customer experiences As telco companies face an increasingly competitive environment, they are looking for ways to drive continuous growth. With industry-wide efforts to capture market share, telco providers are looking to enhance personalized targeting while mitigating risk and fraudulent activities while continuing to focus on serving underserved communities. In this session, we will explore how to acquire and approve more consumers with better data, less friction, fewer deposits, fewer vendors, and potentially less cost.Learning Objectives: Learn about enhanced, unrivaled data to bolster growth while mitigating risk and spearheading DEI.A case study illustrating the effectiveness of Experian’s composite risk model in helping to decrease deposits and increase approval time. It promises to be a great session, see you all in Louisville, KY!

There has been so many changes for marketers to deal with related to email marketing in particular.  For the final installment of our three-part B2B marketing-focused Business Chat discussion, Tony Romero from the Experian product team shares tips marketers can employ to improve email performance. In today's chat, we focus on ways marketers can improve campaign performance by incorporating analytics and models. Be sure to register to attend Tony's 15-Minute Sip and Solve talk "Increasing Email Campaign Performance With Analytics", he will go into greater depth and offer actionable tips to you execute successful B2B campaigns. Watch Our Interview   What follows is a lightly edited transcription of our talk. [Gary Stockton]: Tony, can you share some examples of models marketers can use to segment and target prospects? [Tony Romero]: It's very important for a marketing manager or CMO to take a deep dive into their marketing plan. What are the objectives? What are they trying to do? You know, it could be a variety of things. One is that they could try to grow their existing market space with the same type of customers they already have, or they could be trying to penetrate new markets or try to go after a specific type of company or consumers. So, depending on the marketing plan, it's important then to do deep dive analytics to provide the right type of target audience for that marketing plan. [Tony Romero]: So what custom modeling can do is identify what attributes constitute the ideal customer. Again, whether that ideal customer is an existing type of customer or penetrating a new market, it could be using SIC or NAICS codes to identify those new market spaces or looking at specific attributes on demographics or credit data. It could be numerous things. And so Experian Data Sciences scientists can create custom modeling to clearly define those types of businesses and individuals to promote them effectively. [Gary Stockton]: Excellent. Now let's talk a bit about metrics because some metrics are no longer helpful, such as open rate with the iOS update. What other metrics should marketing departments focus on now with all of these changes? [Tony Romero]: Open rates are not going to be significant anymore because Apple has set up a proxy server to take in emails coming in from a service provider. The provider opens them up in a proxy server first before it reaches the actual individual who's opening that email. And the purpose of that is to disassociate the IP address so that the consumer has privacy. So open rates are no longer a valid KPI for marketers to use. You'll see very, very high open rates, but what you can do to effectively email marketing to consumers is, first of all, ensure that your deliverability is high. And again, that's where data hygiene comes in. You want to make sure you have the most current and correct email address possible. You want to ensure they're not part of the don't email list. So again, deliverability is one of your key KPIs now to focus on. The second one to focus on is your clicks, making sure that your content is as effective as possible so that your audience is actually going to click on that call to action. And again, that's where segmentation, as we discussed, is very important. So your message is hitting the mark. It's resonating with your audience. And then finally landing on the site. So once the user clicks on that and lands on your site, ensure that that individual is then taken to the right place to be given the information they need. So making sure all of that is effective throughout their journey is going to be critical. [Gary Stockton]: Yeah, because with the Apple changes, you know, open rate, that used to be quite important. But now the proxy server will look like everything's opened, and you can't always trust that. So you do have to be looking at other metrics. But the other thing I hear about is intent-based campaigns where people have implied interest or shown an intent to buy. Can you talk a little bit about how those campaigns work? [Tony Romero]: Intent data is excellent information. Basically, when a consumer is on a website, they're clicking on particular things. For example, they may be downloading a white paper, or they may be asking for more information or having a salesperson contact them. Those are very specific triggers that can be used to identify that a consumer has intent on purchasing, and all of that can be pulled together to create a score to provide a marketer with information about how much intent a consumer has. So intent data is very valuable, and here too, Experian can provide intent data to marketers to be able to use that to promote and do effective campaigns. Now, one other thing too about intent data is, again, third-party cookies can track it. It can be tracked by first-party cookies, or it could be tracked by tracking pixels. And as Gary had mentioned, you know, third-party cookies are going away, but that doesn't mean that intent data is going away. There are still plenty of other ways to track intent. [Gary Stockton]: Yes, also for account-based campaigns too, you can use that intent-based data to show you which accounts have got that market problem that if you're listening to those signals solutions like 6 Sense, a lot of B2B sites are using things like that. So, on the analytics front, any final thoughts on how marketers can improve campaign performance? [Tony Romero]: On the analytics side? Again, I think the main thing is focus on your target segments and be able to define your objectives; how can you really focus in hyper-focus on who that target audience is so that your message will resonate. Also, one other thing I would say with analytics is to measure your KPIs. You know, after a completed campaign, look at your KPIs and say what went right? What went wrong? or what needs to be changed? And then being able to then either assess, pivot, or refine whatever your next campaign will be, is a very critical thing to do. [Gary Stockton]: Assess, pivot, excellent stuff. It's been great to get your perspectives on marketing here Tony, I've learned a great deal in these chats, and ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to get a level deeper on this, don't miss Tony's upcoming marketing analytics, Sip and Solve webinar. He's going to be talking in much greater detail about this element of optimizing marketing campaigns. And you can find a link to that session in the description of this video and our blog posts, or remember to like this video and subscribe to our channel.  

Mark your calendars! The Experian Insurance team is heading to Vegas for InsureTech 2022,  September 20 – 22, 2022. We're super excited because ITC Vegas is the world's largest insuretech event – offering unparalleled access to the most comprehensive and global gathering of tech entrepreneurs, investors, and insurance industry incumbents. Over the course of three days, the Experian crew will be showcasing lots of great solutions and answering your questions in booth #2020. Want to increase productivity and reduce costs while enriching the lives of your policyholders? Be sure to stop by booth #2020. Want to set something up before the show? Get In Touch

Experian and Oxford Economics have just released the Q2 2022 Main Street Report, offering a unique glimpse into the credit performance of main street businesses.

If you want to get the most out of your marketing campaigns, it's important that they are tailored for a specific audience. We invited Tony Romero on Business Chat to talk about part two of his three-part Sip and Solve webinar series focused on B2B marketing where he explains how segmentation and targeting can make all aspects (landing page or email) more effective by using industry SIC as well as NAICS codes. Look-a-like analysis CMO's challenged with restricted budgets Analyzing portfolio diversity and targeting minority-led, women-led businesses Profiling prospects with limited data attributes   Watch Our Interview What follows is a lightly edited transcription of our talk. [Gary Stockton]: So in our last chat, we talked about maintaining robust marketing data to power effective campaigns and how clean data really helps businesses conduct effective marketing campaigns. This week, we switch gears to discuss the power of segmentation and targeting using industry SIC and NAICS codes to optimize your marketing budgets. So let's dive in. In our previous chat, we spoke about the changes that tech companies have enacted to make the job of targeting business prospects harder, but it's not game over for marketers. [Tony Romero]: No, definitely not. You know, it's really important to know that there's still a lot of a wealth of data out there that can be used to identify and segment target customers. You know, the first-party data obviously is really key, as well as being able to take information that may be spotty. If, for example, you only have a name or address, you can be able to through services like ours, be able to get a full, comprehensive set of data on that customer, both firmographic, demographic, and credit information, and then be able to use that to promote to customers. [Gary Stockton]: So can you share some examples of how Experian data can help marketers hone in on their target customer, for example, how SICs and NAICS codes can help? [Tony Romero]: Yeah, Gary, you're right. SIC and NAICS codes provide information about what industry the business is in. And so, by knowing that, you're able to target those consumers. So again, as I mentioned before, you can take a look at your existing customer base and find out who's your ideal target customer. And from that, then you can compare that to prospective businesses that look just like that. And that's what's called a lookalike analysis. And by using SIC and NAICS codes, you're able to use that to segment the market and then be able to promote effectively. And Gary, you also mentioned that with the economic state, CMOs have to watch their budgets and be as efficient as possible these days. So again, by doing very good segmenting of your target audience, you are making sure that your finance and financial output to a campaign are as efficient as possible. [Gary Stockton]: Excellent, regulators, they're focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion. How can Experian help clients in that effort? [Tony Romero]: You know? Yeah. That's a very key point and definitely more than ever. It's important to focus on identifying your existing portfolio and seeing how many customers in your portfolio are minority-led or women-led businesses. So you can do benchmarking, you can see how you fare against other businesses in your market space. And that helps you to determine how much more do you need to market to these minority or women-led businesses. So what's number one is the benchmarking, but secondly, you need to be able to go out and look at your prospective target list and find out who are minority-led or women-led. And there, getting an indicator about a Woman-led or Minority-led business allows you to promote specifically to those types of businesses to help increase your portfolio. [Gary Stockton]: That's good. So if all I have is a name and an email address, and in a lot of cases, you know, if we're driving a newsletter, can I still profile this contact? Or are there other ways to do that with minimal info? [Tony Romero]: Yes, there is. You know, even just having a name and address is enough data to go through our type of service and be able to append all of the other information that we talked about, whether it's firmographic with SIC or NAICS codes, it could be demographic information where we look at the business and find out who the consumers that are tied to that business are? So that's called a B2C linkage. And from that now, you know who the actual individual is and go target those specific individuals. So that's also another key point to bring out [Gary Stockton]: Excellent stuff, Tony. Well, folks, if you enjoyed this chat and want to go a level deeper, don't miss Tony's campaign targeting Sip and Solve webinar – Fine Tuning B2b Campaign Targeting. He goes into greater detail on targeting B2B prospects, just click the image to be taken over to the recording.

Mark your calendars! Experian and Oxford Economics will present key findings in the latest Main Street Report for Q2 2022 during the Quarterly Business Credit Review for Q2 2022. Kathy Bostjancic, Oxford's U.S. Chief Economist will share her take on Experian's most recent small business credit data and a macroeconomic outlook for the coming quarter. Brodie Oldham, Experian's V.P. of Commercial Data Science, will cover commercial credit trends. Q2 2022 Main Street Report The Q2 2022 Experian/Oxford Economics Main Street report is expected to release on August 23rd. If you are not already subscribed to thought leadership updates, be sure to sign up for updates on our Commercial Insights Hub. Mark Your Calendar Quarterly Business Credit Review Webinar Date: Wednesday, September 7th, 2022 Time: 10:00 a.m. (Pacific), 1:00 p.m. (Eastern) Why you should attend: Leading Experts on Commercial and Macro-Economic Trends Credit insights and trends on 30+ Million active businesses Ask our panel questions in real-time Industry Hot Topics Covered (Inclusive of Business Owner and Small Business Data) Commercial Insights you cannot get anywhere else Peer Insights with Interactive Polls (Participate) Discover and understand small business trends to make informed decisions Actionable takeaways based on recent credit performance Register To Attend

With uncertainty about the U.S economy growing, businesses across the country remain focused on maintaining a positive cash flow. One way to impact that is to make sure your marketing campaigns perform well. We sat down with Tony Romero from our Marketing Products team to discuss what small businesses can do to make sure their data is in good shape for campaigns, and a special 3-part Sip and Solve webinar series around B2B marketing.  Check out our conversation with Tony. Watch our interview What follows is a lightly edited transcription of our conversation. [Gary Stockton]: Well, hello and welcome to another episode of Experian Business Chat. With uncertainty about the U S economy growing, businesses across the country remain focused on maintaining a positive cash flow. And one way to impact that is to make sure that marketing campaigns are performing well. So we've put together a series of three short business chats with our experts about B2B marketing. Today, we're going to be speaking with Experian's marketing products manager, Tony Romero, about marketing data. Good morning, Tony. [Tony Romero]: Good morning. [Gary Stockton]: So let's dive in, CRM databases can go stale quickly. And when people change jobs or change roles, this can impact campaign performance. So, keeping tabs on your marketing data is highly recommended. How does poorly managed marketing data impact marketing campaigns? [Tony Romero]: Yeah, it can really impact negatively, you know, for example, the bad data, it means that you're not reaching your target audience and you're wasting money, right? As they're doing any type of direct mail campaign or any other multi-channel campaign, not reaching the right audience is going to be costly for you. But secondly, it also means that you're going to potentially reach the wrong audience. And that's also just as detrimental because you want to be as efficient as possible. [Gary Stockton]: So why is it important to have clean and robust marketing data? [Tony Romero]: Yeah. When you think about what clean and robust comprehensive marketing data provides is that first of all, you're able to identify your true market segment. Who are you trying to reach? Secondly, you want to understand what's the messages that you want to get across to these people, and you want to make sure that again, you're reaching the right people in order to deliver that message to them. So by having clean data, you're able to reach the right audience you're re and you're able to communicate that message to them properly. [Gary Stockton]: So what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see businesses make when it comes to data governance? [Tony Romero]: Yeah, you know, what's, what I would say is the most important is that data can go stale very quickly as, as you've mentioned, Gary. And so it's very important to make sure that it's current. Secondly, you could have duplicate data or you could have incorrect data. So data hygiene is seriously critical in order to make sure that you have current data and correct data. And then that way, for sure, you'll again, get back to deliverability, you'll be able to reach the right audience. The other thing too, that's important is that when you're thinking about segmenting an audience and you want to be able to filter out who's in the right audience, who's not in the right audience, again, having proper data, make sure that you're truly calling the true target audience for, for your campaign. [Gary Stockton]: So cleaning a marketing database. I mean, it, it doesn't sound like it's something that I would, you know, push a button and have a, like a cleanup type of function execute, you know, how can you clean a marketing database that has maybe spotty or missing info? [Tony Romero]: Yeah. You know, the, the main thing there is to be able to identify if you have a current file of your list of customers, you can actually run it through a process to look at it, compare it to data. That's actually been human verified to make sure it's the most current, the most correct data. So going through that process of the data hygiene, data appends, or new creation of lists, it's important to make sure you do that through a service where people have actually human verified, that the data is correct and current. [Gary Stockton]: So what are some helpful tools for cleansing a marketing database? Any that you'd recommend? [Tony Romero]: Well, you know, I think the most important thing is number one is to take a look at what's called data hygiene in order to be able to make sure it's correct and current there's also append, which means that you're identifying data that's not a part of the current list and make sure that you add that data in. And then lastly, creating a list of lookalike customers. So an example is you might have a list of customers that you've identified as being your true ideal target customer. And now you want to be able to find others that are like that. You can work with companies to do what's called lookalike analysis, to be able to identify your ideal customers and create an expansive, comprehensive list that you can go prospecting to. [Gary Stockton]: Very interesting. So what recent changes by tech platforms are having an impact on marketing data? I mean, there's been a lot in the news recently. [Tony Romero]: Yeah, definitely. You know, first of all, tech platforms are capable of collecting a lot of information on consumers, both through third party cookies and first party cookies, as well as third party data. Now, the interesting thing is that while they've been able to collect a lot of data, there's been a recent shift in the market space in that Google is no longer supporting third-party cookie data. So it's more important than ever to focus in on the first party cookies. But secondly, third party data is still available. And so there's companies where you can provide all of these that I just mentioned, the data hygiene, the data append, the list creation that you can add to your first party data in order to come up with a comprehensive marketing lead data list. So those are the main tools to think about. The other thing I'd mentioned about tech platforms is that they're able to do a lot. [Tony Romero]: For example, they can provide truly personalized experiences to their customers because they know a lot about their customers. And secondly, they can provide additional capabilities like prequalified loans. So in that perspective, the platform can offer a customer to find out what the loan offers that they qualify for. And they can go through the pre-qual process where they can go find out what offers they qualify for with a soft inquiry. So they're not getting impacted with a hard pull and then they can find out if they want to move forward with that. And the ideal thing for lenders is that that pre-qual process means that it's just a soft pull. It's a pretty low cost. And for people who do apply, there's a high likelihood that they will be approved for that loan. Wow. [Gary Stockton]: Well, this has been really great information, Tony, on data cleansing, if you enjoyed this chat and want to go a level deeper, don't miss Tony's Sip and Solve webinar, he goes into greater detail on optimizing marketing campaign data.  And in our next business chat, we will be continuing the discussion with Tony and focusing on campaign targeting. Related Posts

The U.S. economy is growing, but the pain caused by staff shortages; supply chain delays during Covid, and now the war in Ukraine. Rising inflation is further complicating things to the degree that credit departments might start to see their DSO creeping up as forbearance and deferrals expire. In this 15-minute Portfolio Management Sip and Solve session, Solutions Consultant, Bonnie Gerrity provides actionable tips for doing more with less, and how you can be more proactive in your portfolio management during a changing economy. We talk about: Identifying risky accounts quickly Managing a large number of accounts with limited staff Validating decision models for optimal performance Watch Session Recording

When it comes to B2B marketing and finding qualified small business prospects, particularly in niche industries, having fresh accurate data will always be key to rising above your competition. Whether you're looking to improve your targeting or measure the success of your campaigns, you need accurate, reliable data. When people think of Experian what often comes to mind is credit scores, and it's true that Experian is one of the largest credit reporting companies in the world with information on more than 1 billion consumers.  But did you know Experian is also a leading provider of business information?  Here’s a quick rundown of our business information products and services. A leading provider of small businesses data Experian’s commercial data is deep and extensive, with information on more than 47 million US businesses. This data contains more than 700 attributes, so you can pinpoint the exact information you are looking for to tailor your marketing campaigns.  For each business record, we also include the many individual contacts working in that business, with over 67 million email addresses. Business data is maintained and updated constantly Because information is coming into Experian at rapid pace, the data is in a state of constant change — over 800,000 daily identity updates to ensure our data remains up to date. Intent data to pick up on signals Innovation has played a major role in our market strategy, and intent signals are one area where Experian has made significant investments. Our systems have been tuned to listen for over 3.2 billion intent signals per month. Intent identifies a responsive audience of decision makers that is "in the market" for your products or services within the last month. It records when users take some action, such as consuming a piece of content, or doing some other observable behavior leading to an indication of intent. Focusing on observed behavior and flagging those signals for intent will provide insight to specific interests or need of a product or service at that moment. Using this data allows you to prioritize leads based on their likelihood of buying, as well as to identify unassuming audiences that are looking for your product or service (but might not know it yet!). Our intent methodology can boost your engagement by 16%, and increase your close rates by up to 79%. We help you target decision makers at the time when they are ready to buy. Fraud data With over 2,000 searchable credit and fraud attributes, Experian helps financial institutions and credit grantors to mitigate against future fraud. Many of our fraud attributes are helping some of the country's leading financial institutions minimize exposure to fraud risk. Data Hygiene Services We help you leverage a single-platform approach to make sure your data is clean, accurate and up-to-date. Our services connect to hundreds of data sources to profile data, standardize formats, correct errors, verify and remove duplicates, and then enrich your data with our globally-curated data sets to transform your data into deep customer insights. Best in class third-party datasets To help our clients reach the right target, Experian has built an extensive third-party dataset that includes government data, economic data, social data, user permissioned data, cyber identity dark web data, and health data. Funneling numerous data sources–including public information like corp registration, liens, UCC filings, bankruptcies, with contributed member trade, collections data (alternative and consumer) — our breadth and depth of information helps you identify fraud exposure almost before it begins. We are continuously augmenting our platforms with new and alternative data sources to bring additional insights to the table to help you, and to remove the stress of you having to constantly source and evaluate new data sources. Simply put: when new issues surface, we solve them. Human Verified information Verification of our data is performed by real people. Our human verification takes signals that are sometimes 50-60% accurate to over 98% accurate. Overall database accuracy measures consistently at over 94%, at the record level. We will deliver you the most accurate data on your customers, period. We realize all this can be very complicated! That's why our Marketing Solutions team crafts a custom solution for every single client. Because no two businesses have exactly the same needs. Contact an Experian representative today, and we'll show you how to create a unique marketing solution for your business that will save you time, money and energy. Supercharge your B2B marketing campaigns today