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

    In this Experian Business Chat we turn our attention to the record flood of new businesses getting started and, the need for credit grantors to evaluate credit applicants with greater speed and precision. To help us understand how that job gets done, we invited Product Director Greg Carmean to join us. Greg leads product development related to our partnership with Small Business Financial Exchange, so we met to talk about our partnership,  and how our focus on innovation is enabling emerging businesses to succeed while giving lenders greater ability to identify and respond to risk. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion. [Gary]: So Greg, with so many new businesses entering the market, one of the things that we hear often from clients is a need for a better view of their customers, to more accurately assess risk. How is Experian innovating for small business service lenders in that regard? [Greg]: Well, Gary innovation starts with the best possible raw materials, and in our business that's data. So it really starts with our focus on obtaining credible information on both businesses and business owners from Experian and then also supplementing that with information coming from the Small Business Financial Exchange, which is considered the gold standard in lender data. We take that data through a data quality process, which is part of the innovation. We call it our Data Foundry, which really makes sure that we're operating in the cleanest version of the data we possibly can. And then we apply our analytical techniques to provide the most predictive outcomes for our clients so that they can create the most tailored treatment for their small business customers. Finally, we provide platforms that enable not only list distribution, especially as we become so much more focused on the digital economy since the onset of the pandemic, but also platforms that are analytic in nature so that our client's data scientists can work with the data in formulating the best possible strategies for the business. [Gary]: That's great. So Greg, what can lenders do to improve decision-making across the customer life cycle and how important is it to see business credit risk over time and how can that be viewed by a lender? [Greg]: Gary, what we found is that the trends in the data are tremendously predictive in the risk outcomes that our clients are trying to predict. We've known this for some time on the consumer side of our business, as we've had trended attributes there for many years. What we've done now with the SBFE program at Experian is we've developed our V3 attributes, which are trended, and this trend in nature, not only allows you to see the static view of where a business attribute is at a point in time but at how the business attribute got there. Is the business improving in credit quality, are they declining in credit quality? And that is tremendously powerful when you incorporate those types of attributes into scores. [Gary]: So trended attributes,  they sound powerful, can you discuss the use of some of the different types of attributes? [Greg]: Sure. Gary. So in addition to the trended nature of our V3 attributes, we've also incorporated a variety of different specialty attributes. For instance, how do businesses perform on government funding programs like SBA loans and the PPP program? How can I understand how a business is going to operate under forbearance programs? And also how could I potentially do things like reject inferencing to see if I'm leaving accounts on the table. These are all elements that we've worked into this V3 version that can further help our clients refine their strategies and get the best business outcomes. [Gary]: So how do lenders manage accounts once they're found and, and handle regulatory changes across the account mix? [Greg]: Well, Gary, one of the most impactful things that we've done through the SBFE program is really focused on what we call machine-learned models, and machine learning, I think most people are familiar with, it's the notion that a model can continuously take in additional data and learn over time. But when it comes to regulatory compliance, that can be challenging because the model isn't very stable. So what we've done is we've adopted a strategy where we use all the machine learning techniques right up until the time the model is deployed, at which time it becomes static. What that allows us to do is create a model that has, as an example, consistent adverse action codes that will come out of it, which is tremendously important for regulatory compliance. Another element is making sure that the model is transparent so that a regulator can understand at a human level, how we get from the input to the decision. With our approach to these machine-learned models, we've been able to accomplish that and the results have been tremendous for our clients. [Gary]: So you lead product development related to our partnership with the Small Business Financial Exchange. Can you speak to how these solutions benefit SBFE members and empower small businesses? [Greg]: Absolutely. Both SBFE and Experian are committed to empowering small business growth. And we do that by placing powerful tools in the hands of our clients who are SBFE members so that they can put the small business that they're dealing with into the right product at the right terms. The second thing is as they are managing those accounts, our tools really help them identify risk earlier, which allows them to intervene more proactively. And that can really make the difference in a small business account that can be maintained versus one that might go to charge off. [Gary]: Well, Greg, this has been very insightful. It sounds like we've got a lot going on to benefit both small business service lenders and the businesses they're serving. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Take the next step If this chat raised your curiosity about Small Business Financial Exchange attributes for small business lending, consider watching the recording of our webinar titled "Disruptive Strategies to Empower Small Business Lending" Experian/SBFE Analytical Insights Webinar

Experian has just released our Summer 2022 Beyond the Trends report. As I did the analysis for this release I imagined the crack of a starter pistol for the start of an intense race.

Experian and Oxford Economics have just released the Q1 2022 Main Street report, a window into the credit performance of small businesses complete with macroeconomic analysis. Highlights: The US economy contracted in Q1 for the first time since the pandemic-driven recession ended, but the domestic economy showed resilience in the face of Omicron, lingering supply constraints, and high inflation. Delinquency rates rose across the term periods; the 90+ days past due (DPD) climbed to 0.9 percent. Looking ahead, intensifying headwinds from more aggressive Fed tightening and tighter financial conditions will slow activity this year without stalling it. Download Q1 2022 Report Watch the Quarterly Business Credit Review Webinar Hear the experts from Experian and the lead economist from Oxford Economics unpack the latest Main Street Report. Watch the Quarterly Business Credit Review

Experian analysts look at data each week on the millions of U.S small businesses in our database and discover actionable insights that benefit our clients. They deliver these insights through the bi-weekly Commercial Pulse Report, providing a directional update on small business credit. The Commercial Pulse Report delivers a quick read on COVID market impacts, high-level credit trends, score and attribute impacts, and other market related activities. We just released an update to the Commercial Pulse Report, here are a few highlights.

  We have exciting news about the Experian Main Street Report and Quarterly Business Credit Review webinars. Starting with our Q1 report, set to release later this month, Experian will partner with Oxford Economics on the co-authoring of the report and presentation of insights in the Quarterly Business Credit Review webinar. You are invited to attend! We expect to release our Q1 report in the final week of May. 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, June 1st, 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 Watch Recording