Marketers are under more pressure than ever to deliver personalized, high-performing campaigns—while navigating tighter budgets, shifting privacy expectations, and fragmented tech stacks. Despite an explosion of tools and data sources, the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed.
Every great campaign still starts with a simple question: Who are we trying to reach?
The answer depends on how well you understand your customers. Increasingly, that understanding is hampered by data silos, inconsistent identity signals, and disconnected workflows between planning, activation, and measurement. When those pieces don’t align, it leads to inefficient spending, incomplete insights, and missed opportunities.
To move forward, marketers need more than better tools—they need a more connected approach.
Start with a complete view of the customer
The foundation of effective marketing is understanding your audience—not just who they are, but what they care about and how to reach them across devices and platforms.
That starts with building a complete customer profile. For many marketers, this means linking persistent offline data—such as name and address—with fresh digital signals like device IDs and online behaviors. When combined, these elements provide a high-fidelity view of the customer that can be enriched with attributes like demographics, purchase behavior, and lifestyle interests.
This kind of profile doesn’t just help you understand people—it helps you build audience segments that actually perform. Whether you’re working with your own CRM data or third-party sources, the ability to create addressable segments that are both accurate and scalable is what separates good campaigns from great ones.
🛳️ That’s exactly what MMGY did for Windstar Cruises. By layering first-party data with behavioral and demographic insights, they built custom audiences that more than doubled campaign benchmarks.
🎮 Gaming platform Unity tapped into Experian audiences to understand player behaviors across web, mobile, and connected TV (CTV). These insights helped their advertisers reach gaming audiences more effectively—tailoring creative and delivery to real-world preferences, not assumptions.
Activate with precision, not just volume
Knowing your audience is only half the battle. The next challenge is reaching them—consistently and efficiently—across multiple channels.
This is where fragmentation can creep back in. All too often, marketers build audiences in one system, but activate in another, causing data loss and targeting mismatches. A more connected strategy uses the same identity and audience spine across planning and activation, reducing signal loss and improving accuracy.
👉 Curated private marketplaces (PMPs), for example, allow marketers to match high-quality audiences with premium inventory in a targeted, transparent, and efficient way. These deals let marketers align their spending with their goals—whether that’s lowering cost-per-acquisition or boosting reach in a key vertical.
Performance results are bearing this out:
When identity, audience, and inventory are aligned, everyone benefits—marketers, publishers, and consumers.
Measure what matters
Too often, measurement is treated as an afterthought. But in a connected campaign, it’s built in from the beginning.
By using consistent identity across planning, activation, and measurement, marketers can connect ad exposure to real-world outcomes—whether that’s an online conversion, an in-store visit, or a new customer relationship.
This kind of closed-loop measurement turns marketing into a learning engine. You don’t just see what happened—you understand why it happened and can use that information to improve the next campaign.
🛳️ In the case of Windstar Cruises, MMGY used Experian identity to precisely measure how digital ad exposures translated into bookings. That kind of visibility gives marketers more than a report card. It gives them the feedback they need to optimize smarter next time—and prove ROI every time.
The future is connected
To meet today’s demands, marketers need a new way of working—one that starts with a complete understanding of the customer, builds addressable audiences on a strong identity foundation, activates them precisely across channels, and measures impact in real time.
The marketers embracing this approach are already seeing results: stronger performance, more efficient spending, and deeper insights that power what comes next.
The future won’t be built on more tools—it will be built on more connection.
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Welcome! Who doesn’t like a warm welcome? Whether your customer is walking into your store or just signed up on your website to receive communications from you, she expects a warm reception. It’s important to make that first impression count. A welcome series helps the conversation open up between the customer and your brand. It sets expectations on the types and cadence of content the customer will receive. Welcome emails also garner 86 percent higher open rates than regular promotional mailings – not too shabby! In a recent webinar, Saks Fifth Avenue shared that they are constantly testing new and current programs to optimize the customer experience. As a result, they discovered that switching from batch-sending welcome emails to sending welcome messages in real time increased open, click and redemption rates significantly. Here’s an example of their welcome series: Saks’ results are consistent with Experian Marketing Services’ welcome email findings which indicate that emails triggered in real time receive up to 10 times the transaction rates and revenue per email vs. those that are batched. A welcome series has also been shown to increase retention by educating customers on new ways to use products and services they’ve purchased from your brand. These emails also can remind customers of the benefits they’ll reap from enrolling in your loyalty programs or credit card. … and welcome back Even if a customer has been welcomed and has interacted with your programs, a day may come when the customer goes silent. Reactivation campaigns are an effective way to get them to re-engage. Naturally, it’s important to target your dormant customers in a variety of channels so you can reach them more effectively. Maybe you’re wondering why I jumped from the warmth of a welcome series right into reality of needing a reactivation campaign. The reason? Marketers need to understand where a customer is in their lifecycle and come full circle with customers if they have parted ways. Marketers can pique the interest of a returning customer by telling them what’s new and reintroducing them to their brand. Carnival® Cruise Lines, for example, sends a welcome-back email that features the newest social networks, offers and deals its customers can take advantage of immediately. At the end of the day, customers expect to receive relevant and engaging messages throughout their entire relationship with a brand. Customer life cycle programs deliver just that. If you’re interested in learning more about welcome campaigns, waitlist/back-in-stock programs and other remarketing strategies, check out our webcast, Driving revenue through customer lifecycle marketing featuring Josh Pratt, Director of Email & Promotions for Saks Fifth Avenue and Saks Fifth Avenue OFF 5TH. Contact us today
It seems that every time I go into a store today, I am offered a loyalty card. From one of my favorite local restaurants to my shoe store VIP program, I feel like I am getting a host of emails and points at every turn. Statistics support my theory: according to a recent Experian Data Quality study, 91 percent of organizations use loyalty programs. Why did they become so prevalent? Today’s consumer is more empowered than ever before and driving major change within business. In the era of Yelp, digital channels and a 24/7 shopping cycle, organizations have less control. Just look at the shoe market, which you can tell I pay attention to. It used to be that you would purchase whatever your local department store or brick-and-mortar retail had to offer, which might be 50 different options. Now, you can go online, read reviews and browse hundreds of different choices based on style and color. In fact, last night I went online and searched for black boots and scrolled through six pages of different options! Loyalty programs are a counter balance to that choice and empowered customer behavior. They make sure that while I am shopping for shoes, I am probably doing it through my preferred store and earning reward points for free merchandise. And through the loyalty process, companies are collecting a lot of data. Customers usually need to provide more than three types of information to sign up, the most popular being email, followed by name and phone number. However, collecting this information accurately isn’t always easy, which is why poor data collection is one of the leading problems for loyalty programs. Eighty-one percent of companies face challenges related to these programs, the two biggest being not enough customers signing up and poor contact data. Inaccurate data means that a customer has signed up, but the marketer is unable to communicate with them in the desired channels. This clear drop in communication and a potentially bad customer experience could be by improved data collection. Sixty-four percent of respondents say this is a needed improvement. Let’s go back to my shoe retailer example. If they had collected my email wrong, I wouldn’t get my email confirmations or offers around upcoming sales. If they got my address wrong, I wouldn’t be receiving my shoes. Considering how much money I spend on shoes annually, which I am ashamed to admit, if any of those items went wrong, I might switch to a competitor. That can equate to a lot of money annually, especially when you look at it across a large number of clients. When a customer chooses to sign up for a loyalty program, they are making a commitment to the company and expecting something in return, be it points, free shipping, coupons or just company updates. However, if bad contact information is collected, then the consumer often never receives the benefits, resulting in a bad customer experience. In the next year, marketers need to data validation in place to ensure information is accurate upon collection. This type of software can be implemented across all channels where information is collected and ensure data is accurate while the consumer is still engaged. If information is accurate when it is collected, then loyalty programs have a better chance at engaging consumers and actually seeing the benefit that a loyalty program can provide. To learn more about loyalty programs and the research mentioned above, please read our new white paper, Driving customer loyalty. Contact us today
Black Friday online traffic increased 7% in 2012 versus 2011 as the top 500 retail sites received more than 193.8 million total US visits. So far this Holiday week of online traffic to the top retail sites is up 10% on average. Online retail traffic was up 1% on Black Friday compared to Thanksgiving Day 2012 traffic this year. Amazon.com remained the top visited retail site on Black Friday while Walmart was the second most visited retail site. BestBuy moved up to the 3rd most visited site while Target was the 4th most visited site. JC Penney moved up from being the 8th most visited retail site on Thanksgiving Day to the 5th most visited on Black Friday. Among the top 5 sites, JC Penney saw the biggest day-over-day growth at 26%. Looking at the top 20 retail sites on Black Friday, the Apple Store site saw the biggest day-over-day growth at 99%. Check back for CyberMonday insight and a weekly recap of this week. Contact us today