Successful targeting with marketing automation

BY BENJAMIN RUND

(Published in The Produktkulturmagazin issue 2 2015)

I am a passionate runner and always track my runs on my iPhone. For this, I use an arm band from a leading sports apparel company. I am a great supporter of this brand so I often buy their products – mainly through their official website online. For the past few weeks, however, I have repeatedly received marketing offers from this brand, promoting apparel that does not match my style or size. As a repeat customer, this lack of promotional accuracy frustrates me. After all, I have purchased many items from this brand yet the company still does not seem to know which products I prefer. 

While today’s customers expect a seamless, integrated and consistent buying experience, most businesses cannot meet that expectation. With inaccurate, inconsistent and disconnected customer information spread across channels and touch points, they lack the basis to make informed business decisions. However, one can optimise marketing applications and increase response rates by organising clients in segments based on detailed customer profiles while monitoring transactions to understand which products the clients prefer.

Informatica addresses this challenge with the ‘Total Customer Relationship’ concept, which transforms data silos as well as fragmented and channel-centric information into integrated, connected and customer-centric data.

Such a holistic approach requires a lot of data: customer data, transactional data, product data, product reference data, marketing data. Most enterprises today have all this information available but store them in separate data silos and are thus unable to use that data in a productive manner. The key question is: how can one connect all this data? The answer: Total Customer Relationship.

What is Total Customer Relationship exactly? A reliable customer profile includes complete information: all members of a customer’s household or corporate hierarchy, information about products they have purchased across lines of business and channels, their channel and location preferences as well as their relationships with employees and partners, validated contact information of course, as well as other important information from 3rd party sources. 

Total Customer Relationship enables marketing, sales and customer service silos of customer information to connect and thus get direct access to clean, consistent and connected client profiles. This is more than a single view across all channels ‒ it is access to the entire customer relationship and the basis upon which to make offers using great product information, which can pose an enormous competitive edge. 

Two things are needed for this. “Informatica MDM”: Master Data Management (MDM) empowers building and managing rich customer profiles and product catalogues. Secondly, “Informatica Data as a Service”: Informatica Data as a Service (DaaS) is integrated directly into the Marketo software and helps to validate and correct client addresses in more than 240 countries.

How is process data accompanying the customer journey? The customer buys a particular item. The respective customer data is linked to the item via MDM. MDM then checks if the customer has relatives or friends. In case of a potential target person, the system further checks the gender and obtains possible upsell / cross-sell items. MDM connects all interaction of the customer in a central client profile and a 360° view of products. Based on this information, the customer can be assigned a persona. MDM subsequently transfers this data to the marketing automation tool. This tool then generates a promotional email and sends this email to the target person.

But how can we market one product to two different target groups individually? Let us assume that the company ‘Tech&Stuff’ has a well-organised 360° product overview with references to matching accessories. Tech & Stuff has two different target persona — Jo and Kitty Seven. Together they bought a television ‘Multivision Isio 32’ which has a cross-sell reference to a digital sat receiver.

This is typical information found in an MDM system: which products have meaningful references and thus are a potential up-sell. In this case, this information is not only used for output channels like eCommerce but also for personalised marketing purposes. In our example, a cross-selling recommendation to a ‘TechniBox S1+’ digital sat receiver is stored.

As soon as the customer ‘Jo Seven’ has bought the television in the company’s online shop system, Informatica MDM automatically pushes a data set connecting ‘Jo Seven’ to the Television ‘Multivision Isio 32’. An automated process now triggers a database check to see whether the customer ‘Jo Seven’ has relatives or friends. He lives in one household with his wife ‘Kitty Seven’. Since the cross-sell product is not gender specific it is relevant for both target persons. The process pushes comprehensive blocks of information to the marketing automation tool. They contain all the relevant information needed for the marketing automation tool to create an email to the customers. An appropriate email template is already stored in the marketing automation tool already. Drawing on various information blocks, the tool is able to generate two emails promoting the up-sell product. The first email targets Jo, the second Kitty. Before Jo and Kitty are addressed, email verification starts to ensure that the emails are safe and accurate. Only after this check, is the email sent. Due to the fact that in MDM all product data, including gender-specific images, is stored on a product’s site, the promotion email can be adapted to the receiver accordingly.

Upon reading this email, Kitty wants to buy the digital satellite receiver. She goes online and orders the receiver. When entering her shipping address, the data is verified with Informatica Address Verification directly within the Marketo form. Kitty and Jo also enter their phone number in the Marketo form and opt in to be updated via SMS on the progress of their purchase. The number is verified for accuracy with Informatica Phone Validation and identified as a mobile number. As soon as the satellite receiver is shipped, the Informatica SMS Mobile Messaging service automatically sends out an SMS with a tracking number to Kitty.

With a combination of a powerful marketing automation application like Marketo and a Total Customer Relationship approach, more meaningful customer segments based on rich customer profiles can be built to generate more personalised cross-sell and up-sell offers to existing customers, as well as their relatives or friends. Unleash your hidden marketing potential and deliver great customer experiences with great data.

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 SOFTWARE VENDOR

Informatica MDM helps organisations to deliver business value with complete and accurate views of business-critical master data – “360° view of customers, products, and relationships. 

Informatica Corp
Benjamin Rund
brund@informatica.com 
informatica.com

Picture credits © Michelle Jefferies/Getty Images