I often encounter situations at work that bring me to this invaluable conclusion: Even the smartest marketers’ hands are frequently tied by the lack of technology and shortage of execution tools, that prevent her from achieving her goals and showcasing her skills as an experienced professional.

I want to share an interesting story: One of my closest friends currently works for a B2C enterprise as a marketing manager. We recently met up during the long Easter weekend. While catching up, she shared about the 10-step journey she had to go through to send her Easter promo campaign.

First, she needed to ask the Business Intelligence team to query the database and export the list of customers who fit her desired target audience. It took just two hours to receive the list. Unfortunately, the audience size was smaller than expected, so she needed to rethink and redefine her audience.

“If only I was able to query the DB myself,’ she told me. “I could have been way more productive without having to depend on the other team.”

That’s just one aspects of being dependent on others –the data analysis team will then need to analyze the campaign, share the result in an Excel file, and who knows if it will take a day, two days, or arrive by sometime during the following week. From my experience – It’s usually the latter.

You can probably identify with her frustration. How could she turn the ideation to execution process from a long, stressful, multitouch point process that requires having to push most of her work to the last minute into a smoother, self-sufficient, result-oriented procedure, she could have full control over.

Untying the marketer’s hands

In recent months, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) nabbed the spotlight they deserve in the martech conversation. These solutions allow marketers to collect, analyze and act upon all customer data within one interface among the “must have” tools in the current marketer’s toolbox. And one application inside the CDP I’ve benefitted greatly from is the customer insight discovery.

Marketers face immense pressure to increase their company’s revenue. Many times, we fall into the trap of focusing on acquiring new customers in order to meet these goals. Other times, marketers put an emphasis on maximizing the value of existing customers.

No matter which of these groups you fit into, much of your success will be tied to your ability to uncover insights about your targeted customers. Below, I offer two of my favorite examples (With short videos made with the help of my colleague) on how to leverage your CDP to uncover valuable insights.

1. Which promotion should you offer valuable customers at risk of churn?

As marketers, there’s a fine line we need to tiptoe around when creating promotions to stave off churn. On one hand, we want to provide customers with a juicy offer they can’t resist. On the other hand, we don’t want to cannibalize our revenue with an aggressive offer. By storing all customer data in one place, you can easily access your segment’s history and confidently answer this question:

In the example above, the average order value for this “High-Value High Risk” customer segment was $331. The average price paid per item was $116.3, and the average items per order was 3.4. The marketer who can easily find and act upon this information will probably offer either a 10% discount for orders above $380 (for a total order value just above the segment’s average), or a quantity discount for orders that contain more than four items. As dealing with high-value customers usually involves outliers, exploring the groups key characteristic and reviewing their range could also determine whether this group should be split to more granular groups. In this example, the average and median are relatively similar, meaning this group is pretty homogenous.

2. Are you acquiring valuable customers?

Sometimes, marketers aren’t interested in discovering insights to create promotions, but rather to understand if different actions or strategy changes had a positive impact. One example of positive impact that could result from a strategy shift could be whether customers acquired after the change had higher future values than before. With Facebook ad spend projected to continue growing in 2019, we imagine marketers are trying to understand if new strategies are improving their results. Leveraging a combination of historic and predictive values from your CDP could answer this question in minutes:

As seen in the example above, marketers can quickly compare the future value of customers acquired before and after a Facebook acquisition strategy change. In this case, the average went from $48.3 to $54.2, a massive uplift.

Focusing on insight discovery

Insight discovery is not a new obsession for marketers, but only CDPs allow marketers to do this on their own terms. Your discovery could focus on identifying the ideal segment to engage with, the precise manner in which you should do so, or even what you should offer. And once you’ve run your campaigns, it should focus on seeing whether your efforts impacted company revenues in the short and long term.

This can’t be mastered after quickly glancing at a few how-to articles, which is why our webinar offers in-depth, easy to grasp examples that prove the benefits of customer exploration capabilities.

You can now listen to our webinar on that subject – “Going from Insights to Action”. Click here

Published on May 16th, 2019

Posted in

• Customer Retention
• Data Analysis
• Wisdom

Amit Levkovich

Amit Levkovich is Optimove’s Director of Product. She has an extensive technical and product management experience, and specializes in applying technologies to create products that solve business challenges. Amit holds a BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management, and a Masters in Business Administration.