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High ROI Customer Marketing Design

Designing a high ROI customer marketing program is not difficult.  It moves along faster if clients have been tracking customer metrics and doing some customer modeling first.  If they have not, we will do these things as part of designing their comprehensive program.

The following assumes I'll be doing all the work for you.  If you want to learn how to do it yourself, you need the workshop.

I've found there are general stages in the process of attacking a specific database marketing challenge; these stages are described below.  It is useful to break up the process like this so all the players understand what's involved and progress can be tracked.

You may or may not need to go through all these stages, depending on the progress you have made so far.

Stage 1:  Initial overview - learning the details of the business.  Goals, problem areas, past experiences, research material (surveys).  I will also want to review the customer reports you have, particularly those covering transactional activity of any kind (purchases, page views).

Stage 2:  Data scrutiny - seeing what kind of data is available.  Dump the data or a sample and review it for content and integrity, get a feel for the manifestation of the business in the data.  Ideally, I would like to see raw data records and if you use a marketing datamart, the summary data available to users.

Stage 3:  Follow-up on data - confirming my perceptions of the data with data owners.  This can sometimes be more of an IT type idea, where I make sure I understand very clearly what the data is and where it comes from, verifying the data sources and usually asking for new kinds of reports to be developed.  The new reports are "customer behavior mapping" tools - the organizing of your data around customer behavior.   It's the idea at the core of my Drilling Down method, and is a one-time exercise you can continue to benefit from down the road.

Stage 4:  Formation of thesis - what do I think can be done, what kind of program can be developed?  The kinds of ideas generated at this stage would be similar to these: "you're giving away the store on discounts to best customers and you don't need to", "you have a whole customer segment that could be profitable but your campaign timing is off", "you have a serious best customer defection problem", and so on.  This is grinding on the data, running scenarios, looking for clues. 

Stage 5:  Gut-check thesis - does it make sense to the program owner?  I run through the basic first thesis (test idea) with the owner, tear it apart, rebuild it, and get commitment to a test of some kind.  This stage includes program delivery decisions (e-mail, snail mail, CRM rules-based execution, personalization of pages, etc.)  We will also finalize who will be targeted, what the offers should be, and creative in this gut-check stage.

Stage 6:  Execution - nuts and bolts.  Choose the list, design creative, execute the program, wait for results to come in.  I probably don't have to be involved in this, unless you want me to monitor results as they come in and suggest adjustments.

Stage 7:  Results Analysis - was the thesis correct?  What are the key most profitable behavioral trigger points?  Which customer segments are the most profitable, least profitable?  We're tearing apart the data, looking for clues.

Stage 8:  Final Presentation - wrap up the first thesis.  Interpretation of the results, ideas for improvement, review of new facts and ideas generated by the test of the first thesis.

What would you like to do now?

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