Introduction
Hi there, Jim Novo here. This site is home for
The
Drilling Down Project - a collection of articles,
tools, and services
you can use to take control of your customer data and
use this data to improve your
profitability. The Project includes this web site, the Marketing
Productivity Blog, free
newsletter, book with free customer scoring
software,
and High ROI Customer Marketing
Services and Workshops
for Marketing or IT folks.
Background on the Method
I was the VP of Marketing and Programming for Home
Shopping Network, overseeing marketing and merchandising efforts for TV
Shopping,
the Catalog division, and Interactive on CompuServe,
Prodigy, and the Internet.
Over a 10 year period we developed and tested a method for increasing customer value while reducing marketing
costs through modeling customer behavior. Using simple
query tools and tough ROI formulas, we frequently generated returns
on marketing spending of
over 100%, with some programs returning 400% or more. And we
did it with simple, readily available tools.
How we did it is the subject
of this site, the Drilling
Down book, and the High ROI Customer Marketing Roundtable
and Workshops.
Do-It-Yourself Customer
Analysis
for High ROI Customer Marketing
If you are looking to avoid the high risk and cost of installing
a full-blown customer analysis suite, but want to take advantage
of high ROI customer
marketing tactics, this site is for you. You can develop a very simple toolkit, build experience
with High ROI customer modeling techniques, and make more money
using the Drilling Down method.
Here's how it works: customers are "scored" on their
transactional activity (purchases, page views, log-ins, etc.) with
an Excel spreadsheet, by
the Access application that comes with
the book, or your own application (business rules supplied). The scores represent the
likelihood of each
customer to respond to marketing and remain a customer,
allowing you to rank your customers by their potential
value. When you can identify the potential value of
customers, you are able to:
- Go get more customers like the
highest potential customers
- Focus on growing the
profitability of middle potential customers
- Stop wasting resources on low
potential customers
Then "trip wire" reports are run each week or month and
changes in potential value scores are monitored. Rising scores
indicate the potential value of the customer is increasing; falling scores
indicate decreasing potential value - and signal the customer is
becoming less likely to continue on as a customer. Trip wire reports
monitor changes in score and "flag" important
changes in potential customer value, allowing you to:
- Emphasize the ads, media, and products
creating long term high potential value customers and downplay
the ones that don't
- Create High ROI marketing programs and make more money selling
to customers by driving higher sales while reducing costs
- Predict when best customers are about to leave you and react
with customer retention and save-a-customer programs
- Quantify the effects of marketing and operational initiatives by
linking them to a change in potential customer value
Customers can be scored by segment (demo, geo, source, media,
products purchased, time of day, referring URL) or as individuals.
You can get started right away discovering the clues to
increased profitability locked away in your customer data without long lead times
and a lot of expense.
Then, when you have the experience and the ROI justification
you need, you can move up to
a more powerful solution at your own pace - and bring with you real-world
experience
in driving profitability using customer data for decision making.
Click here
for step-by-step contents of the book
Easy to Understand
The Drilling Down method
is very mechanical in
nature. Customers are classified and compared with each other
on a number of parameters using their transactions - not personally
intrusive questions. There's not a
lot of guesswork involved; the answers you are looking for become
very clear. You don't have to be a database
marketing expert - just someone with common business
sense.
IT people love this method (clue: it was developed from the beginning
with IT people
involved). They think of the Drilling
Down book as the "Customer Analysis Requirements Document" they
could never manage to get out of Marketing, because it provides a
very logical, iterative approach to allocating resources and
increasing customer value. IT folks without a lot of marketing
support are just "running with it", building up a store of
important behavioral data to be used later on when the marketing
support comes onboard.
Read user comments on the method
Why Does it Work So Well?
It's a "low hanging fruit" idea and inexpensive to set
up and use. The Drilling
Down method provides a structure for organizing your
approach to customer data and identifying the highest ROI
opportunities. You spend very little on new infrastructure, use existing
IT resources, and drive bottom line impact.
Proven Approach, Real Results
This site is designed as a preview of the
Drilling
Down method, and provides
many examples of customer marketing models and techniques. By
reading the articles and taking the tutorials,
you will begin to understand there are real methods and metrics
behind the hype you have been exposed to.
The fact is, some of these techniques have been around
for decades, and have been over-complicated and over-hyped by the
various players in the space. I have personally been working
with some of these methods since 1983. Customer behavior
modeling has a very long
history of success, proven to work again and again across many
different business models. And it's privacy friendly.
These methods work very well using only customer transactions (page
views, purchases, log-ins,
contacts, etc.) to predict and manage future customer behavior.
What you
will learn how to do in the book
I guarantee you will learn
some common sense, easy to implement customer marketing optimization techniques from
going though this site. The topics covered on this site represent
"building blocks" used in the Drilling
Down method, the foundation - and are actionable ideas by
themselves. As you
go through the site, you will be building an
appreciation for how powerful simple customer modeling can be, and understand
you can do it yourself.
If you want to access the complete step-by-step Drilling
Down method for creating high ROI customer marketing
programs, you should consider purchasing the book.
If you are not in "do it yourself" mode, please
review my
hands-on needs discovery, pre-CRM ROI analysis /
testing, and
teaching programs tailored to
where you are on the Database Marketing / CRM Analytics learning
curve. If you represent a marketing / consulting agency or
software company, see the subcontracting
section.
Good luck to you!
- Jim Novo
Helpful Links: The Drilling
Down method is a tight integration of many
concepts you read about all the time that never seem to make much
sense by themselves. I've created customized "gateways" to the
method for many of these concepts so you can see how they integrate. Please choose the background
or interest area you're coming from below:
By Marketing Concept:
CRM Customer
Loyalty Customer
Retention
Relationship Marketing
Permission Marketing
By Tactical Approach:
Visualization of Customer Behavior
Visitor
Conversion Customer Profiling
Customer
Modeling Customer LifeCycles
LifeTime
Value RFM Modeling
Calculating
ROI
By Business Type:
Retailing Utility /
Telco Insurance /
Services
Durable or Low Purchase Frequency
Goods
No fit with your interests? See below.
What would you like to
do now?
Find Out How
Do-It-Yourself Customer Analysis
and High ROI Customer Marketing are Done
Learn
Do-It-Yourself Customer Analysis, Customer Modeling,
and High ROI Customer Marketing Techniques
Read the First
9 Chapters
of the Drilling Down Book
Get the book
with Free customer scoring software at Booklocker.com
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