Do Business Well

External Activity

<CROSS-CHANNEL CONTACT HISTORY (MAIL, TELEPHONE), PENDING SUPPORT ISSUE, FIRST AND LAST SUPPORT CALL AND EMAIL, SUPPORT LOG/EVENT HISTORY, PRODUCT RETURN HISTORY …>

Data generated from your direct mail, telemarketing, customer support, and product return operations can be a critical part of measuring true customer value, cost to serve, and cost of customer contact and conversion. Linking this type of external data with your email marketing system will enable you to spot—and avoid— potential problems. Imagine, for example, that a customer has sent you an email complaining about a product defect. If customer service doesn’t let marketing know about the problem, marketing might send the already-angry customer an email offering the latest add-on to the product he or she is complaining about.

Whenever eBags receives a customer service email, it triggers an automatic data feed to its email marketing system. This data feed places a “marker” in the customer’s profile, which keeps the system from delivering any further emails to that customer until the marker has been removed (which happens only when the issue has been resolved).

External Information Overlays

<DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION OVERLAYS, PARTNER DATA OVERLAYS (RETAILERS SHARING DATA AMONG THEMSELVES) …>

External information overlays are information acquired from outside sources that you add (or, as they say in the trade, “append”) to your customer profiles. If you don’t know what kind of cars your customers drive, for example, but you consider that information important, you can—in theory—acquire it from a third-party provider such as Axciom, whose large demographic database contains information on a majority of U.S. households. Information in overlay databases is normally collected from a variety of sources, some private and some public (such as your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles or U.S. Postal Service change of address database).

Overlays are commonly used to enhance traditional direct marketing lists, but they are still fairly rare online. There are several reasons why this is so.

None of the commercially available services have email addresses for any significant portion of the consumers in their demographic database. This means that they cannot do an append keyed by email. You could use name and address as in offline direct mail, but many email marketing databases don’t contain full name and address.

The usefulness of appends from traditional sources is still debatable. You might be able to improve the service you offer by using an append early on in your relationship with a prospective customer or member. In many instances, though, you’d be better off simply asking prospective consumers for the information you’re looking for during the first online encounter. Most site visitors will tell you what kind of car they drive if they understand why you’re asking and what value they’ll get for answering. This gives you accurate, up-to-the-minute information instead of potentially old, and probably inaccurate, information.

Given the heightened sensitivity to privacy in the online environment, it’s quite possible that appending customer profiles with detailed demographic information could cause an outcry among consumer privacy watch groups and advocates.

While appended information from a third-party database may improve targeting, it won’t help with personalization. A database might, for example, reveal that 70 percent of your potential customers are women, but it can’t say for sure which ones. If you rely on that information you’ll end up addressing a number of men as Ms. when you send them email and that won’t do much to build their confidence and trust in you.

Modeled Information

<DEMOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION, BEHAVIORAL SEGMENTATIONS, LIFETIME VALUE MODELS, PREDICTIVE MODELS …>

Developing analytic data models can help you understand many of the less obvious aspects of your customers‘ interactions. This is the learning part of the listening and learning we discussed earlier. Models are used to segment customers into groups with similar characteristics, behaviors, interests, and so on. They can be used to trigger communication such as automatic win-back programs when the model indicates that a particular customer is a possible defector. Models enable you to design and develop new programs and campaigns based on your insight into your customers‘ behavior.

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