As a strategist at Speedeon, I’m often having discussions with clients on how to drive meaningful business growth. Most often, this growth has been aimed towards acquiring new customers.
These discussions are typically after digital channels (display advertising, social media targeting and paid search) have been tapped and often times fully optimized.
Our conversations always start and end the same way, a push for more. More volume, more responses, more conversion – we just need more to achieve the acquisition goal.
This is typically where I start discussing more one-to-one communication channels, like direct mail. Direct mail combined with data enabled solutions become a game changer and take acquisition campaigns to the next level. This enhanced one-to-one acquisition targeting lends itself to improved performance.
Not convinced?
Here are three different strategies that have worked for emerging brands. All consider current customer information and refines it to achieve the acquisition goal.
- Retargeting Online Users Offline – Similar to online retargeting, utilizing offline data to monitor online-based search behavior presents a unique opportunity to create a trigger-based direct marketing program. The ability to target someone who has been actively searching for specific goods or services such as insurance or financial products will help move prospects down funnel toward conversion.With over half of customer journeys beginning online A, pushing through the noise and targeting someone at their mailbox or in their inbox will drive greater response.This program can be especially impactful when targeting consumers through multiple direct marketing channels such as direct mail and email. What makes this approach unique is that the monitored audience can be built off of specific business rule requirements, modeled data, or life event dataSince an estimated 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to make a purchase B, offline retargeting becomes essential.
- Modeled 3rd Party Data – There are multiple types of selection strategies when utilizing 3rd party data. One approach is to apply demographic and psychographic filters to reach the targeted audience. These selections are typically based on what the business thinks its current customer or ideal customer looks like. Whereas descriptive targeting may be appropriate when resources are limited, a modeled approach often lends itself to higher response rates. Predictive models built from a sample of current or otherwise ideal customers offers the ability to further optimize selections based upon model rank and removes selection bias which may plague descriptive, “filter-based” selection strategies.This option, which uses both demographic and psychographic variables, will provide a more in-depth view of a prospect than with straight data selects. Because the variables are based off customer information, this information can also help drive content creation strategies and other business decisions in addition to direct marketing.
- Co-Op Data – Co-Op data consists of transaction-level detail captured and consolidated across thousands of businesses and can help brands understand specific spending habits with current customers. Typically, data cooperatives require companies to contribute their customer data to the “pool” of sources to further strengthen the audience which offers reciprocity for existing brands within the co-op.It’s worth noting that co-op Data strategies work especially well within the specialty space because transactional data includes stronger in-market cues associated with prior purchases compared to demographic data often used with predictive models.
The three data strategies above represent ideas outside of the normal prospect list or digital and social realm of acquisition targeting. These options provide a targeted approach, utilize current customer information to find the best possible audience and are proven to help emerging brands accomplish their goals.
Testing any of these data sets will allow for scalable campaigns and the information can transfer across other channels as well as parts of the business.
The three data strategies outlined above are just the tip of the iceberg, which new data audience will you begin testing in 2021?
A https://www.oberlo.com/blog/online-shopping-statistics
B https://business.adobe.com/resources/ebooks/website-and-seo-for-lead-generation.html
