Data alone isn’t useful, and it has the potential to be distracting or even misleading. And analytics are only helpful if they’re focused on finding actionable insights – in other words, providing information that helps you make smarter decisions about your marketing, sales and general business efforts.

Here are five specific ways you can leverage analytics to turn your customer data into better business results and increase the ROI of your marketing and sales investments.

1)      Target the right customers

You don’t have unlimited resources for marketing and sales, so it’s critical to focus your spend and time on the customers that will generate the most value for you – those that you are most likely to retain and grow. When developing a targeting plan, it’s typically important to consider the customer’s current value (how much revenue/profit are you getting from the customer?) in addition to the customer’s potential value (how much revenue/profit could you get from the customer?).

There are a variety of analytic techniques to identify the right audience, depending on the depth of data that you have and the state of your current marketing efforts. If you’re just getting started with customer analytics or you have limited data, then a relatively simple segmentation may be the best way to carve out the right audience. On the other hand, if you’re already doing some basic targeting and you have a rich set of customer data, then you may want to build predictive models to further enhance your targeting.

2)      Acquire new high-value customers

You can typically leverage an analysis of your current customers to help identify the best acquisition prospects to pursue. A better understanding of your existing customers can go a long way to determining which type of prospects are most likely to be interested in your products and become valuable customers. A segmentation or predictive model will help you focus your acquisition marketing efforts where they will be most effective. One of the key issues to consider is which metrics are most important in assessing the success of acquisition campaigns. This is discussed in more detail here → Value Models vs. Response Models.

3)      Provide relevant offers and messaging to each customer

Once you’ve determined the right audience for your marketing or sales efforts, you’ll want to decide which offers and messaging to put in front of each customer. Retaining, growing, or acquiring a customer hinges on providing something relevant and compelling to that specific customer.

You can develop customer-level segmentations and models based not only on what a customer has purchased historically, but also on predictions of what that customer is likely to buy in the future. With the combination of customer transaction data and customer attributes, you can infer what a customer may buy in the future based on the purchase patterns of similar customers.

The good news is that today’s marketing technology makes it relatively easy and affordable to provide dynamic customized offers to each customer – you don’t need to stick to a single offer or message based on lowest common denominators.

4)      Optimize frequency of communication

Frequency is another key aspect of your marketing strategy that has a big impact on your effectiveness and ROI. If you don’t reach out to customers enough, you may find you’re not in their consideration set. On the other hand, you may be pouring money down the drain if you’re mailing, calling or visiting customers too often. To further complicate matters, it’s unlikely that there is a single magic number when considering the “right” number of contacts per customer. A better strategy likely involves different frequencies for different customers.

A simple way to start is to use what your segmentations or models have told you about customer value. Customers with higher value and potential likely warrant frequent outreach, while it may make more sense to connect with lower-potential customers less frequently.

To truly optimize frequency, you can set up randomized tests to provide some customers with more/less frequent communications. You can then compare the results and costs between the different groups to see which level of frequency is more cost-effective.

5)      Focus marketing spend in the right channels

Optimizing spend across channels is difficult, especially if your marketing mix spans digital, direct and mass media channels. However, with the right processes and systems in place, you can measure (or at least reasonably estimate) the cost-effectiveness of each channel and see where you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

You should also consider running tests with a modified marketing mix across regions or time, so you can measure the marginal impact of shifting spend across channels. The key thing to consider is that you really care about the incremental sales being generated by each channel or campaign. This concept is discussed in more depth in a white paper → Incrementality.

These opportunities to use customer data transcend specific marketing or sales channels. Whether your business is driven primarily by direct mail, digital marketing, or a national sales force, analytics can help you focus your attention and spend on the right audiences and optimize your marketing and sales programs.

Hopefully this blog gave you a helpful idea or two. If you’re not sure what your next step should be or what makes the most sense for your business, give us a call to discuss the possibilities.

Since the website relaunch, traffic has increased 30% and the time customers spend on the site has gone from 10-15 seconds to two minutes and 30 seconds. Customer satisfaction has also risen from 64% to 72%.

“We’ve improved online account opening and are now getting 500 funded new accounts online a month,” senior vice president and digital marketing director Thomas Bontempo said.

To read the full article, visit Bank Technology News here.

Every year the RBJ recognizes Rochester’s best business websites at the Best of the Web Awards breakfast. The awards are given for sites determined to be Rochester’s best by a panel of judges

Judge Eric Mitsch commented, “This site is refreshingly easy to navigate. I found the items I wanted easily without being loaded down with excessive text … plus, the expanded drop-down navigation is extremely helpful with the content extras such as the location, phone numbers and hours info … would visit them again and made me want to open an account — very effective.”

The site was designed by the bank’s direct and digital marketing agency, Catalyst, based in Rochester, New York. To date, the new site has produced a 30% increase in the number of online customers.  A case study about the site’s development was just presented at the American Banker Best Practices in Retail Financial Services conference, March 13-15, 2013, and featured in American Banker’s Bank Technology magazine on March 20.

You can pretty quickly figure out which marketing automation vendors rank highly by looking at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant or Forrester reviews. (And the lines are getting ever more blurry between the ESP and the marketing automation tool.) Each vendor has its strengths and drawbacks. Today we’re all talking about social and smartphones. Five years ago, it was SMS. Five years before that it was email. So you need a toolset that can adapt not only to the latest trends but also to the reality of what drives business for your customers.

Yes, your marketing automation tool needs to work, and its feature set needs to match your campaign needs – but it’s not the most important cog in your data architecture. The underlying database is far more important, even if you’re stuck with a legacy ESP (email service provider) or MAT (marketing automation tool) that’s been in place for years.  And the connection to your CRM is also essential.

In our case, we’ve been able to standardize on the underlying database (Microsoft SQL). The marketing automation tool, or the ESP, sits on top of that. It’s the engine that pushes out direct mail, triggered email, SMS and social campaigns for clients and monitors results. But that’s not the critical cog.

On the very top layer, we’ve built highly customized Web apps that allow our clients’ sales channels to twist the dials on their marketing campaigns. They can change offers, modify coupon values, increase or decrease communications to certain customer segments, customize the creative, and track unique codes that enable meaningful tests and analytics. Their human intelligence is what makes the marketing automation tool effective.

So don’t drive yourself nuts deciding which marketing automation tool to buy. Spend more time thinking about the customized apps and analytics that you will need and the strategic decisions you will need to make once that’s in place. It’s analytics, coupled with an empowered sales force, that drives truly successful campaigns. The specific marketing automation tool isn’t where the smartness lies.

But what gets many analysts salivating, including me, is when we uncover something unexpected.  Or in other words, unpredictable analytics, which sounds like an oxymoron but isn’t. This is especially exciting when it means the analyst and the client both learn something new.

A good example of this was with a client that sells small household appliances.  As part of each sale, a customer would receive several free annual tune-ups.  A month prior to the tune-up date, we sent out a postcard reminder.  We and the client expected a small return on this campaign, since free tune- ups were just that – free —and we thought of it more as a customer service than a revenue-generator.

The analytics however, surprised both of us. They showed that the tune-up postcard actually produced additional cross-sales of in-store products —both new units and replacement parts.  The success of the campaign was so high that free tune-up offers are now mailed to all customers

How did we discover the increased sales? From point-of-sale data. The sales were driven by the in-store sales reps, who engaged the customers in conversation when they came in for their tune-ups, and ended up selling them more merchandise.  A totally unexpected result!

Another example of a keen insight was found with an automotive aftermarket client.  We launched a direct mail campaign to existing customers who would likely need new tires for their vehicles.  The campaign offer was a purchase discount on those tires.

The client was expecting most responsive customers to use the discount for their tire purchase and pocket the savings. During the analysis, we found that, as expected, more tires sold at a higher rate among the mailed audience than among the holdout cell. The unexpected discovery, however,  was that a large number of customers used the discount not to save money, but rather to buy more expensive tires that would normally have not been purchased  due to their higher cost.  This thrilled the client because the more expensive brands carried a higher profit margin.

Results that fall within the expected range are all part of a normal day’s work for an analyst. When those days include uncovering an unexpected insight, my heart beats faster and I click my mouse a bit quicker. Never knowing when you may come across the next unexpected result is what keeps my curiosity piqued.

Other selected commenters for the feature include Kim and Wayne Pick, creative directors at RAPP, and Adam Kleinberg, CEO of Traction.

1.  No Two Channels Are Created Equally

A lot of waste occurs when the mobile channel is viewed only as another option to do all of the things that are currently done in well-established channels (i.e., lots of time gets spent making sure that the website renders properly on the phone, without truly understanding customer context or needs). The alternative is to establish unique communications that are focused exclusively on what an “on the go” or “surfing” customer might need — to hone down and sequence the message or content to align with both the unique capabilities and limitations of mobile devices as well as with the customer’s likely frame of mind when they are using their mobile device.

To eliminate waste in this space, determine how your customers are actually interacting with your brand from their mobile device, and ask them (or infer) what it is that they really want to be able to do. Think of this audience as a subset of customers who have unique needs … then market to them accordingly. Structure the mobile experiences so that they can easily get to the information they need most, without having to navigate through less relevant information and waste precious time (which, over time, can hurt your brand). In the end, you may need different ways of serving up mobile content – for example, apps for frequent users and mobile-optimized sites for occasional users).

2.  Mobile Experiences Should Extend the Brand … In-Store and In Every Channel

Another area of significant waste is the creation of mobile experiences that are not well aligned with the brand strategy. The fact that mobile users love to play games on their phones does not mean that every brand needs games to enhance the customer experience. The question is, how best can the brand be delivered in this channel?  In what context will users be seeking out your brand?

For example, retail customers are primarily experiencing the brand when they are in the store, engaging with retail personnel and in-store merchandising. So how best can the mobile channel be used to enhance that experience? The use of apps is one way that marketers can connect with their most engaged customers, but what about the less engaged? You may want to explore the use of geo-fencing and push communications as an alternate means of reaching customers who might see value in being engaged with a relevant message at precisely the right time and place.

In either case, the opportunity is to create a better in-store experience AND to extend the experience for the customer beyond the storefront. Encouraging customers to check out current promotions, access additional product information/reviews, and/or download coupons are some of the most common options. But what about extending the in-store aisle with a virtual one by providing store-specific maps for “hard to find” items … or giving customers an easy way to contact customer service directly to address any questions/service issues they are having?  And how about helping them plan their next visit after they leave, with relevant promotional offers that are coming up, special in-store programs that might be of interest to them, or even a survey to learn how best to serve them during their next visit?

These types of experiences will create unique, more meaningful connections with your customers, adding unexpected value to their experience and reinforcing the value of your brand.

“A significant percent of our agency business is business-to-business,” said Jeff Cleary, Catalyst’s managing director and author of the white paper: It’s the Relationship, Stupid: Bridging the Gap between Lead Generation and Marketing Automation.

“We’ve had a great deal of success developing lead generation, nurturing and scoring programs for Fortune 1000 companies, as well as CRM initiatives,” he said. “Having our work recognized by BtoB Magazine—the number one business-to-business marketing strategy magazine—is something we’re really proud of.”

Catalyst’s business-to-business clients include Eastman Kodak Company, Heraeus Kulzer, Valvoline, and Xeikon, among others.

Download a free copy of It’s the Relationship Stupid: Bridging the Gap Between Lead Generation and Marketing Automation here.

1. It’s inviting and engaging – It offers purposeful use of video and interaction, clear and on-brand copy, customization and dynamic targeting
2. It creates the experience I’ve dreamed of – It delivers on the brand promise and on the top information I want (served up in a way I would expect)
3. It speaks to me in ways I understand – It presents the information in human terms, with contextual help available in the right forms, at the right times
4. Doesn’t hide anything – No fine print. Literally. Readable font with disclosures or disclaimers as integrated as possible (and again, in human terms)
5. Listens to my needs (and wants) – Can you hear me? Can I connect with you at any point in any way works best for me? Is your contact information in a universal header? Do you offer click-to-call, pervasive chat, email … everything but the carrier pigeon?
6. Grows with me and encourages me to deepen the relationship – Are there appropriate levels of dynamic targeting, relevant offers (I don’t mind being tracked or giving up some information or being cross-sold if it’s what I need, at the right time)
7. Dependable. Not too needy or high-maintenance – Everything works … it isn’t sluggish … and it doesn’t ask too much of me
8. Fresh content, occasionally surprising me – I look forward to coming “home.” There’s the comfortable environment I expect but I look forward to some great news and improvements
9. Takes me to places I didn’t know existed (but was glad to discover) – It’s hard to keep up on everything all the time. I like to learn useful things that I didn’t even know I was missing out on
10. Looks stunning too – Sleek, simple, uncluttered, evocative imagery –hate to say it but sometimes the medium really is the message. It’s nice to get the total package, right?

Offer all this on your website and I guarantee your visitors will have a lovefest with you that leads to a deeper and more meaningful relationship. Meanwhile, happy Valentine’s Day to you and the special valentines in your life.