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Banking: 5 Key Steps For Your Data Journey

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Download 5 Key Steps For Your Data Journey

“Smart” Data Can Help You Align Marketing and Sales

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Sales and marketing team alignment is more important than ever! Our partner Hubspot reports that companies that get marketing and sales working together not only generate 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts – but they see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates.

Where does data fit into this alignment? Capitalizing on customer intelligence and making insights and clean data available to Sales can lead to a more efficient and effective process that can motivate and fire up your sales teams. Get started by using these analytical techniques:

Create Common Sales Cycle Definitions Across Marketing and Sales

Your sales team lives and dies on what they call leads, but Marketing might have a very different definition. Adopt a common language for each stage and definition of the sales cycle. Whether you use Prospects, Inquiries, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) or some other set of opportunity ratings, collaborate to define each stage across Sales and Marketing –so you can all start working towards the same goals, and be able to understand each other’s measurements.

Data Dirty? Build the Case to Invest in Clean Data
Both sales and marketing hate dirty data – but how much revenue is it costing your company? Build some scenarios for better demand generation and increased close rates with better data – you’d be surprised how much lost revenue can be picked up with just a lift of 5%!

Here are some ideas for the metrics you might use:

 

Add a Score to Your Leads

Nothing will kill Marketing’s demand generation credibility faster than a bunch of unqualified leads being sent to the Sales team. Sales probably shouldn’t make a call until you know there is a budget and a timeline. Maybe lower cost sales channels like email or outbound telemarketing can be used to collect the missing data before a lead reaches an acceptable score. Alignment on the meaning of a “good lead” can really reduce friction and time to close.

Build a Common Definition of Your Segments – and Assign all Prospects and Customers

Building personas for web development won’t help the sales team much if they never see those types in the market place. Find real customer segments that purchase in distinct ways, and help the sales teams craft a USP for each segment that will give them a better shot at creating opportunities. Then, make sure each prospect and customer is assigned to a segment so sales can put that messaging to work on the ground.

Find Your Territory Gaps

Use your customer and prospect data to find the holes in territory maps where you have low coverage but high potential. You can often pull much more opportunity out of an area with better or more salespeople. Marketing often has the data to help make these decisions, but Sales is the team that needs to make decisions about coverage.

Use Purchase Likelihood Scores for Call Center Targeting

Outbound phone calls are not inexpensive and turnover in telesales can be high. Invest in reaching only the highest priority prospects by using predictive model scores in your call center. Focusing calling from the top down – best to worst prospects. This should cut the calls needed, improve team morale, and increase the success rate significantly.

Your marketing team should be able to add these types of smart data to customer and prospect records – and both Marketing and Sales can get aligned around your target and your critical asset – your data.

Creating Smart Data

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If you and your team are spending time trying to wrangle all your various data feeds to find a way to create opportunities for your organization — there is a way to streamline your efforts.  You don’t need to find a home for, and a way to use all your data — just the “smart data”.

The flow of data is picking up speed for all marketers, and astute leaders are turning this data into better, more targeted and relevant sales and marketing efforts. But managing all the data from web platforms, marketing technology, mobile devices and the “Internet of Things” is often a daunting and time-consuming task. Rather than focusing on managing the big data flow, we think marketers should try to discover the relatively few data points that can really drive revenue – find your smart data and put it to work!

Start with Customer Segments

The simplest way to begin data-driven messaging to customers and prospects is by understanding that different segments may purchase your products for different reasons or in different ways. For the B2C client we find that demographics or lifestyle factors drive differences in product usage, and for the B2B client – different industry verticals, or other firmographic data mean different likelihoods to buy products and services.  Are you able to accurately identify these customer segments and analyze the differences in how they purchase or use your products and services?

Find Your Customers’ Trigger Point

Often times your customers will take some specific actions before they buy – or before they say good-bye (for example, checking their balance before paying off their car loan).  These actions should be seen as prompts that can be used to trigger communications to make the sale happen faster, or keep a customer longer. Using predictive models can score your customers and prospects for their likely purchase propensity – but the model itself can identify the behavior triggers that can be turned into automated messaging programs.

Build an Engagement Score

Measure how engaged your customers are with your brand by creating a score that will combine interactions across channels (email, satisfaction, service calls or visits to the store). Keeping it simple with a High-Medium-Low engagement scoring process, you can easily tell if some customers just need more love!

Add “Data Transformations” to Your Data Clean Up

When you combine data from multiple sources you might receive basically the same fields from the different data sources – although they may have different names and slightly different values. For example, “current age” is not as easy to update as “year of birth,” and may actually be the most useful data element for use in marketing campaigns. Build common rules, definitions and data naming conventions so the data can be easily understood, and used efficiently in marketing, sales and operations.  Data Transformations are key to making your data smart and actionable.

Trying to gain control of all the data generated by your marketing today can actually slow your progress to a more innovative data-driven approach.  Quality over quantity is key! Find your top ten “Smart Data” elements, use them to test more relevant multi-channel efforts, and build in more variables as you grow.

5 Ways to Rev up your Marketing Performance with Data-Driven Fuel

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Customer Insights give great value to marketers when they can be activated through marketing and sales efforts that move the sales needle in the right direction. “Smart customer data” has emerged as a powerful strategic asset for the most successful marketing professionals – and the process of using this data to help define goals, audiences, campaigns, and tactics as well as measuring and analyzing performance makes marketers much more agile and responsive to rapidly changing consumer expectations and behaviors. If you recognize the need to accelerate your marketing with a more data-driven, analytical approach we recommend getting started with some of these ideas:

1. Assess When and How Your Customers Want Communication

  • Help customers let you know their communications preferences by making it easy on your privacy pages and in every reply form
  • Once they tell you their preferences – make sure you respond and respect their choices in your campaigns
  • Use message testing to persuade your customers to interact with you over multiple channels to build your understanding of what makes them tick
  • Keep track of what worked – optimize results and the satisfaction of your customers will grow

2. Use Insights to Drive Your Content Strategy

  • Different segments of your audiences will be interested in different types of content. Use insights about your segments in content development
  • Determine the types of marketing content and delivery format your key segments crave and respond to the most
  • When developing different content, consider where customers are in the sales cycle – are they gathering information and researching the category? Give them an overview of where you stand vs. your competition

3. Master Data-Driven Cross-Selling

  • Build a cross sell matrix and keep track of the most likely next-to-buy products for your customers
  • Analyze the typical time between purchases, and make sure you trigger a cross sell offer around the time your customers will be going back into the market.

4. Use customer data for digital micro-targeting

  • Use digital ad buying platforms to deliver ads directly to your individual customers – with segment specific messages
  • Push your current customer data into the platforms. They can build predictive models on the fly to find lookalikes
  • Drop digital ads to the same group of people just before and just after direct mail contact to see if you can boost your direct mail results
  • Work with your media buying team to pilot some of these innovative 1:1 digital techniques and find out where you get the biggest bang

5. Test into Offer-Optimization

  • Create offers with just enough incentive to get your customers and prospects to act
  • In addition to monetary, create offers that provide information or interesting content. Too many monetary offers can backfire and train your customers to wait for the best deal
  • Use a test and learn approach to get the most response from your product and service offering

Whether your aim is to fine-tune marketing targeting by selecting audiences that will deliver the greatest return, to deliver more relevant messaging, or to find the customers that are ready to leave (or those that are ready to buy) – the answers are often found in your existing customer data.  Analyzing data from inside your organization will build customer insights that speed up your marketing performance.

Build Your Data Strategies

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Virtually everything we do produces more data, and it’s a fact that marketers who can capitalize on that data are the winners in their respective industries. Data Equity (the value of your company’s data) has begun to pop up as an asset on corporate balance sheets, and it’s imperative for you to be armed with real-time, actionable analytics and business intelligence to drive smarter marketing, sales and business decisions. Data views need to be easy to understand and customize, when and where you need it.

SIGMA has spent over 30 years helping our clients capture the hidden value in their data contributing to customer acquisition, sales force optimization, and consumer loyalty. We are poised to share strategies that we know will continue to help you engage and grow your customers – and your client’s customers.

We’ve engaged our SIGMA thought leaders and curated some insightful and interesting content that will help you consider how to build out your data strategies for the rest of 2018 and beyond.  We invite you to join our mailing list so we can share these, and other, very important insights:

  • 5 Ways to Take Your Marketing Measurement to the Next Level
  • B2B Data 101 eBook
  • 100 Ways eBook
  • Successful analytics eBook
  • Data Driven Success eBook

If there is something you would like to learn more about, please leave a comment below. As always, we are here to help.

 

Is Your Data Solution Enough?

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Scanning the headlines of the advertising and marketing trade press, it’s obvious that the marketing services industry is adept at keeping up with and pushing new trends in media, channel integration, and new marketing technologies. From conversations we have with many of our clients and agency partners it seems that many agencies struggle with what could be the industry’s most important challenge for the future; the need to understand and grapple with the mountains of data our clients want to use to achieve their business goals. Many agencies have put their toe in the water with data analysis and management — but is it enough?

Compounding this challenge is the continuing explosion of tech providers to fill in every white space in the marketing landscape. Each of these players is helping to drive the overwhelming amount of ‘Big Data’ that’s washing over the marketing landscape. Many of these tools are intended to allow us to optimize marketing spends and let individuals see unique messaging across a brand’s owned, earned and paid channels – but they end up creating even more silos of confusing data.

Today, working with client data as well as third party consumer information are essential skills for any agency seeking to build a successful brand. By offering effective data analytics and customer insights, agencies who can no longer keep their clients based on their creative ideas alone are able to productively drive business outcomes and effect corporate direction – making their agency / client relationships more valuable.

Client expectations are increasing every day, and keeping up with the demands of real time, data-driven marketing that resonates with their audiences and drives results requires a re-think about data and analytics. Once considered a luxury add on to basic agency services, these analytics and insights have become a necessary component in a brand’s overall marketing plans, most importantly in customer acquisition and growth strategies.

As a result, tech and data-focused agencies are increasingly in high demand. In a survey conducted by eMarketer, 75% of senior marketers surveyed said an agency with marketing data and analytics capabilities would be a deciding factor in agency selection.

Agencies now understand that in addition to their existing capabilities, data and analytic capabilities must be part of their solution. Today, clients expect their agency’s to leverage data successfully to advance the success of their brands. Once more agencies have successfully integrated stronger data and analytics skills they will be better equipped to be the marketing partner brands want and need.

Whether you build, or partner–flexing your data muscles will make your agency/client relationship stronger and more strategic.

So, what’s your data solution?

Partner with a data analytics firm that has depth at data science, best-in-class data tools, and the data governance and environment to integrate, manage, analyze, enrich, and ultimately construct actionable outcomes for your data – effectively building the strongest and most successful brand strategies.

Act now.