17/Nov/2009 understand the profile of my customers better

You might know a lot about your customers RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value), but your customers’ behaviour can’t be fully understood looking at RFM alone. Your customers might belong to different demographic groups, have different channel preferences and purchase from different merchandise categories. Does that impact how they purchase from you and how you should talk to them? Of course it does.

 That’s why it’s important to gather both demographic and behavioural information about your customers - and we have a lot of valuable information to offer. With our Customer Profile Report we can help you to identify the key traits that define your customers and to profile different segments of your customer database.

We leverage transactional information from one of the largest data pools in the UK, with over 18 million households on the Alliance and more than 500 million transactions on file. Thanks to our members’ commitment to providing regular updates, we have more than 6 million 0-12 buyers on file.

If you have in-house analytics capabilities, you might also be interested in our Data Enhancement offering. We can provide you with transaction-based variables to be appended to your company’s marketing database. 

17/Nov/2009 measure share of wallet and discover which other products my customers are buying

We can help you to understand where your customers buy, how long ago they made their last purchase and how much they spent in each of our merchandise categories.

With our Merchandise Category Report we can show you how your customers spend is allocated amongst the different merchandise categories and compare that to the trends of the entire Alliance. This insight can be used to identify opportunities for list rentals, advertising or merchandise-mix expansion.

Our Share of Wallet Report demonstrates how much each of your customers are spending in your merchandise category and what percentage of their spend goes to competitors. This report comes with a customer-level segmentation that can be easily appended to your marketing database and used to support your selection strategy, helping you to turn insight into action. 

Also, we can help you to make the most out of the data available by appending customer level information to your database. Our Data Enhancement offering contains more than 400 transaction-based variables that you can tag to your database and use to support analysis efforts and your selection strategy. These variables will enable you to see in which merchandise category each of your customers is buying.

17/Nov/2009 understand how my customers differ from the buyers in my competitive category

There are many things that can make your customers different (or similar) to the buyers in the competitive category - seasonality, the allocation of their spend and their demographic profile for example. You can find all this information in our Market Insight Report.

The Market Insight Report is composed of three separate modules, each module providing insight relative to one area of the ’life’ of your buyers. Together, these three modules provide a 360 degree picture of your buyers and help identify the characteristics that make them unique. 

The Seasonality module shows you highs and lows in the activity of your customers and compares their purchasing behaviour to that of all buyers in the competitive category.

The Merchandise Category module looks at the purchasing behaviour of your buyers outside your competitive category and compares that to the average buyer on the Alliance.

Finally, the Demographic module, based on CACI Ocean demographics, compares the profile of your buyers to that of the buyers in the competitive category and the entire Alliance. 

By combining all of this information you can build a complete picture  and create communications that are relevant to your customers and prospects. 

14/Dec/2009 mail my customer database less but keep my customers engaged

There are many factors influencing the level of engagement and purchase frequency of your customers. Some of these factors are related to seasonality and are common to your merchandise category. Others are specific to your offering and your customers and we suggest that you take a look at both.

Let's start with the seasonality. Our Seasonality Report analyses the purchasing trends for your customer database over a 12 month period and compares it to the trends in the competitive category. This helps you to identify the months where your customer database opportunities are highest, so that you can concentrate your efforts in these periods and mail less when customers and prospects are less likely to respond.

Our Time to Purchase Report will help you get a better understanding of when and how frequently your customers purchase. This report looks at the purchasing behaviour of new recruits and existing customers separately, helping to identify patterns that can be exploited to test different contact strategies and optimise mail frequency.

Using this insight will identify the optimal contact strategy for your business. This will allow you to keep your customers engaged while minimising the number of touches and therefore growing the ROI of your customer database initiatives. 

14/Dec/2009 ensure my marketing budget is allocated correctly

To make sure that you’re spending your money in the right places you should track customer response using match-back analysis and measure Near Term Value (NTV) by different recruitment channels, or even by single prospect source, so that you can identify the prospect sources that are generating the highest returns on your marketing investment. Sounds complicated? Let us help!

Our Buyer Analysis Report will help you to measure NTV for your recruits by recruitment channel or prospect source, offering a better understanding of the purchasing behaviour of new customers in their first year after recruitment. The report will enable you to assess the differences in purchasing behaviour by recruitment channel, first order channel, first order value, time to second purchase and month of first transaction.

This will allow you to identify the combination of factors (recruitment channel / order channel / month of recruitment) that generates the best recruits, helping to answer the question “What cost can I recruit at?” Also, the insight from the Buyer Analysis Report can help you to identify customers with high potential early in their lifecycle, allowing you to give them the red carpet treatment as soon as they get onboard. 

14/Dec/2009 re-activate lapsed buyers efficiently

The first step towards better performance for your re-activation campaigns is to build a Re-Activation Model. Our Re-activation Models can help you to overcome the limitations of RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) as they leverage more data sources and allow more factors to play a role in the selection. In fact, our models leverage transactional information from your competitive category as well as other merchandise categories, measuring customer engagement in a more comprehensive way.

Also, since re-activating lapsed customers can take multiple touches and be very expensive, you might want to consider reactivating only those lapsed customers that have the potential to become highly profitable. Our Category Spend Report can help you to identify these customers by segmenting your lapsed customers based on how much they’re spending in your merchandise category.

By combining likelihood of re-activation with an assessment of a customers’ potential you can increase the response to your re-activation campaigns and make sure that you are re-activating customers with long-term potential. A similar strategy can be used to identify the enquirers that are more likely to convert and become highly profitable customers. 

14/Dec/2009 mail at the most opportune time

Generally speaking, the best time to talk to your customers and prospects is when they are buying the type of merchandise you sell. Sounds obvious, but knowing exactly when consumers are buying the type of products you sell can be quite tricky. In fact, this doesn’t always coincide with when your revenue peaks during the year…

 Since your contact strategy affects the trends in your sales, it is impossible to get an unbiased read of the seasonality in the marketplace by analysing only the trends in your own data. However, we can help you to get a better read of the market by leveraging data relative to your entire merchandise category.

With our Seasonality Report we can allow you to identify seasonal trends in the purchasing behaviour of your buyers and those in the competitive category and to discover untapped retention and prospecting opportunities.

Through using the insight contained in our Seasonality Report you’ll be able to optimise your contact strategy so that you can talk to prospects exactly when they are ready to listen. Also, the report will help you to identify opportunities on your customer database so that you can grow your share of wallet amongst existing customers. 

14/Dec/2009 identify good customers early in their lifecycle

In order to identify good customers early in their lifecycle, you should first analyse the behaviour of your past recruits. In particular, you should identify the characteristics of the first order made by recruits that ended up being very good customers. Once you’ve done this you can use the insight to screen new recruits as they get onboard and identify high-potential recruits as soon as they make their first purchase.

You can find all this information in our Buyer Analysis Report. This report measures customers Near Term Value by the characteristics of their first order. The report contains information regarding average order value, average number of orders, subsequent spend and repeat buyer rate by recruitment channel, first order channel, first order value, and month of first purchase, offering an in depth view of the customers’ performance.

For example, you might look back at last year’s recruits and find that some spent over a certain amount, or purchased through a certain channel in their first order ended up being your best customers. You can then screen new recruits and identify high potential customers as soon as they put a foot in the door. 

14/Dec/2009 make the analysis pay off

If you’re looking for analysis that can help you change things right away, you should make sure that you’re being provided with precise and practical recommendations and that once the results have been reviewed, you’ll have everything you need to transform insight into action. Fortunately, all these things come standard with our Actionable Reports.

There's no point investing in analysis if you’re not going to use the insight provided to improve your business. However, sometimes turning the insight into action is not easy and the implementation phase is where the lifecycle of most analytics projects ends abruptly. That’s why we created Actionable Reports, so that you can not only answer key business questions, but also quickly implement changes and extract the full value of the analysis from day one.

Along with our Actionable Reports we provide a dataset with customer-level information that can be easily loaded to the company’s marketing database. This data can be immediately used to segment your customer database (with or without your RFM) and support your selection strategy.