Offer optimization
Using customer analytics to improve marketing performance
By Jeff Zabin, Aberdeen Group
The research for this report examines the various technologies, analytics capabilities, organizational resources, business processes and performance metrics that bring to life the concept of offer optimization. Between July and September 2009, Aberdeen examined the use, the experiences, and the intentions of more than 200 diverse enterprises engaged in data-driven marketing improvement.
The result is a roadmap that companies in multiple industry verticals can use to gain performance improvements in their customer-centric marketing capabilities across all stages of the customer lifecycle, from customer acquisition to retention to cross sell / up sell, and to move closer oward realizing the vision of offer optimization.
Survey results show that the firms enjoying best-in-class performance shared several common characteristics, including:
- 85% have deployed a centralized customer database
- 81% use marketing dashboards for performance reporting
- 59% have in-house statisticians and other analytic resources devoted to identifying patterns and deriving insights from customer data
To achieve best-in-class performance, companies must:
- Use marketing mix modeling to examine the outcomes of previous campaigns and quantify the most effective activities for each possible offer and the likely sales impact for each type of media for use in future campaigns
- Use triggers to automatically deliver targeted offers, messages and customer service treatments to customers on an individual basis at the most optimal point in time, based on predefined events