While text and data are standard methods of communicating concepts, infographics do it better. Many infographics shared through social media sites are often intended for humor or satire, and others illustrate market or demographic trends. One should keep in mind how that research was generated because the dissemination of data from a poorly constructed research study is still bad data, regardless of how pretty of a graphic it can be turned into. An infographic can be as simple as showing the different types of clouds relative to the elevations they are typically found at. Infographics can be used to illustrate any data set with meaningful attributions. More data on a picture is not necessarily better or adds more validity.
Notable Infographics
Data Viz Challenge (Google partnered with Eyebeam to sponsor the Data Viz Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes using data provided byWhatWePayFor.com)
Infographic World's The Life and Times of Steve Jobs
Interactive Map: Costs of Hunger
Social Media / Marketing
Randall Munroe's xkcd illustration about Online Communities
Michael A. Stelzner's How Marketers are Using Social Media in 2010
Social Media Facts & Figures for B2B Sales (2010)
NetProspex Social 50
Showing posts with label data segmentation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data segmentation. Show all posts
Have Data, Will Target
Coremetrics, featuring a real world case study with Estee Lauder, hosted a webinar today on retargeting emails based on behavioral triggers. Beauty products are a tactile product, meaning customers like to touch and feel the product at a store counter before purchasing; and one might assume that customers would rather do that at a brick-and-mortar place than online.
Estee Lauder's toolbox includes:
Estee Lauder's toolbox includes:
- Coremetrics for enterprise web analytics
- Coremetrics LIVEmail (not to be confused with Windows Live email)
- Experian's CheetahMail for email delivery metrics (opens, clicks, opt outs) and automated email campaigns
- Online display ads paired with cookies and search keywords with select ad networks
- A network of more than 250 websites, 50 of which are e-commerce sites
- An in-house list (does not use 3rd party lists at all)
EL's approach for retargeting emails:
- Determine segments and top performing product categories
- Customer service-oriented messages to customers
- Free shipping plus samples; call-to-action embedded in the ad itself
- Use registration confirmation, cart abandonment, and cookies that track categories browsed
- Segmentations based on visitor engagement, category affinities (serves up specific ad displays), referral sources (Google, Facebook), site tools (product reviews), level of engagement, and customer value
The results:
- Remarketing email open rates were 3-5x higher than broadcast emails
- Revenue per email was 6x higher than broadcast emails
When asked in the Q&A section about the open rates for broadcast emails, Estee Lauder commented they were average for the industry. This suggested that for the beauty and personal care segment, open rates were roughly 15% with a 3% click-through rate. Open rates this low usually means that the data hasn't been cleansed in a few years, there's plenty of duplicate customer records, fake customer records from users wanting to take advantage of single-use offers multiple times, or there's simply GIGO in their database. But, I digress. Back to the webinar...
Re-messaging for online display ads looked at customer behavior while visiting EL's website(s) or partner websites, specifically targeting customers who interacted with the site but did not purchase which triggered an ad to appear via browse cookie on the ad networks used.
In context, ad serving in the example of Clinique ads went like this:
- skin care shopper gets a skin care ad
- make up shopper gets a make up ad
- abandoned cart shopper receives and offer ad
Re-messaging (targeting specific tailored ads to specific product interests) for display ads resulted with significant ROI improvements such as more impressions and click-based revenues.
On the whole, EL has few challenges and they are common to just about everyone who transacts and tracks marketing spends online such as privacy concerns, measuring ROI, or determining the number of touch points within a 24-hour period.
If you're getting higher quality responses (more clicks, higher revenues) from your customers because you've now sent them a targeted email specific to their interests instead of one intended for all audiences, of course you'll get a higher response rate.
EL has either a really good design team or a great ad agency that can produce color-rich imagery that sticks to each product's brand. They aren't really challenged with lack of content like the rest of us. This chart shows some of the challenges faced by content marketers in the US:
Don't let the lack of content stop you from setting up parts of the process for demand generation or automated email follow-ups. Estee Lauder uses one creative per branding ad campaign and rotates it with fresh content every few months. This insight didn't happen overnight and takes careful market planning for budgetary spends and execution.
Organic Growth for Email Lists
You don't need a sophisticated ad program on a 3rd party daily deals website to gain traction with your local customer base. If you have a physical storefront like a dry cleaner, restaurant, bakery, coffee shop, or auto repair shop, you want a loyal, repeat customers.. right?
Here are five easy ways to get started:
1. Use online registration - on your website, on a social media profile page
2. Use offline registration - ask customers if they want to be added to your newsletter or sign up for special in-store offers; a simple sign-up roster or guest registry book can help
3. Embed opt-in messaging in transactional emails
4. Use a brand-relevant prize if engaging in a contest or sweepstakes
5. Use market research studies as a means to gather relevant customer insight, contact info
Pros:
This is relatively inexpensive and subscribers have already expressed an interest about you or your products/services. They are pre-qualified, or at the very least, open to receiving information or relevant offers from your organization. Growing your own list can help reduce spam complaints and opt-outs.
Things to keep in mind:
Here are five easy ways to get started:
1. Use online registration - on your website, on a social media profile page
2. Use offline registration - ask customers if they want to be added to your newsletter or sign up for special in-store offers; a simple sign-up roster or guest registry book can help
3. Embed opt-in messaging in transactional emails
4. Use a brand-relevant prize if engaging in a contest or sweepstakes
5. Use market research studies as a means to gather relevant customer insight, contact info
Pros:
This is relatively inexpensive and subscribers have already expressed an interest about you or your products/services. They are pre-qualified, or at the very least, open to receiving information or relevant offers from your organization. Growing your own list can help reduce spam complaints and opt-outs.
Things to keep in mind:
- Make sure your sign-up box is highly visible on your website (top left is common)
- Don't limit your subscription box to just the home page; make it available in more than once place and be sure it can be easily picked up by a search engine when users type in "email newsletter" when searching in conjunction with your brand(s) or company
- Give people a reason to subsribe: free offers, free webinars, new product announcements, offers from relevant partner firms (e.g., if you are a Photographer magazine and you have exclusive offers for teachers who buy software/hardware from an academic reseller like Studica); free industry research or highlights; coupon for free shipping, 50% off an item (Michaels.com); free gardening newsletter and %-off coupons (HomeDepot.com, Lowes.com)
- If you're using a contest as a means of traffic traction and conversion, track the lifetime value of subscribers obtained this way to determine if the promotion is worth repeating
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
Attended an Amazon webinar today that covered their Simple Email Service. I have yet to test it out. Initial impressions suggest that you should stick with your existing email service provider for basic email marketing broadcasts because there aren't a whole lot of tools nor analytics built yet for SES. It is a basic as basic gets.
A few things to note:
There are two types of email sending options: formatted or raw message; both of which are also supported by API functions (SendEmail, SendRawEmail). The basic feedback analytics are reminiscent of basic web stats (GetSendStatistics API) which will tell you about delivery attempts, rejected messages, hard bounces, and spam complaints. And, everyone's lists are served up separately, so even if you have an overlap of customers with another business that also uses Amazon SES, their spam complaints do not affect your broadcasts (unlike how Gmail blocks spam).
Most ESPs have sending limits built into their pricing contracts. Amazon is no different. Every SES user is assigned a quota (max number of emails that can be sent in 24 hours) and an access level (everyone starts out in the sandbox to test SES features and can send up to 200 recipients a day), which is tiered. However, you can only send to and from a verified email address.
Pricing. ESPs that support small to medium sized businesses such as iContact, Bronto, Vertical Response, or ConstantContact, shouldn't fret about Amazon's pricing structure. Pricing is tiered and is based on the combination of two elements: data transfer and CPM per email message.
Current CPM is $0.10 per thousand messages sent. Data transfer pricing is as follows:
Pricing examples:
1000 email messages to one recipient per day with content size 10kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 3.1 GB in/out data transfer
= $3.73 for the month
1000 email messages outbound to one recipient per day with content size 100kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 31 GB in/out data transfer
= $10.70 for the month
Amazon EC2 users are already subscribed to the free pricing tier and are capped at 2000 messages for free each day.
To get started with Amazon SES:
Subscribe
Verify email addresses / create your own whitelist of verified addresses
Send Email
Request production access
Get Feedback
Limits on sandbox accounts: 100 whitelisted verified addresses, up to 10MB per message (because most popular email readers cannot handle more than that).
Limits on all accounts: Does not support SOAP or file attachments
A few things to note:
- Supported APIs
- Built-in Features
- Sending Limits
- Access Levels
- Pricing
There are two types of email sending options: formatted or raw message; both of which are also supported by API functions (SendEmail, SendRawEmail). The basic feedback analytics are reminiscent of basic web stats (GetSendStatistics API) which will tell you about delivery attempts, rejected messages, hard bounces, and spam complaints. And, everyone's lists are served up separately, so even if you have an overlap of customers with another business that also uses Amazon SES, their spam complaints do not affect your broadcasts (unlike how Gmail blocks spam).
Most ESPs have sending limits built into their pricing contracts. Amazon is no different. Every SES user is assigned a quota (max number of emails that can be sent in 24 hours) and an access level (everyone starts out in the sandbox to test SES features and can send up to 200 recipients a day), which is tiered. However, you can only send to and from a verified email address.
Pricing. ESPs that support small to medium sized businesses such as iContact, Bronto, Vertical Response, or ConstantContact, shouldn't fret about Amazon's pricing structure. Pricing is tiered and is based on the combination of two elements: data transfer and CPM per email message.
Current CPM is $0.10 per thousand messages sent. Data transfer pricing is as follows:
| Data Amt | Cost |
| First GB | Free |
| up to 10 TB | $0.15/GB |
| next 40 TB | $0.11/GB |
| next 100 TB | $0.09/GB |
| 150+ TB | $0.08/GB |
Pricing examples:
1000 email messages to one recipient per day with content size 10kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 3.1 GB in/out data transfer
= $3.73 for the month
1000 email messages outbound to one recipient per day with content size 100kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 31 GB in/out data transfer
= $10.70 for the month
Amazon EC2 users are already subscribed to the free pricing tier and are capped at 2000 messages for free each day.
To get started with Amazon SES:
Subscribe
Verify email addresses / create your own whitelist of verified addresses
Send Email
Request production access
Get Feedback
Limits on sandbox accounts: 100 whitelisted verified addresses, up to 10MB per message (because most popular email readers cannot handle more than that).
Limits on all accounts: Does not support SOAP or file attachments
Customer Segmentation Revisited
The Pareto principle (a.k.a the 80-20 rule, Haddad's Theorem) states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In the business world, this has come to mean that 80% of your revenues typically comes from 20% of your customers. Businesses have long sought after more customers who are akin to the 20% that generates the most revenues. How is it done? One method is to use customer segmentation.
Is this scenario familiar to you?
You're putting together list acquisition specs for business unit of your company (or your client's). The BU manager wants to launch a customer acquisition campaign that targets all small and medium sized businesses which have 100-500 employees, have $XX+ millions in revenues, and are geographically located in southern California. Their best repeat business customers comes from professional offices such as engineering, architectural, CPA, and law firms.
Do the specs and requirements match?
Traditional segmentation used to mean that you'd take a database (or list) of customers and carve them out into customer groups based on demographics or socio-psychographic data (e.g., Claritas). Value-based segmentation looks at groups of customers in terms of the revenue they generate and the costs of establishing and maintaining relationships with them. ROI is not just a financial statement hot item, it is a typical key performance indicator (KPI) to gauge how useful customer acquisition strategy is by comparing what measures it took to get that customer's business, how many units of X they purchased, and how many more units of X they intend to purchase.
Just who are your customers anyways?
The basics of customer segmentation answers the following parameters of any industry its applied to: Who, What, Where, Why, and How.
Who
Consumers? Businesses?
What
Your products or services.
Where
Not just for postal recipients. Did they respond to web or email advertisements? Attend a webinar? Buy directly from you or from an affiliate merchant?
Why
The reasons(s) why your products or services won the sale. Is your product or service better than that of the next best substitution product/service? Cheaper? Easier to use? A simple followup with a customer survey usually answers this and keeps the feedback door open.
How
How was it purchased? online? at a physical storefront? at the company store? at a tradeshow/seminar event?
Is this scenario familiar to you?
You're putting together list acquisition specs for business unit of your company (or your client's). The BU manager wants to launch a customer acquisition campaign that targets all small and medium sized businesses which have 100-500 employees, have $XX+ millions in revenues, and are geographically located in southern California. Their best repeat business customers comes from professional offices such as engineering, architectural, CPA, and law firms.
Do the specs and requirements match?
Traditional segmentation used to mean that you'd take a database (or list) of customers and carve them out into customer groups based on demographics or socio-psychographic data (e.g., Claritas). Value-based segmentation looks at groups of customers in terms of the revenue they generate and the costs of establishing and maintaining relationships with them. ROI is not just a financial statement hot item, it is a typical key performance indicator (KPI) to gauge how useful customer acquisition strategy is by comparing what measures it took to get that customer's business, how many units of X they purchased, and how many more units of X they intend to purchase.
Just who are your customers anyways?
The basics of customer segmentation answers the following parameters of any industry its applied to: Who, What, Where, Why, and How.
Who
Consumers? Businesses?
What
Your products or services.
Where
Not just for postal recipients. Did they respond to web or email advertisements? Attend a webinar? Buy directly from you or from an affiliate merchant?
Why
The reasons(s) why your products or services won the sale. Is your product or service better than that of the next best substitution product/service? Cheaper? Easier to use? A simple followup with a customer survey usually answers this and keeps the feedback door open.
How
How was it purchased? online? at a physical storefront? at the company store? at a tradeshow/seminar event?
Organic Traffic
For the first time, my other blog has received organic traffic from AOL. This is both interesting and significant because I don't advertise at all through any of AOL's networks. I don't get a whole lot of traffic, but it's steady and worthy of consideration to monetize the blog. I haven't done so in the past because it doesn't cost me anything to keep the site up.
I really don't see why people are so obsessed about keyword ad buys and bidding on short- and long-tails for that 15% or so paid search traffic that will get them placed higher up on the food chain. SEO is a concept, a lot like modern day IT practices, where the concept has to adapt so rapidly to changing technologies that you have to have employ specialists to cope with such trends to stay ahead of competitors. I don't feel that it adds any value to a company's business model and it detracts from the resources necessary to generate positive net income. I can have this opinion because of the 89 visits (83 absolute unique visitors) to the food blog in the last 30 days (May 10 - June 9), 72 visits (80% of total traffic) were Google organic.
For all the sites that I manage (2 blogs, 1 personal site, 1 game info site), I use Google Analytics, but I also have Stat Counter and ClusterMap on the ones where I know I will have international traffic. ClusterMap provides a wonderful display of frequency by location, representing website hit population by a visitor's IP address but at a bird's eye view.
This is where my international visitors came from (June '07 - May '08):
My two largest visitor populations are located in Florida and California. I have two recipes that generate consistent monthly traffic. Can you guess which ones? I'll give you a hint. One is a Cuban dessert recipe (majority of hits) that I was inspired to make from scratch after tasting it from Portos Bakery; the other is a Chinese appetizer (2nd most frequently visited posting) that is probably one of the priciest items you could order at a restaurant that has it. Both of these are made from basic (to that food culture) ingredients.
So, why do you suppose I have so much traffic from these two US states for that one Cuban recipe?
Predictive modeling
This was once known as customer behavioral profiling, although some I/O psychologists would probably have you believe otherwise that there are far deeper sentiments that consumers attach to the everyday and ordinary that surprisingly have monetary value. The most common example of predictive modeling in the financial services is credit scoring.
In the USA, credit scoring is a basic data analysis of a person's (or business') ability to maintain good credit standings and pay off debt. The higher the rating, the lower risk the person is to taking on more debt, or so the working practices go. Such factors like how many lines of credit a person has, what the revolving balances are, how much is paid off at the end of each billing cycle, are there any missed or late payments, current balance on your primary savings account, etc. Oddly enough, you actually have to take on more debt and faithfully pay it off to raise your credit score. The top major credit bureaus that amass credit data on individuals are Equifax (ScorePower), Experian (PLUS score), and TransUnion. If you are responding to an online ad about getting your free credit report, it's very likely that it's a consumer program managed by one of these companies.
So who uses this scoring methodology? Banks, of course, so they can lend you money for a home loan or extend credit to you for a HELOC; Utility companies (Gas, Electric, and Water services often require $25 deposits for customers who have poor credit); Apartment managers; Cable service providers; Private and public companies who look at a job applicants' credit history.. the list goes on.
Consumers are kind of screwed to begin with since each "hit" on their credit report influences their scoring as well. There isn't enough transparency with how scores are calculated to see if the report was accessed for financial reasons (buying a new house or car, applying for a platinum credit card) or for living reasons (relocation to a new city, getting gas service hooked up to a new apartment). And, there are hardly any resources for consumers to realistically "fight the system" when bad credit history is slapped onto their virtual account. I digress.
Predictive modeling helps companies identify their prime target for new or existing products and services based on current or historical purchase behavior the customer has exhibited. Looking at aggregate data (multiple consumers, multiple purchase points), you'll start to see trending in what products or website areas are more popular with consumers who bought X and are considering the purchase of Y. Amazon.com
already does this and their metrics are a value-add for everyone looking at it. The consumer is given a feed of popular products purchased by other registered site users. The company's marketing team has a lot of supporting data statistics to provide to affiliate merchants and advertisers, and guest users can see where else on the site to look for things most similar to their search.
In the USA, credit scoring is a basic data analysis of a person's (or business') ability to maintain good credit standings and pay off debt. The higher the rating, the lower risk the person is to taking on more debt, or so the working practices go. Such factors like how many lines of credit a person has, what the revolving balances are, how much is paid off at the end of each billing cycle, are there any missed or late payments, current balance on your primary savings account, etc. Oddly enough, you actually have to take on more debt and faithfully pay it off to raise your credit score. The top major credit bureaus that amass credit data on individuals are Equifax (ScorePower), Experian (PLUS score), and TransUnion. If you are responding to an online ad about getting your free credit report, it's very likely that it's a consumer program managed by one of these companies.
So who uses this scoring methodology? Banks, of course, so they can lend you money for a home loan or extend credit to you for a HELOC; Utility companies (Gas, Electric, and Water services often require $25 deposits for customers who have poor credit); Apartment managers; Cable service providers; Private and public companies who look at a job applicants' credit history.. the list goes on.
Consumers are kind of screwed to begin with since each "hit" on their credit report influences their scoring as well. There isn't enough transparency with how scores are calculated to see if the report was accessed for financial reasons (buying a new house or car, applying for a platinum credit card) or for living reasons (relocation to a new city, getting gas service hooked up to a new apartment). And, there are hardly any resources for consumers to realistically "fight the system" when bad credit history is slapped onto their virtual account. I digress.
Predictive modeling helps companies identify their prime target for new or existing products and services based on current or historical purchase behavior the customer has exhibited. Looking at aggregate data (multiple consumers, multiple purchase points), you'll start to see trending in what products or website areas are more popular with consumers who bought X and are considering the purchase of Y. Amazon.com
already does this and their metrics are a value-add for everyone looking at it. The consumer is given a feed of popular products purchased by other registered site users. The company's marketing team has a lot of supporting data statistics to provide to affiliate merchants and advertisers, and guest users can see where else on the site to look for things most similar to their search.
Starting from scratch - mailing lists
"I have a new website and I want to setup an e-newsletter that users can sign up for. How do I get started?"
This question comes up frequently, especially from new site owners who want to offer a value-added service to their user community. There are several ways to approach this and each depend upon the type of community you have. There are always use third-party solutions available which may cost more than an open-source application, but the time saved from not having to deal with the headaches associated with managing distribution lists manually would make it worthwhile.
These are some common third party vendors:
Constant Contact - http://www.constantcontact.com/
IntelliContact - http://www.intellicontact.com/
Vertical Response's iBuilder - http://www.verticalresponse.com/
CampaignerPro - http://www.campaigner.com/campaignerpro.html
JangoMail - http://www.jangomail.com/
Or, you can go with a bulletin board format:
Yahoo! Groups - http://groups.yahoo.com
vBulletin - http://www.vbulletin.com/
VoyForum - http://www.voy.com/
YaBB (open source) - http://www.yabbforum.com/
phpBB - http://www.phpbb.com/
Or, with a mailing list manager:
L-Soft listserv - http://www.lsoft.com/listserv.stm
eXtropia - http://www.extropia.com/scripts/mailing_list.html
ecartis - http://www.ecartis.org/
Mailman - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mailman
If you send frequent broadcasts and intend to use an off-the-shelf app with your own servers, you may still want to sign up with DomainKeys (http://www.dkim.org/), and work with the various email service providers to maintain your "whitelisted" status.
This question comes up frequently, especially from new site owners who want to offer a value-added service to their user community. There are several ways to approach this and each depend upon the type of community you have. There are always use third-party solutions available which may cost more than an open-source application, but the time saved from not having to deal with the headaches associated with managing distribution lists manually would make it worthwhile.
These are some common third party vendors:
Constant Contact - http://www.constantcontact.com/
IntelliContact - http://www.intellicontact.com/
Vertical Response's iBuilder - http://www.verticalresponse.com/
CampaignerPro - http://www.campaigner.com/campaignerpro.html
JangoMail - http://www.jangomail.com/
Or, you can go with a bulletin board format:
Yahoo! Groups - http://groups.yahoo.com
vBulletin - http://www.vbulletin.com/
VoyForum - http://www.voy.com/
YaBB (open source) - http://www.yabbforum.com/
phpBB - http://www.phpbb.com/
Or, with a mailing list manager:
L-Soft listserv - http://www.lsoft.com/listserv.stm
eXtropia - http://www.extropia.com/scripts/mailing_list.html
ecartis - http://www.ecartis.org/
Mailman - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mailman
If you send frequent broadcasts and intend to use an off-the-shelf app with your own servers, you may still want to sign up with DomainKeys (http://www.dkim.org/), and work with the various email service providers to maintain your "whitelisted" status.
Advice to Prospective (List) Vendors
Topic: e-mail marketing lists
Issue: I get requests all the time from senior managers about how we can grow our e-mail database. Most of our data comes from our existing customers. There are a few ways we could create interest in doing business with us, but that is for another blog post.
Today, I got a sales rep of a list reseller company all worked up, hostile and offended, just from asking a few basic questions about their company. Preliminary research about their company showed that they manage two websites, one is registered in the UK and the other is registered in Ireland. It has one sales office in San Francisco and a data center in India. There is zero information about their company on either website, why wouldn't I think it's a subsidiary of a larger company? Mid-conversation I realized that the company had no identity and they were completely unaware of what differentiated themselves from other list firms.
What did I ask?
What process do you use to verify your e-mail marketing data?
What is your pricing like, could you give me an example?
Tell me about your company.
How long have you been in business?
How large is your company?
What I didn't get to ask was:
How often do you scrub your database?
What's the recency of your data?
What's your policy on opt-outs?
Is your company a member of the DMA (Direct Marketing Association)?
They probably started off with good intentions, but there's nothing on their website to suggest that they are CAN-SPAM compliant or value the integrity of their data. Heck, they offer e-mail lists for purchase. Standard practice is that qualified industry e-mail lists are for rent. Any prudent marketing firm knows that the database is the lifeblood of the company. A good list company will manage their relationships really well, be it a business buying a list to target prospective customers, or managing a publication's subscriber list.
It doesn't matter what position you hold within a company. When a stranger greets you at any random place: the mall, a party, a corporate event, a wedding, the park, or standing in line at the local deli, you need to be able to give good details about your company, who you are, what products/services your group is responsible for, and be proud of it in some way enough to generate interest about your company. After all, if you aren't interested in your own employer, why should anyone else be?
And, you can never lose your cool because once you do, you may never get that customer back.
Conclusion: When I was asking for specifics about the company, we got disconnected. Sure, that happens a lot if you're using a VoIP connection. While we were disconnected, the rep took the time to send me an e-mail with sample records of what their data looks like. The first file that I opened had a sample record of someone from my own company. Hey, that looks cool right? This is where I would have had my "data recency" question answered.
The contact name listed, supposedly an EVP of audit services, wasn't an employee anymore since they didn't show up on our intranet employee directory. Out of curiousity, I looked up the telephone number that was associated with that contact record. Guess what it came back as? Admin mail services. Yeah, I can see how *cough* accurate this data is.
One record does not make or break a company. But having erroneous data of the company you're trying to sell to is an inexcusable mistake.
Issue: I get requests all the time from senior managers about how we can grow our e-mail database. Most of our data comes from our existing customers. There are a few ways we could create interest in doing business with us, but that is for another blog post.
Today, I got a sales rep of a list reseller company all worked up, hostile and offended, just from asking a few basic questions about their company. Preliminary research about their company showed that they manage two websites, one is registered in the UK and the other is registered in Ireland. It has one sales office in San Francisco and a data center in India. There is zero information about their company on either website, why wouldn't I think it's a subsidiary of a larger company? Mid-conversation I realized that the company had no identity and they were completely unaware of what differentiated themselves from other list firms.
What did I ask?
What process do you use to verify your e-mail marketing data?
What is your pricing like, could you give me an example?
Tell me about your company.
How long have you been in business?
How large is your company?
What I didn't get to ask was:
How often do you scrub your database?
What's the recency of your data?
What's your policy on opt-outs?
Is your company a member of the DMA (Direct Marketing Association)?
They probably started off with good intentions, but there's nothing on their website to suggest that they are CAN-SPAM compliant or value the integrity of their data. Heck, they offer e-mail lists for purchase. Standard practice is that qualified industry e-mail lists are for rent. Any prudent marketing firm knows that the database is the lifeblood of the company. A good list company will manage their relationships really well, be it a business buying a list to target prospective customers, or managing a publication's subscriber list.
It doesn't matter what position you hold within a company. When a stranger greets you at any random place: the mall, a party, a corporate event, a wedding, the park, or standing in line at the local deli, you need to be able to give good details about your company, who you are, what products/services your group is responsible for, and be proud of it in some way enough to generate interest about your company. After all, if you aren't interested in your own employer, why should anyone else be?
And, you can never lose your cool because once you do, you may never get that customer back.
Conclusion: When I was asking for specifics about the company, we got disconnected. Sure, that happens a lot if you're using a VoIP connection. While we were disconnected, the rep took the time to send me an e-mail with sample records of what their data looks like. The first file that I opened had a sample record of someone from my own company. Hey, that looks cool right? This is where I would have had my "data recency" question answered.
The contact name listed, supposedly an EVP of audit services, wasn't an employee anymore since they didn't show up on our intranet employee directory. Out of curiousity, I looked up the telephone number that was associated with that contact record. Guess what it came back as? Admin mail services. Yeah, I can see how *cough* accurate this data is.
One record does not make or break a company. But having erroneous data of the company you're trying to sell to is an inexcusable mistake.
Specifications
A request to send a survey to customers in Northern California came by my desk the other day. The business unit originating this request failed to specify criteria with respect to which area or region defines what a northern California customer is. A popular marketing way to do this is by identifying a region by zip code. California's zip code range is 90000-96199. The messiest way is to identify this by a list of cities or MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas). What you, as the business unit, shouldn't do is make broad sweeping suggestions as to what you want without knowing what it is that you want.
Disneyland uses the zip code range of 90000-92999 for SoCal resident ticket promos. Another website, www.us.endress.com, suggests that the northern California zip code range is 93600-96199, and breaks southern California into two groups, "90000 to 92999" and "93000 to 93599," however that's just how their sales territories are split for California.
None of these will really do it for this campaign broadcast since what constitutes as northern California is both industry and company-specific. Ventura starts at 93000 and Santa Barbara starts at 93101, both of which are within an hour's drive to Los Angeles. What is good for Endress may not be good for this mortgage company. What's still a bit scary for me is that my inner consultant is telling me to pull a strategy from the air wafting above my head and implement it as a marketing standard for a moving-foward point, since no standard exists for this type of broadcast.
So, what's my resolution? It looks like this state will be split into northern (93600-96199) and southern (90000-93599) California. Unfortunately this is only a bandage solution for what probably wouldn't be aligned with the segmentation goals for the year. Most often when it comes to data segmentation, internal and external clients simply don't know (insert how, what, who, etc). But they're asking you the subject matter expert, the consultant (or in my case, the e-mail marketing manager).
Disneyland uses the zip code range of 90000-92999 for SoCal resident ticket promos. Another website, www.us.endress.com, suggests that the northern California zip code range is 93600-96199, and breaks southern California into two groups, "90000 to 92999" and "93000 to 93599," however that's just how their sales territories are split for California.
None of these will really do it for this campaign broadcast since what constitutes as northern California is both industry and company-specific. Ventura starts at 93000 and Santa Barbara starts at 93101, both of which are within an hour's drive to Los Angeles. What is good for Endress may not be good for this mortgage company. What's still a bit scary for me is that my inner consultant is telling me to pull a strategy from the air wafting above my head and implement it as a marketing standard for a moving-foward point, since no standard exists for this type of broadcast.
So, what's my resolution? It looks like this state will be split into northern (93600-96199) and southern (90000-93599) California. Unfortunately this is only a bandage solution for what probably wouldn't be aligned with the segmentation goals for the year. Most often when it comes to data segmentation, internal and external clients simply don't know (insert how, what, who, etc). But they're asking you the subject matter expert, the consultant (or in my case, the e-mail marketing manager).
List types - Buyer Beware or Be Aware
A standard list has one or more components that makes it marketable to businesses, consumers, nonprofits, or government. These components are what we call list selections, or selects. Data pricing varies by retail/wholesale vendor, by price per thousand (/M) or flat fee (/F), and by client need. On the wholesale side, pricing can vary from as little as $0.02/record to $0.15/record, depending on how selective (or targeted) the list is. On the retail side, pricing can go as high as $3/record (or higher, say $25/record for mortgage/real estate leads, or $45/record for custom lead generation. Pricing by need is based on whatever markup exists when buying through an agency like a marketing/advertising/or PR firm or directly through a list owner.
A list contains at least a respondent's name, job title, company, address, and phone number. Some direct mail lists lack selects like phone number. Some telemarketing lists lack job title, company, and address, giving a business only the person's name and a telephone number by which to reach them. As a general rule, if you're picking selects on a datasheet, you should require your list vendor to export those selects instead of furnishing you with the basic name/address/phone repertoire. This allows you to verify the integrity of the list. If you buy business list, you can segment them in your inhouse database by SIC code.
Selects can be by:
* demographic: race, religion, political position, gender, age, household income
* industry: automotive, banking, Internet, high tech, manufacturing, consumer products, etc.
* region: north, south, east, west, Americas, Europe, Asia, by state/province, etc
* other identifiers: number of employees, number of branch locations, subsidiary, HQ, public/private company
On the agency side of marketing, list brokers often give each other discounts if they are in the same business, providing services and list products to their customers. This discount can be up to 20% of the base price of a list. The markup can be as high as 30% on top of that, which is how agencies make the bulk of their money. Regardless of which side of marketing you work on, agency or client side, there's always an average, industry-acceptable price for something.
Biggest bang for the buck does not exist in marketing. It only exists as an unfounded, preconceived notion that such a thing is possible. What really ends up happening is what is conveyed during a sale between the customer and the agency. The client believes they are getting a good deal, the list is satisfying a need, a mailing goes out, and the client gains feedback or an increase in customer activity as a result of it. The agency believes the client is getting a good deal because research was done on a list to ensure that it met a client's specifications and fit within a stated budget. Biggest bang for the buck? Not likely.
Unless you own a list brokerage business, there's no trickle-down theory when it comes to wages in the industry. The bulk of one's income comes from that 5% to 20% commission that one typically gets when buying a list, plus whatever markup is passed to the customer. Many brokerage houses see a high turnover in list brokers because of the low salaries or when demand decreases for lists. You may end up with working with more than five reps in a single year from a large brokerage firm like Experian, InfoUSA, or D&B. Why be concerned as a list buyer? Because it is very likely that at some point, you will be sold a list that isn't up to par and fails to meet your specs; and you won't be able to get a refund.
Ain't nothing in the list industry that's free. Everything comes at a price.
A list contains at least a respondent's name, job title, company, address, and phone number. Some direct mail lists lack selects like phone number. Some telemarketing lists lack job title, company, and address, giving a business only the person's name and a telephone number by which to reach them. As a general rule, if you're picking selects on a datasheet, you should require your list vendor to export those selects instead of furnishing you with the basic name/address/phone repertoire. This allows you to verify the integrity of the list. If you buy business list, you can segment them in your inhouse database by SIC code.
Selects can be by:
* demographic: race, religion, political position, gender, age, household income
* industry: automotive, banking, Internet, high tech, manufacturing, consumer products, etc.
* region: north, south, east, west, Americas, Europe, Asia, by state/province, etc
* other identifiers: number of employees, number of branch locations, subsidiary, HQ, public/private company
On the agency side of marketing, list brokers often give each other discounts if they are in the same business, providing services and list products to their customers. This discount can be up to 20% of the base price of a list. The markup can be as high as 30% on top of that, which is how agencies make the bulk of their money. Regardless of which side of marketing you work on, agency or client side, there's always an average, industry-acceptable price for something.
Biggest bang for the buck does not exist in marketing. It only exists as an unfounded, preconceived notion that such a thing is possible. What really ends up happening is what is conveyed during a sale between the customer and the agency. The client believes they are getting a good deal, the list is satisfying a need, a mailing goes out, and the client gains feedback or an increase in customer activity as a result of it. The agency believes the client is getting a good deal because research was done on a list to ensure that it met a client's specifications and fit within a stated budget. Biggest bang for the buck? Not likely.
Unless you own a list brokerage business, there's no trickle-down theory when it comes to wages in the industry. The bulk of one's income comes from that 5% to 20% commission that one typically gets when buying a list, plus whatever markup is passed to the customer. Many brokerage houses see a high turnover in list brokers because of the low salaries or when demand decreases for lists. You may end up with working with more than five reps in a single year from a large brokerage firm like Experian, InfoUSA, or D&B. Why be concerned as a list buyer? Because it is very likely that at some point, you will be sold a list that isn't up to par and fails to meet your specs; and you won't be able to get a refund.
Ain't nothing in the list industry that's free. Everything comes at a price.
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