Monday, July 02, 2007

Anecdotal Data

As we begin the process of Relevancy Marketing, we begin to add the data that will us to determine what is relevant to a specific client or prospect. While CRM and database marketing rely on historical and modeled data, Relevancy Marketing generates it own data.

At the beginning of that process is anecdotal data. In other words, what the company thinks they know about a particular customer or prospect. For example;

  1. Rank this customer, from one to five, in terms of how recently they have done business with us.
  2. Rank this customer in terms of how frequently they have done business with us.
  3. Rank this customer in terms of how much volume this customer has done with us.
This is an RFM analysis for those paying attention.

other questions might be,
  • Rank our account penetration of this account, that is how effective have we been at selling to all the users of our products or services in a particular account.
  • Rank our account saturation for this account. This is the number of product/service lines we sell to an account- are they buying everything they can from us?
All ranking should be done on a scale of 1 to 5. This allows for distribution in quintiles or groups of 20%.

Other anecdotal data:

Business to business:
  • SIC Code or Industry Type
  • Geographical data
  • Company sales volume
  • Number of employees

Consumer:
  • Geographical data
  • Lifestyle info- what do they do for fun
  • Income
  • Homeowner Status
  • Marital Status
  • Birthday
  • Anniversary
  • # of Children
  • Children's name
  • Children's birthdays
This data is going to be used in three ways; we will use it to segment our list, and we will use it to develop a profile of our customer and we will use it when we test the effectiveness of our marketing.

It may appear that some of this information may be very private, and it is. As you begin to collect this data you need to become very conscious of security. How you store it is another potential challenge. I recommend Excel or some other spreadsheet at this point.

Collection of this data should involve anyone who might be able to contribute. If your company has sales reps, they should provide info about just their customers, thus breaking up the task. Print out a customer list and have them rate 10 percent of the list daily of 10 days. Try to make this as unobtrusive as possible. But speed is important. This should be completed with a two week period. The data entry should be complete within and additional week. You may need to hire a temp to accomplish this, but at this point speed of execution is critical.

Concurrently, data from the first mailing should be entered as well. Mail pieces with undeliverable addresses need to be purged or corrected. Responses need to be entered as well. Simply add a column in the spreadsheet for First Mailing Response and put an x or a data in it. We'll use it in a bit.

I guess I should mention that if you have access to historical data in your system that you should use it only if you can get at it quickly and without outside help and you can get it into the spreadsheet with the rest of the data. Your relevancy marketing database should include more than just current customers, but prospects, suspects, etc. Again, at this point speed of execution is more important than accuracy- that will come.

No comments:

 
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping