Profiling for improved acquisition campaigns

Preparing for a campaign:

• We put all our efforts into getting the right message and creative for our new campaign.
• We carefully decide on the channels we are going to use to send the final piece.
• We profile our customer base to ensure we are targeting the right prospects – those who are most likely to respond… don’t we!?

Analyse your existing customers

Never take existing and repeat customers for granted; not only are they often the bread and butter of your business – but the information you hold on them can also help you identify better prospects to target.

Create your next generation of repeat customers from the best possible prospect list.

Our profiling process involves:

• Taking your existing customer data and matching it into our extensive B2B or B2C universe files;
• Where the data matches we will make a comparison between the data we hold on your customers, and the universe file as a whole;
• We compare characteristics such as: Age, Gender, Household Composition, Geography (for B2C) and Industry, Job title (for B2B Marketing), as well as up to 100 different areas of interest;
• The impact of each variable is assessed and combined to build an overall propensity score on the prospect data;
• The records with the highest scores will be the prospects who most closely match the profile of your customer data, and are therefore the most likely to be interested in your products and services.

Testing your campaigns

Using a virtually instant channel such as email will enable you to test a campaign.

Not only for the usual subject line, call to action and creative successes using AB style testing techniques. But also to re-profile your prospects based on the responses you receive.

Re-profile your prospects based on the responses you receive

So we now know who opened or clicked on the test email.

This will help to even more accurately identify the characteristics of those who are responding to the campaign.

This methodology is also extremely valuable if you have limited or no client data available from which to create the initial profile described above.

Is it worth it?

The reason a lot of people instinctively answer ‘No’ to the third point above, is that they don’t believe it will have enough of an effect on their response rate to make it worthwhile.

However, taking a real-life example, we recently assisted a client with a campaign to attract crowd-sourcing investment for their business. Following a profiling exercise, that campaign achieved a 342% increase in Response Rates.

Worth a try then?

To illustrate this, if you would normally expect 15 responses from a campaign, each worth £300, the sales total would £4,500. If you undertook profiling and saw the same level of improvement to your results as the client mentioned above - you would be looking at 51 responses instead of 15 and increasing that sales total to £15,300.

Inform future marketing strategy and budgets

Understanding your customers and prospects is absolutely key to successful marketing.

Profiling is by no means a one-campaign thing.

Once obtained, a good profile can be used on an ongoing basis and predict future customer behaviour, which can help drive effective marketing planning. As more information is collected around responses, this can be fed back into the profile to enhance performance even further.

Improve ROI by focusing your efforts on those customers who are most likely to respond and convert.

Extra profiling can delve even deeper into your data and look at transactional data.

Examine the true value to your business of different groups of customers.

By targeting only the most relevant prospects you will save on campaign costs at the same time as gaining more responses.