The webinar, “Customer-Centric Marketing: Making the Move from Campaigns to Cross-Channel Dialogue ”presented by Pitney Bowes, generated great interest from an engaged audience of marketers. Loyalty 360 is privileged to share insights gleaned from the post webinar Q&A. Questions posed below, come directly from you, our audience and webinar attendees.
Responses offered by: Jeff Nicholson, Vice President of Product Marketing, Customer Analytics and Interaction, at Pitney Bowes Business Insight
Regarded as a thought leader in his field, Jeff works closely with industry analysts including Gartner and Forrester and is a frequent presenter upon topics including event-triggered marketing, customer analytics, customer communications, campaign management, business process management and dialogue marketing strategy.
How do you measure ROI for the dialogue stream? How do you know that what you are saying to your customers is resonating with them if you are measuring the impact of the entire stream?
Nicholson: The entire stream, in the topic of cross channel response attribution, is a very difficult thing to solve and it’s all going to come down to understanding the moment and time in the predictive lifetime value of the customer. To do that, you must have a foundation in place which is, randomized control groups across your campaigns. That’s going to allow you to measure the difference between the treated group (the treated offers) and other customers like them who did not get those offers. Did they act differently and what were the response rates across those? Did you positively influence the customer behavior? Did you positively influence the customer value, did you move that ahead? And, did you impact the likelihood that they are going to stay with the organization? So understanding those pieces is important. Isolation is the first place to start.
Then you can begin to do path analysis, where you are analyzing the customers’ movements over time. Further understanding their progression as an individual customer, either across products (they’ve purchased one product and they move on to purchase another) or across channels or otherwise (did they begin here and more over to another one). You will begin analyzing these as segments of customers, because you really have to start there. From there you are able, with the technologies, to drill down to individuals and even get quite granular. There are many different facets to it. My advice is that you must have randomized control groups in place. This is the first best practice. From then on it’s becomes a very resource intensive analysis, at least a very advanced one.
What is the most effective number of channels one should use to have the most statistically valid response metric?
First and foremost, the right number of channels will differ for the individual customer. As you move from segment based strategies to those that are more individualized, the first thing you should be doing is asking the customer to tell you what the right channels are for them. Campaign and dialogue is all about the individual. Second, there is another more advanced analytical approach around the aspect of constraint or contact based optimization. An analytical practice where one will analyze multiple channels and the likelihood for response, or ability to change a behavior across those channels, and the constraints of those channels.
Certain channels will cost different amounts of money over time. For example, unfortunately, a lot of marketers think your email channel is free. Yet, if a customer opts out it actually has a very big impact on your ability to have a dialogue with them, retain and cross sell them. So it’s certainly not free, and understanding the costs of that email customer versus those that require direct mail is important. If a particular customer, or segment of customers, wouldn’t respond on email but would respond on direct mail, then it’s worth the cost versus other channels that you may want to deploy.
Did you miss the webinar? Loyalty 360 members have the opportunity to access playback and view the presentation in its entirety at: “Customer-Centric Marketing: Making the Move from Campaigns to Cross-Channel Dialogue”