How data-led campaigns offer more for your money

Improving return on investment should be a top priority for communication service providers (CSPs) in their marketing campaigns. Yet in many cases, even though these companies have a wealth of information available about their customers, they aren’t using this effectively to deliver better, more personalized messaging.

As a result, many campaigns are too generic or based on gut feelings about what will be effective rather than real-world evidence. This means many of the efforts CSPs make will fail to see a positive ROI.

So what can be done to tackle these poor returns? In order to be successful, campaigns need to be much more tightly focused. Targeted campaigns may not reach as many people, but you can be confident that those getting the messages are more likely to be interested in what you have to say.

This means both a lower initial investment and a higher response rate, leading to much more cost-effective campaigns in the long run.

The need to improve targeted marketing campaigns

One of the biggest issues when it comes to marketing is that you have limited opportunities to interact with customers, so the pressure is on to get the messaging right. You can’t simply keep contacting your users with new offers until you find one they’re responsive to, as both regulations and ethical considerations prohibit this.

Even if you maintain a reasonable number of marketing messages, you always need to be mindful that you aren’t crossing the line into annoying or frustrating your users. And it’s not just the volume of communication you need to consider, it’s also the relevance. 

The majority of customers are happy for some contact as long as they can see value from the messaging. But if users feel the marketing materials they’re receiving aren’t useful to them, they will quickly withdraw their consent.

Ensuring you can maintain this permission is crucial to the success of future campaigns. In today’s heavily regulated environment, with rules such as GDPR in the UK and CCPA in the USA tightly governing what you can and can’t do, it may only take one poorly-targeted message for customers to exercise their right to opt out. Once they do this, all future opportunities will be lost, as it is highly unlikely they’ll revisit their consent settings later.

How data helps identify the right customers for the right message

There are a few reasons why campaigns fail, but it typically comes down to targeting the wrong customers with the wrong offers. However, this issue can be overcome with effective use of the customer data you already possess, provided you’re able to ask the right questions of this and use it to better define your audience.

Good use of data enables you to segment your customers in a number of ways, creating behavioral tribes that group users based on interests, personality traits and brand affinities. 

These data-led segments enable you to better understand how consumers behave and what their key drivers are. This feeds back not only into what offers you present to them, but the way in which you frame the message. 

For example, you might be able to identify from your purchase data who your ‘early adopter’ users are based on when they upgrade to the latest devices. But this doesn’t tell you why they make these decisions. Are they power users who demand the fastest, most responsive hardware? Are they fashionistas who see the device as a status symbol? 

Knowing these behavior patterns and drivers helps you group customers together into much smaller, more targeted clusters, giving you more confidence that you’re focusing your resource in the most effective way.

Ensuring customers are hearing what you’re saying

However, even if you do this part correctly, messages that aren’t worded in the right way or sent at the wrong time will still fail to register with the intended audience. Therefore, ensuring that what you’re saying and what your customers are hearing is the same thing is vital. 

This may seem straightforward, but if you’re not aiming your messaging at the right people at the right time, you’re never going to see returns. In many cases, CSPs that can’t analyze their customer data properly may not even realize there is a disconnect between who they think their customers are and who they actually are. This means what companies may think will resonate ends up being irrelevant.

Ultimately, being able to use data-led segments delivers much stronger messaging, and this translates directly into results. According to the Boston Consulting Group, CSPs that focus on hyper-personalization see 35 percent higher lifetime customer value than those that don’t. Much of this comes from more conversions and higher-value conversion. And this isn’t possible without targeted, data-led campaigns.

Find out more about how the SafeSignal Engine lets you improve your customer segmentation and deliver better-targeted, truly personalized marketing campaigns. 

Image credit: iStockphoto/Blue Planet Studio