Personalization Archives - Page 12 of 13 - Omnichannel Personalization SaaS Solution

19 Sep
2013

Big Data Analytics: The Key to Unlocking Business Potential

Positive Results From the Smart Use of Big Data Analytics (3rd in a Series)

I recently spoke with several high level marketing executives about the near-ubiquitous topic, BIG DATA. The executives included Paul Golden, ex-CMO of Samsung Mobile, Barry Judge (ex-CMO of Best Buy, current CMO of LivingSocial, and Brad Todd, (Principal at The Richards Group). In this third installment, we review some of the results these executives experienced. Big data analytics was the key in making the information they had actionable to drive customer value.

Brad Todd has helped clients use their data in very sophisticated ways, by applying rigorous big data analytics. A home improvement retailer, for instance, has used information from their customers’ do-it-yourself projects to engage in helpful conversations with their customers. This type of engagement not only makes the customer feel valued, but very often leads to follow-on projects and increased customer loyalty. For instance, if a customer has planned a deck using online tools, the retailer can follow up with them at predicted intervals with suggestions and relevant offers to improve the likelihood of purchase.

The Richards Group also helps their clients integrate their marketing data and then apply big data analytics, with the objective of personalizing customer communications. They have seen improvements of 20% on average when website, email and remarketing channels are personalized to customers. The results are even greater—about 25% if cross-channel personalization occurs.

At Samsung Mobile, Paul Golden used longitudinal brand preference data to prioritize markets for their marketing efforts. He and his team tailored brand messages and tactics for eight key markets to improve brand preference versus a key competitor. The result was a swing from a relative score of -6 to +2 in overall brand preference, despite only focusing on eight key markets. Big data analytics allowed Samsung Mobile to cost-effectively determine which markets would swing the entire country’s brand preference score in their favor.

While CMO of Best Buy, Barry Judge and his team applied big data analytics to vast amounts of customer information to zero in on their highest value customers. They then tailored all their marketing to best serve those customers and increase their engagement. Knowing their customers and what their shopping habits allowed Best Buy to offer the most relevant products and offers to promote via email and direct mail. By focusing on their most loyal customers, they grew their loyalty even more and increased their share of wallet with these customers.

Big data can be a big deal in driving results for brands if used to improve customer interactions. Set objectives, determine what data is needed to achieve those objectives, compile and analyze the data, then translate it into something valuable for your customers.

Want to learn more about how to use big data analytics to improve business results? Click here.

And please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

05 Sep
2013

The Opportunities of BIG DATA: What Do You Think?

What Do You Think When You Hear the Term Big Data?

Opportunities of Big Data Lie beyond the Hyperbole (1st in a Series)

I recently spoke with several high level marketing executives about the near-ubiquitous topic, BIG DATA. The executives included Paul Golden, ex-CMO of Samsung Mobile, Barry Judge (ex-CMO of Best Buy, current CMO of LivingSocial, and Brad Todd, (Principal at The Richards Group). Generally, I wanted to get their points of view on the opportunities of big data.

I also wanted to get a better understanding of their thinking about:
1) how they perceive big data
2) how their companies use it
3) what kind of results they’ve experienced when leveraging that data, and
4) future opportunities of big data.

But first, before I got into the meat of the discussion, I asked each of them the same question: What do you think when you hear the term BIG DATA?

And here were their responses, in no particular order: cliche, digital, lots of customers/lots of interactions, complicated, limited actionability, hyperbole, blanket term. If one were to look at this list, one might draw the conclusion that BIG DATA has a BAD RAP.

But when we began to speak about the promise of big data, these same executives were much more positive and even excited about the opportunities of big data–the potential customer value it could deliver. The goal of big data is understandable and very desirable, but the steps to get to there are difficult to envision. Especially with all the hype today about big data, which often is just that–hype, a certain amount of cynicism has crept into the C-suite.

But today, you CAN turn all that big data into actionable information to deliver value to your customers by hyper-personalizing their experiences. From connecting all your data dots, to generating the most relevant customer messages, to omnichannel marketing communications, Nectar has the comprehensive marketing suite that can take you from A to Z, quickly and easily. Want to learn more about the opportunities of big data?

Stay tuned to the rest of our series as we find out what these executives think about actual use of big data in business.

Please feel free to leave a comment or ask a question in the section below.

04 Sep
2013

Market Segmentation versus Personalization: Which Marketing Strategy is Best for Your Business?

I often hear people using segmentation and personalization interchangeably. And it’s no wonder–the goals of both are similar: speak to your customer in a relevant way to increase their engagement with your brand. Every business wants to have more engaged customers. So we slice and dice our customer base to try to understand how best to communicate with them.

Market segmentation was THE big thing until a few years ago. Take all your customers and try to figure out similarities that would enable you to group them into segments, then communicate with those segments. So you’d have High-end Heather and Coupon Clara and Value Victoria, segments that would receive similar communications, targeting their demonstrated habits. High-end Heather would get direct mail filled with expensive brands, while Coupon Clara got emails touting the best coupons of the week. Of course, segmentation was better than the mass marketing of old, but what if you had one million Value Victorias? Victoria could be a young stay-at-home mom or be a grandmother or be a college student, or even be a Victor! Segmentation will likely engage your customer more, but will not differentiate you from your competitors.

With the advent of all things digital and the realization that we now know more than we ever did (or thought we wanted to) about our customers, we now see personalization at the customer level. Of course, even today, personalization can seem to be an over-used, and sometimes misused, word, but essentially, it means speaking to your customers as individuals, not as segments. Rather than speaking to a few large segments of customers, you can speak one-to-one to each of your customers. Because we can access and control so much customer data, we now know that a customer in the Value Victoria segment is graduating from college and will likely need professional attire and perhaps starter furniture. And message accordingly.

So which marketing strategy is best for your business? If you have very few products and a homogeneous set of customers, segmentation will likely suit your needs. An extreme example would be a personal jet dealer/broker. They likely sell to rich individuals and businesses. Very limited product line and two types of customers–>Very easy segmentation. However, few businesses have the luxury of having very few products and very similar customers. Most companies have a large number of SKUs and a heterogeneous set of customers; for them, personalization is the way to best engage customers. With recent technology improvements, cost is no longer a factor in choosing between the two, so personalization no longer has to be a dream deferred.

29 Aug
2013

5 Tips for Building an Omni-Channel Customer Profile

Creating an Omni-Channel Customer Profile can be Easy, if you Start with the End in Mind

With all the clutter of marketing messages, customers are demanding relevance. At the same time, marketing teams are struggling with some of the basic foundational components because of all the disparate sources of data available both internally and externally { there I stayed away from saying big data } …The ability to communicate with your customers in an individual manner is becoming table stakes in both online and offline marketing, what we at Nectar Online Media like to call Hyper-Personalization. Whether you use the term 360-degree customer profile or omni-channel customer profile, the goal of creating a unified picture of your customer’s data is foundational for accurate customer analytics and also hyper-personalizing your interactions with your customers.

In this post, we thought we’d provide some of our tips for how to build an omni-channel customer profile. If you start with the end in mind (i.e., your marketing or business objective), it will be a lot easier.

# 1 Know Your Goal — It sounds simple and we’ve heard the same tip for many other areas, both in business and personal life. As it relates to customer analytics and hyper-personalization, the goal is based on how you want to use the customer data and, therefore, impacts the data sets you really need vs ideally want to have. By selecting the right data sets for building your omni-channel customer profile, your internal business partners and external providers can be much more focused (and efficient).

For example, Nectar works with an online ecommerce retailer, hipcycle.com, to help personalize their digital communications { if you’ve not checked out Hipcycle before, I strongly encourage you — you won’t be disappointed }.

Based on understanding Hipcycle’s marketing business objectives, we were able to hone in on the right data sets to integrate. These data sets were primarily based on transaction, crm, and behavior on hipcycle.com. While data sets like social media and household data provide an interesting lens, these data sets were not going to add incremental benefit & results that outweighed the effort.

# 2 Marketing & IT Need to Collaborate — While the marketing team can help define business objectives and outcomes based on using the omni-channel customer profile, the marketer’s technology counterparts are pivotal in articulating in identifying road blocks ahead of time and developing the right data streams.

If the marketing group is defining the customer analytics and hyper-personalization needs, involve the technology teams early on in the process to be better informed on constraints, timelines, and the ‘art of the possible.’

# 3 Choose the Right Technology — Different technologies are appropriate for different business objectives. If you are aiming to build an omni-channel customer profile, our experience has found a traditional SQL (row & records) environment is not optimal. Why? In a nutshell, because of all the different data sources and likely millions of records, there is a fair amount of processing a system needs to do before you can see the results (analysis, reports, recommendations, etc.) that you are looking.

At Nectar Online, we’ve found a noSQL environment is much better suited for storing data records for the purpose of utilizing that 360-degree view of the customer. The primary benefit is that data is stored in an array … so at the instance when data needs to be processed for an individual customer, information is ready.

# 4 Relevant Refreshes — An important component to evaluate is the frequency of your omni-channel customer profile refreshes. Depending on your goal { see how knowing your objective comes back in }, a different refresh or re-scoring frequency may be needed potentially at a data set level.

For example, if you are using social data to identify key life events of your individual customers, a weekly refresh might be sufficient. However, if your goal is to create a trigger event based on an abandoned cart, having this behavior refreshed in real-time is important.

# 5 Test & Learn — In the same way that a customer’s behaviors, habits, and interactions change over time, so do requirements on how you are using the customer profile data. By having a specific testing and learning plan identified prior to embarking on building your initial omni-channel views, the marketing and technology teams can better determine what elements are important for consideration.

In addition, as the customer profiles continue to be refreshed, you will be able to identify additional revenue and engagement driving opportunities. The testing and learning plan establishes the right set of performance indicators for what you are looking to accomplish.

+ + + + +

I’d love to hear from you and learn about your experience building omni-channel customer profiles. What other tips have you seen be helpful?

Drop us a note or share a comment below.

20 Aug
2013

SXSW: Vote for Us to be on a Panel and Learn More about Hyper-Personalization

Asking for your vote for SXSW Interactive 2014

SXSW Interactive: It’s huge. It’s music. It’s technology. It’s THE place to be in March of any given year. And we at Nectar are very excited (and also honored, maybe a bit nervous) to say that we made it through the first gateway to speak at SXSW Interactive in Austin next year.

With this opportunity, we have a chance to share our vision–to bring hyper-personalization to the B2C masses. We would love your vote to help us accomplish this. With this in mind, we ask you to please vote for our talk, “Hyper-Personalized Marketing: Easy as 1-2-3”: The steps for voting are:

1) Setup your account: https://auth.sxsw.com/users/sign_up

2) Log in: //panelpicker.sxsw.com/

3) Go to this page to vote for our submission: //panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/21906. Click the thumbs up icon so it turns green.

4) And you’re done. (Feel free to comment of course.)

Thank you!

Patricia Blair, Nectar Online Media

08 Aug
2013

What’s Next: Personalization at the Washington Post?

Can Jeff Bezos Turn the Tide at The Washington Post by Introducing Personalization?

When I read about Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, I was surprised and also hopeful. I am a big Bezos fan and if anyone can transform the “newspaper industry,” I think Mr. Bezos can. Will he bring newspapers into the 21st century just as he did retail with Amazon? Will the Post begin to use personalization to engage readers with their content? Will they use personalization to deliver the most relevant ads to their readers? A large part of Amazon’s success is due to their personalization prowess, and Bezos is Amazon.

Think about it: Amazon wows its customers with their ability to know what you want and/or need, be it on the commerce or the customer service fronts. I’ve drunk the Amazon kool-aid. I probably spend 80%+ of my non-perishable grocery retail purchases with Amazon and you know why? Because I feel like they know me, like I’m a member of their family. Personalization works!

And if for some reason, they get me wrong now and again, I go online or pick up the phone and ask for help. I don’t cringe before contacting Amazon’s customer service center and our interaction never ends with me wanting to scream in frustration. (We’ve all been there with other companies’ customer service, right?) Amazon performs head-and-shoulders above its competition on both commerce and service because they have all this big data they’ve collected about me. And they use it wisely, to make my life better. My life being better > Concern about Amazon collecting my data for personalization.

But…

Can product and customer personalization be transferred to the editorial content world? That’s the story I’ll be following. If a newspaper–print or digital–could engage me with extremely relevant editorial content the way Amazon does with goods and services, they would definitely get my loyalty. And if. while reading the articles, I only (or mostly) see only those ads that are relevant for me, I would probably also become loyal to those advertisers. Probably.

26 Jun
2013

Mobile Personalization: Boost Mobile Revenues with Relevance

Mobile commerce is big. And getting bigger. It has only been six years since Apple introduced the iPhone, arguably the first shopping-friendly smartphone–though even that didn’t happen with the first generation. And today we are spending billions of dollars shopping and buying on our phones. Next up: Mobile Personalization!

“The runaway hit for retail this year will be mobile commerce. The best way to leave money on the table is not to have a commerce-enabled mobile site and application.”
-Mobile Commerce Outlook 2013

“Over the next five years, total mobile sales are expected to grow 33% annually to $31 billion [from $8 billion today], making up 9% of online sales in 2017.”
-Forrester Research

According to BI Intelligence, by January 2013, 29% of mobile users had made a purchase with their phones. According to Internet Retailer, Walmart estimated that 40% of all visits to their internet shopping site in December 2012 were from a mobile device. And this is happening despite the small screens and the often difficult-to-navigate mobile sites that exist today. Imagine what mobile personalization can do for this small screen.

There are a few retailers who are doing mobile commerce right. Amazon leads in this area. They not only save all your information and sync it across your digital devices, they also make checking out a breeze. And on top of that, they offer mobile personalization for your shopping experience, which makes for a very easy and pleasant exchange; you almost WANT to give Amazon your money.

But how about retailers who don’t have the time (and money) already invested in building an e-commerce (and m-commerce) powerhouse? How do these retailers take a bite of the growing mobile pie?

First and foremost, you have to optimize your website for mobile. Without a mobile-optimized website, no one will shop on your site using their smartphone. Everything else is secondary.

But let’s say you have a mobile-optimized website. You even have an app for iOs and/or Android. How can you rise above all the noise of all the other retailers trying to get the consumer’s attention? The most effective (and least disruptive) way to do this is mobile personalization: making your customer’s mobile experience as relevant as possible for him or her.

Imagine shopping on that tiny screen and you are immediately shown products that are relevant for YOU. You don’t have to try to fat-finger your way through several incorrect screens to get to the item you want. I would certainly be less frustrated and more likely to purchase if I didn’t have to spend my valuable time repeating steps just to try to give a company my money. This is what mobile personalization gives you.

Technology exists today to bring all the data you have together to paint a picture of each of your customers. Powerful algorithms are applied to these customer pictures to determine the most relevant products, offers or messages for each of them. Then if you have a mobile-optimized site, it’s just a matter of displaying the most relevant content in front of each customer. And before you know it, mobile personalization has helped you take a bite out of that mobile pie.

Nectar Online Media

can help you integrate your data (and even gather some), personalize your content and deliver that content for display on your mobile site. Find out more!

23 May
2013

Using Big Data to Drive Revenue

I recently read an article called “In Media, Big Data Is Booming but Big Results Are Lacking” written for All Things D, that included several very interesting tidbits of information:

90% of the world’s data has been accumulated in the past two years.
We’re generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day.
Many companies are logging and contextualizing all this information but little is happening to the information once it’s stored in the database.
And, “Even though almost every CEO says their companies are becoming data-driven, the fact is that most high-level decisions are still being made from bullet points, not data points.”

We all know that we have a LOT of data to contend with: transactions, onsite clicks, email interactions, loyalty cards, social networks, mobile apps, m-commerce, customer service calls, 3rd parties, and the list goes on. Having access to all this data is great, but it’s just a bunch of noise unless you do something with it. The key to getting value from your big data is connecting all those dots among the different customer data sets. Imagine if you could put ALL of your disparate sets of data into ONE huge database, and you have a tool that allows you to associate the data from each set with specific customers. Wow!

Think of what you can learn about your customers. Think about the value you can deliver for your customers. Think about how much more engaged your customers will be when you speak with each of them as if you know him or her. Think of how your customers will buy more from you because they are more engaged.

Now think nectarConnect. Because that’s what nectarConnect can do for your business. This SaaS product combines all your disparate sets of big data and connects the dots to give you a 360 degree view of each of your customers. At scale. nectarConnect then works with other elements of the Nectar Solution Suite

nectarConnect brings order to your data chaos. Now you can use all that valuable customer data you’ve been collecting and make it work for you. That’s how you use big data to drive revenue.

04 Apr
2013

Mad Hyper-Personalization: The Evolution to 1:1 Marketing

Don Draper of Mad Men works on Madison Avenue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In honor of the Mad Men Season 6 premier this weekend, we’d like to take this moment to take a walk down Marketing Memory Lane, From mass marketing to demographic segmentation to customer segmentation to personalization. And now with Nectar, hyper-personalization.

Before the era now inextricably linked with Don Draper, all consumers received the same products, the same messages and the same ads, in the same medium(s). As Henry Ford once famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

Then came those famous Ad Men (and yes, they were mostly men) of Madison Avenue. They realized that men and women actually hear, read and remember things differently. So these Mad Men placed “male-oriented” products, like aftershave, in sports magazines or the sports section of the newspaper. Products “for women” were advertised on TV during the middle of the day, thus the term “soap” opera, a tip of the hat to sponsor Procter & Gamble and their detergents. This demographic segmentation became more and more specific as time passed, differentiating marketing for marrieds vs singles, high income vs low, urban vs suburban, black vs white, and so on.

As companies began to gather more and more data on their customers and computers became increasingly powerful, smart businesses realized there was an even better way to market. Customers could be grouped into similar segments and marketed to according to their similarities. After all, not all women are created equal. Some of us like brand names. Some of us refuse to buy anything without a coupon. And some of us try to shop as infrequently as possible–hard to believe, but we exist! The hypothesis was that If brands could speak to each segment in a way that resonated with that segment, customers would buy more. And they did! Segmentation not only improved customer loyalty, it also reduced the cost of doing business.

With the advent of the internet and the wealth of data it provides, targeting has become increasingly defined. Savvy companies track not only customer purchases, but what customers are looking at when they are on the brand’s site. Some even combine internal digital data with bricks & mortar data. All this data allows businesses to relate to their customers more effectively. This 0ersonalization is the precursor to hyper-personalization.

But what if a brand could speak to a customer on an individual level, aka hyper-personalization? That’s what Nectar’s proprietary software allows brands to do! By combining all digital data available (purchases, online and email click behavior, CRM data, mobile, and so on) with social information, companies can now market to their customers in a 1:1 manner, yet do it at scale.

Today, we may go to the office in blue jeans rather than dapper suits, we may no longer be able to smoke wherever we please, we may not be able to have the 3-martini lunch anymore, but we can speak to our customers in a way that’s much more relevant for them: hyper-personalization. Now, please excuse me, so I can go spend an hour with Don Draper. Cheers!

15 Mar
2013

Amazon eCommerce: Why the Company is Killing It

The most recent retail sales figures from February surprised most people. Everyone expected a modest increase because of the expiration of the payroll tax holiday. But, WHOA, they were much better than the future prognosticators’ expectations. And the biggest winner? Amazon, eCommerce. Everything from a-z indeed.

Slate magazine said it best in their tweet: “Retail sales were up in February as Amazon just KILLED department stores.” According to Slate, general merchandisers (including department stores) saw sales declines of 4% while Amazon eCommerce saw 14% sales increases.

So now the question is why? Why is Amazon eCommerce doing so well while similar brick-and-mortar stores aren’t? Let’s look at what Amazon does well:

They have a vast assortment, yet it’s relatively easy to find what you want in a very short amount of time.
You get your order when Amazon says you will and in the condition they say.
They offer adjunct services to keep you in the Amazon family (and website), like Prime, which not only gives you free shipping but lets you watch shows for free.
They allow you to shop on amazon on every device imaginable.
Customer service responds to your questions or concerns very quickly.
Returns are simple.

In other words, Amazon eCommerce makes the shopping experience easy, consistent and pleasurable.

But other department stores with online stores do this too, right? Many of them do.

And many argued vociferously, as recently as a few months ago, that the reason Amazon was winning was because of the price advantage related to not having to charge taxes. Well, guess what? Amazon has started charging sales taxes and they’re STILL winning.

Could it be that not only do they make it easy, consistent and pleasurable, but they connect with us, the customers, because they seem to KNOW us? How often have you gone to Amazon.com to browse for one thing and ended up buying more than you expected? I have. Lots. And I contend that it’s because they always seem to know what I need (okay, it’s want). Regardless, I always buy more than I probably should because I like what Amazon recommends for me. I like how they personalize my shopping experience.

Well, here at Nectar, not only can we personalize your company’s shopping experience, we can hyper-personalize it! Want to learn more? It’s easy. Contact us for a demo!

Want to learn more or just shoot the breeze about hyper-personalization? Contact me at patricia@nectarom.com.

Patricia Blair

VP Marketing, Nectar Online Media

Want more startup and social media info? Follow Nectar Online Media on Facebook & Twitter!

Finalist