Big Data Archives - Page 5 of 6 - Omnichannel Personalization SaaS Solution

18 Sep
2013

How Marketing Executives Use Big Data: All Types of Data Sets At the Right Time

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). Each of the executives with whom we spoke had used all types of data sets in different ways. Depending on the need of the business, they called on different types of data sets to achieve their purpose. Given their focus on marketing, the types of data sets tended to be tied to customers.

As a principal at The Richards Group since its inception, Brad Todd has seen a lot of changes in how advertising clients have used data. He recalls the proliferation of data from the introduction and use of loyalty cards at grocery stores. Although grocers captured vast amounts of information about their customers—what they bought, how often they purchased, how they paid—very little of that data was used to improve the customer relationship. The data was primarily used for managing inventory and shelf space. Arguably, having fully-stocked shelves does help the customer experience, but the primary use of the data was to improve the bottom line. Today, grocers and their CPG partners have begun to combine many types of data sets for more targeted marketing.

While CMO of Best Buy, Barry Judge and his team used different types of data sets–purchase history, clickstream analysis, email interactions, demographics and psychographics–to identify and deliver relevant product offerings to their customers. However, integrating newer analytics tools into legacy systems posed roadblocks. And incorporating data from the physical store, in order to have a truly holistic picture of each customer, was very difficult.

At Barry’s current company, Living Social, the relative newness of the company and the lack of a physical channel makes it easier to combine data. They have used customer information to prioritize offers according to each customer’s purchase history and click behavior, thus making the customer experience much more relevant.

Paul Golden, while he was CMO at Samsung Mobile, used big data to improve the brand preference score for Samsung’s mobile phones. Applying analytics to their big data allowed Paul and his team to identify key markets and determine the most relevant messages for those key markets.

Once you get past the hype and noise, big data can be very useful. The important thing is to clearly define your objectives and use the data to meet those objectives.

Want to learn more about how to connect different types of data sets? 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 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.

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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.

28 Aug
2013

Nectar: The Easiest One-to-One Marketing Suite. Period.

Is Nectar really the “easiest one-to-one marketing suite”? Yes! We have developed an integrated SaaS suite that makes the marketer’s job easy as pie.

And how have we done it? Our comprehensive software suite allows marketers to take disparate big data about thousands (or millions++) of customers and create individual 360-degree profiles in real time, then determine the BEST marketing message for each of those customers and get it to them, regardless of the device or channel they use. No technical expertise required!

Do you have lots of data in different places that you know has value, but you just can’t seem to get all the dots connected? nectarConnect will do that for you. We are your quick and easy Data Management Platform.

Do you have communications that you’re trying to personalize for your customers but just can’t make it relevant enough for them? Have you tried customer segmentation but aren’t getting the results you expected? nectarEssence will apply our proprietary algorithms to your data and generate one-to-one marketing messages for each of your customers IN MINUTES!

Do you struggle to get relevant messages to your customers across all the touchpoints you have? nectarEngage will distribute your one-to-one marketing messages to each of your customers, no matter how many you have, in real time, across email, mobile, website, and social. Really!

Listen to our Founder & CEO, Amrit Kirpalani, talk about Nectar: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMCPhluRuTg.

12 Aug
2013

5 Reasons You Know You’re Ready for a Data Management Platform (DMP)

And, Just Because You Have ‘Big Data’ is Not One of The Reasons to Get a DMP

Wondering where I’m going with this post because I said having Big Data is not one of the reasons to get a Data Management Platform (or DMP)? Read on …

The term Big Data is now like consultant — it means different things to different. { I’m in that group of folks that uses the term big data to describe our company … so, guilty as charged }. During a number of our meetings, the topics of data almost always comes up, whether it is about clean, dirty, big, small, or no data.

So, I thought in this post, I’d write about what a data management platform is and why many companies are moving from thinking about big data to data management.

Before I go much further, let me provide a brief description about what a data management platform is. To provide a perspective: a DMP is a system of processes and technologies that manages (or normalizes) your data to allow the business user to extract value / information easily from that aggregated data set.

Said another way: a DMP allows you to actually get your job as a marketer done (whether that is finding an insight, generating a report, building a model or executing a campaign).

How do you know your company needs a DMP? Here are the top five ways { Letterman countdown style }:

# 5 … You’ve Got More than 1 Data Source that is Updated Frequently — AT&T has Big Data because it has records about millions of us and every one of our calls logged … but so does MOOYAH Burgers (a fast-growing restaurant chain based right here in Dallas where we’re located). An important trait about the data, though, is that the information is updated frequently creating a need to continually process & normalize the data.

I’ve yet to come across a business that only has 1 data source … this particular reason means there are lots of companies out there that need DMPs.

# 4 … Your Data is Sitting With More Than 1 Vendor — Heard of the story from a marketing colleague where they say, “Well, I have to wait for agency X or company Y to give me a flat file so I can run my analysis”? Well, if you have more than 1 vendor you work with that produces data for you { think agency, social media platform, media buying, email operations, etc. } then maintaining a centralized data management platform is a strategic imperative to both ensure you have data that is well-connected but that you can also readily enable cross-channel or cross-data source analysis.

# 3 … You Have Marketing Operations that Rely on “Real-Time” Customer Data — Basically, if you have a need for ‘production analytics’, the customer data management platform ensures that your data sources are loaded, processed, and normalized. The normalized data can then be readily used for analysis, reporting, or modeling to serve as inputs for a variety of activities & functions.

Example of marketing activities that require product analytics include:

> 1:1 mobile app recommendations

> Populating executive dashboards

> Churn or attrition modeling

> Customer life cycle behavioral triggers

# 2 … You are Focused on Marketing Objectives that Drive Revenue, Engagement, and Loyalty — { This would be our # 1 except that I have an even better # 1 in our top five reasons countdown. } There are so many different data sources, lots of different tools, and more data than you can have easily tied up into a pretty little package.

The problem is, as marketers we’re spending more & more of our time getting information ready for decision making and NOT enough time evaluating the data for decision making. Consequently, our role as a marketer is changing rapidly to spend valuable resources on data vs traditional marketing tactics.

Implementing a robust customer data management platform allows marketers to focus on marketing again.

# 1 … You’re a Data Rock Star and Don’t Have a Programming / Analytics or Related Degree — You are the go to person in your team just because you were able to build that awesome analysis { in Excel } by mashing together those 3 data sets about the product, customer, and behaviors. Everyone else is in awe and you were up for multiple nights in a row cleaning and doing all of those Lookups! { You know who you are! }

Going back to # 2 above, while you are a rock star for trudging through the data and likely getting hi-fives for having a reputation of getting things done, how much of a bigger rock star would you be if you were able to spend time devising that new campaign that grew engagement 15% or innovating on an existing promotional offer set, reducing costs 10%?

It’s time for that DMP.

Have any other reasons you’d add to the list? Drop me a comment below.

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.

01 Aug
2013

Where Did the Name nectarom Come From?

nectar + om = nectarom { the secret formula for squeezing the juice out of your marketing }

Nectar Online Media, Inc.

During many of my meetings, I’m often asked where the name nectarom came from and what we do as a company. Well, here’s the short form: Nectar Online Media is a big data customer analytics software company { yes, a lot of buzz words in there } and then I continue we make the easiest to use 1:1 marketing suite, period.

Almost always, the fact that we make the easiest 1:1 marketing suite out there brings up additional questions and gets people very interested. Now for the part about our name — there is much significance to any name and our company’s is no different.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to name several businesses and it is no easy task. During my MBA course on marketing and branding, I remembered a few things that my professor taught me … a brand needs to be memorable, distinguishable and, ultimately, it’s the guiding force behind the company.

As I was launching Nectar Online Media and thinking about our name I tried my best to keep those principles to mind. I asked family, friends, and our advisors while doing lots of research.

There are many marketers who are familiar with the UK Loyalty Points company ‘Nectar’, we have no relation to them.

So, here goes: there are two parts to our name “nectar” and “om”.

For the first part, “nectar” there are two meanings:

Because we’re a big data customer analytics software company, we want to be able to squeeze the essence, the juice, the nectar out of your data { see what we did there? }
Now the ‘insider’ angle, my name “Amrit” comes from the root language of Hindi called Sanskrit. In Sanskrit, one of the meanings of ‘Amrit’ is ‘Nectar’ … so, in a way, it’s a fun double meaning for our brand.

Now, onto the second part, “om” { you might already be seeing where this is going }:

We decided to add “Online Media” as part of the rest of our name. Reality is we’re about more than online media and we are doing some fun work around ‘offline media’ as well. The practical part was our web domain name, who is going to remember “www.nectaronlinemedia.com” { that’s a mouthful }? So I decided to look for shorter domains and we were able to get www.nectarom.com.

Here comes the fun part again, when abbreviated “Online Media” becomes “OM”. In the Indian heritage , OM is considered a sacred mantra or formula to achieve a higher goal. OM is also considered the primordial sound said to be all pervasive. { okay, yes, deep }. So there comes the meaning of the second part of our name, while we can extract the essence of your big data to help create some amazing results … without the right formula, you can’t reach the goal.

Get to know us … you’ll find all sorts of fun facts about what we do and who we are.

11 Jul
2013

Using Big Data to Micro-Target: Integrating Big Data for 1:1 Marketing

One of the things I love about my job at Nectar is sharing with our customers how we deliver value to their business by enabling them to micro-target messages to their customers. Recently, while reading McKinsey Quarterly articles on big data, I saw a couple of statements from McKinsey directors that really resonated with me, because it addresses the core of Nectar’s value proposition.

1) From David Court: “…the key is to focus on the big decisions for which if you had better data, if you had better predictive ability, if you had a better ability to optimize, you’d make more money.”
2) From Tim McGuire: “Analytics will define the difference between the losers and winners going forward.”

I believe that if you make your customers happy, they will be loyal to you, and loyalty generally translates into greater revenue (and less cost) for your company. How do you make your customers happy? By knowing them. Know how they interact with you, know what they buy from you, know what they like about you, know who they are. At an individual level. Of course, this is easier said than done. But with the right tools and data, it can be done.

When, where, what and how you communicate with your customer is one of those big decisions. Using the data you already have from your customer and combining it with other big data–online behavior, social, CRM, mobile, etc.–enables you to predict what that customer would want to hear from you. This predictive ability, in turn, allows you to optimize your relationship with that customer, which then helps you make more money. (I use the singular “customer” because that’s what a robust Digital Management Platform enables you to do: communicate with each of your customers as an individual, yet do it at scale.)

Technology exists today to bring all of your available big data together to build a foundation from which to make your big decisions. A company like Nectar can help you bring all this data together to enable you to build 360 degree profiles of each of your customers. But we don’t stop there; we then apply our proprietary algorithms to analyze your customer profiles to determine the most relevant communications to deliver to each customer–we call this hyper-personalization. To complete the circle, we then help you distribute consistent hyper-personalized messages across every digital channel your customer uses.

We like our perch at the intersection of big data, analytics and hyper-personalization because when we bring each of these tools to bear for our customers, big decisions not only become easy but they also make you money.

Want to learn more? Please email contact@nectarom.com for more information.

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.