personalization Archives - Page 8 of 9 - Omnichannel Personalization SaaS Solution

20 Sep
2013

The Future: Big Opportunities in Big Data

Big Opportunities in Big Data Abound. You Just Need to Know HOW to Look (4th 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 fourth installment, we will share these executives’ thoughts about the way big data can further revolutionize the future of marketing. They see big opportunities in Big Data. The best is yet to come!

When we posed the question to our marketing executives about the future of big data in the marketing realm, they were excited about the possibilities and big opportunities in big data’s future.

Paul Golden would like to see big data used to truly personalize the customer experience. Paul recalled a men’s retailer whose sales people would write your information, preferences and measurements on index cards (similar to today’s “preference centers”). They would use this information to follow up with their customers whenever an item arrived in-store that might fit a customer’s needs. In this age of big data, this type of information is available for so many customers—retailers could be delivering personalization at its best. Why don’t they create big opportunities with big data they have? With SO MUCH data, many executives just aren’t quite sure what to do with all that data, much less how to turn it into value for their brand and customers. Too much leads to not enough.

Creating a truly omnichannel experience, merging all big data from physical and digital channels would be the holy grail, according to Barry Judge. If you could combine store purchase data with online transactions and click behavior, plus email, mobile and social, throw in CRM and loyalty data, you’re well on your way to creating big opportunities in big data. The key is integrating all that big data into something that allows you to speak to each of your customers as an individual, regardless of where she interacts with your brand.

Brad Todd would like to see retailers, like grocery stores, who have been capturing data for decades, turn that knowledge into a one-to-one customer experience. It would be great, for instance, if the grocer “knew” that you shop weekly for strawberries but didn’t buy any this week; they could offer a real-time discount for you to pick up some strawberries during this shopping trip as well. Another one of the big opportunities in big data.

Today tools exist to make one-to-one personalization—hyper-personalization—a reality. The tough part is corralling all that big data and applying robust analytics to arrive at hyper-personalized communications for each customer. Want to learn how to overcome the tough part?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.