Cross Channel Marketing: Brainpower and Muscle for Multi-Channel MSPs
Posted on Tue, Feb 08, 2011
By Bill Sullivan, Eastman Kodak, Center of Excellence Lead, MarketMover Business Advantage Solutions
How much does it cost to move into multi-channel marketing? Well, if you try it and get it wrong, the sky’s the limit. It could cost you your business. So, despite all the hype and loose talk about how becoming a cross-media marketing services provider is the way of the future for printers wanting to move up the value chain, this is not a business transformation that should be undertaken lightly.
When Kodak first started thinking about how it should be preparing to help its customers make this kind of transition, there was a lot of debate about what they would really need. What we’ve come up with, over a period of more than two years, is a practical, affordable system that combines a robust, dependable technology backbone with some very smart software tools that can work wonders when it comes to getting the best out of limited data.
The result is Managed Campaign Services. It has real muscle when it comes to executing multi-channel campaigns across a range of media that includes variable data print, email blasts, SMS text messaging, personalized URLs (pURLs) and landing pages. But it also has brains, including software tools that can enhance and manipulate data and introduce powerful and surprising elements of predictive modeling.
One way to develop a marketing strategy is to rely on brainstorming, black coffee and inspiration. Another way to do it, though, is to look at whatever data is available to you – often nothing more than raw customer data files – and find ways to analyze and segment these records to classify customers into groups that can be addressed with targeted offers. This analytical approach offers a much higher certainty of success. If you, as a marketing services provider, can offer your clients the ability to identify the most profitable customers on their lists and devise multi-channel campaigns that will reach them and engage their interest, you can virtually guarantee great response rates and loyal, satisfied clients.
By providing access to advanced data enrichment and predictive modeling tools, backed up by the support of skilled data scientists and marketing experts from the Kodak MarketMover Solutions team, the Managed Campaign Services package helps you ensure your clients are able to deliver the right messages in the right media to the right people.
We have chosen to focus a lot of our efforts on data, because data is always the key to cross-media communications, no matter what output channels you end up using. Everything leads back to the data. The more value you can build into the data files, through the processes of data cleansing, data hygiene, data manipulation, data enrichment, and predictive modeling, the better the eventual marketing ROI will be.
But how does a printer with no previous experience of handling the intricacies of marketing data use these sophisticated techniques to add value for the customer? The best answer is a combination of good software and good advice – and that’s what Kodak can provide.
Data enrichment, for example, could involve loading a basic customer records file and then overlaying it with other files containing census data or geo-tracking information. Doing this allows demographic details to be added in about household make-up, educational levels and incomes, or about travel time to a store or entertainment venue. Within Managed Campaign Services, this is a quick, painless routine that immediately gives more depth to the customer profiles. Our customers can either do it themselves or get Kodak to do it for them.
But if data enrichment is a first step, predictive modeling takes the manipulation of the available data a whole lot further.
Our team has taken an established statistical model known as MID (multi-variate interaction detection) and built it into our technology platform. MID has been used for years, in various forms, to forecast the effectiveness of direct mail activity, based on predicted values and past performance. Kodak has adapted and updated this concept and operationalized it within the software so that it becomes an amazingly powerful tool, both for developing marketing propositions and for deciding which media should be used for specific customers.
Just running the MID software against a customer file produces a tree-type representation of the entire data file. This groups individuals together into statistically relevant populations and highlights what they have in common, providing insights that make it easier to create offers that will appeal to them and to choose the right mix of communication channels.
This focus on enriching, refining and exploiting the data, before you even get round to thinking about campaign logistics, numbers and production issues, is unique to Kodak. Nobody else has thought it through and put together a package that pays so much attention to data quality and data analysis, even leaving aside the unique potential of the MID-driven predictive modeling techniques.
But the whole point of cross-media communication is that it builds a relationship over time. The final element of our technologyis a superb set of inbound response monitoring and post-campaign analysis tools that close the feedback loop and ensure the data gets more and more valuable after every bout of activity.
Managed Campaign Services brings together both the data science needed to create the right multi-channel campaigns and the processes needed to execute them, putting the user in control of both, from a single dashboard interface. If you already know the ins and outs of data manipulation and managing and producing multi-channel output, you can buy the system outright. But for most print service providers that are moving in this direction, it makes a lot more sense to take the pay-as-you-go approach.
This involves paying a monthly subscription fee for the basic service and adding on exactly what you need, in terms of assistance from Kodak’s data sciences consultants and marketing advisers, at least until you become familiar with the tools and techniques. With the experts at your elbow, you’ll soon learn what works and what doesn’t, what information your clients should gather from their customers, when to use overlays to enrich the data, and how to tap into the power of predictive modeling.
We’ve seen this side-by-side approach work very well over the last two years with digital print service providers, commercial printers, direct mail specialists and high volume transaction output companies. The costs to these companies depend on what services they choose to use, but a basic monthly subscription ensures their early steps towards multi-channel marketing won’t break the bank.
And the payoffs? In the longer term, what is it worth to reposition a business in an area where it can offer a premium service that measurably boosts its customers ROI and keeps them coming back for more, year after year?
We have already seen examples where predictive modeling and impeccable execution have helped Kodak’s clients lift their customers’ response rates from 3% to 18%. Nothing is certain in this world, but if performance like that doesn’t guarantee real customer loyalty, it’s hard to know what will.
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