From wild season to clever season
How AI and Automation can help you convert seasonal shoppers into usual customers.
Chances are that by the time you are reading this text you are either recovering from another frantic holiday season or still battling through the grind. Black Friday, Cyber Monday (or any other local big sales event) might have come and gone, but are more and more just milestones on the year ends sprint which starts earlier and earlier.
When all the fuss and buzz are over often a number of questions linger on marketing managers minds. The ones that we at Math Marketing hear more often from our customers are:
- How much of my Media purchase was effective?
- Was there anymore that could have been done to deliver better/more results? (be it ROI, sales, etc)
- And most importantly, will seasonal sales convert to recurrent customers?
We gathered the experience from our project managers across different industries and share with you some key ideas on answering the last question.
Holiday season doesn’t have to be a bunch of one-shot customers but a time of year where you can increase your customer base significantly with the right strategies in place.
1. Don’t bet on a hunch, trust data:
Human intuition is biased and often come up with strategies based on believes and wishful thinking instead of actual market knowledge. It doesn’t matter if it is settled on stone nor if it is part of the company culture, intuition may pay off or it may not, but in the end, it’s all a question of betting on luck.
Online and Offline data collection is paramount to any data drive marketing strategy. It is an all year round activity and can trigger pretty creative solutions that end up increasing brand engagement too.
2. Take a look into your data stream:
Too much data is like too much water, there is a risk of drown. Most of the times marketing departments are buried on data, often from several sources and poorly harmonized, from which they can make no sense. Other times they lack the tools to quickly go through big amounts of data, and just produce bland conclusions which increase frustrations among analysts and marketeers alike.
Data is valuable as an action trigger but often has no intrinsic value on its own. Setting in motion a data selection strategy is hard and demands regular tinkering. Therefore, companies often opt for an easier route and collect all information their marketing tech stack allows, just to end up paralyzed by information overflow.
In order to design an efficient data strategy it helps to have cross industry knowledge. We at math have been helping companies from a variety of industries tackling their data challenge on a technology agnostic way.
3. Promotions should be sent and made only to those individual/segments who are likely to respond positively:
Holiday seasons are prolific on discount offers or promotional campaigns. There are costs as well as potential earnings associated with this kind of campaigns. If the set of targets or potential customer aren’t chosen wisely the outcome can end up being a substantial loss.
The goal is to maximize Incremental Response Rate, which measures the increase on sales from the promotion, and Net Incremental Revenue, as in the gain earned by running the promotion. Unfortunately, many companies still follow the path of batch and blast their contact list during this season hoping to convert customers with whom they never kept a conversation during the rest of the year.
Campaign analytics together with advanced statics help your team design casual test during the hear which generates powerful insights on your companies consumers price sensitivity. If a customers has a low price-demand elasticity what is the point of keep offering him/her discounts?
Carefully curated data with the help of machine learning can generate powerful insights about micro segments and tailor the customer experience and communication tone.
4. Work smarter, automate your campaigns:
Automation is one of the best, and often the most cost effective, ways to engage with your carefully tuned segments. It allows you to target the right customer at the right time enabling a near personal experience for your customer. Furthermore, it is easily scalable allowing for increasing results as population increases without any incremental effort. A well designed Marketing automation operation will help you move away from contact lists to Omni-channel campaigns, connecting with your customers in whatever channels they prefer, be it, push, sms, social or the good old e-mail.
This way you and your team can focus efforts on producing the best content instead of having to stay on top of emails all the time.
From econometrics to managing control, my passion has been to help companies and managers with data based decisions. Find more about the impact of my work with marketinh decisions in math marketing and about me on my Linkedin and Twitter.
