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More Than Meets the Eye Companies are detecting larger event patterns in their data to get a deeper understanding of their customers. “The idea behind ‘marketing as service’ is that marketers actually transform their messaging into a genuine customer service.” The company also has partnered with New York Sports Clubs to provide special cobranded workout classes to help women eliminate cellulite. The program is currently offered in New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Philadelphia, with more markets likely to be added later this year. “The backbone was online,” Maurer says. “Our website was interactive with experts to advise/coach over the four weeks of the active push, and we have reached over 100,000 women.” Maurer says Beiersdorf in general and Nivea in particular firmly believe that it all comes down to consumer perception. “The evolving way that consumers perceive brands means we need to educate and challenge them. There’s of course the central message that a certain product can give them a certain benefit, but we want to go beyond that—away from what’s simply functional to a more organic integration in the consumer’s life. If you do that often and consistently enough, the consumers are less likely to view [your product] skeptically, and can more fully understand the role you play in their lifestyle.” There’s also a bottom-line impact, adds Renegade Marketing’s Reissner. “The extreme customer satisfaction generated by [using marketing-as-a-service] programs is money in the bank,” he says. “It helps with repeat purchase, customer retention, and positive word of mouth, and that drives new customer acquisition.” > Kevin Zimmerman Trigger-based marketing is like Newton’s third law of motion: Every customer action triggers a marketing reaction. Using event patterns instead of just triggers, however, allows organizations to market not only reactively, based on what customers have done, but also proactively, based on what patterns in customer data predict they will do next. Banks have relied on this mathematical approach for the past few years to determine which variations in customers’ accounts indicate a high probability that a customer will leave for the competition. Recently, however, other industries are starting to leverage event patterns to inform their marketing communications. From retail to consumer packaged goods, companies are taking a deeper look at data from a host of channels to understand larger event patterns, such as when customers marry, retire, and build families, and then act on these in real time with tailored offers or other marketing messages designed to be more relevant and actionable. Some companies are dividing their end-user customers by characteristics like education level, income, or employment status and then tracking them over time to determine, for example, what segment a certain group living in a city and doing well financially will move into next. According to Jon Cohn, product leader at Acxiom, this allows businesses to find out where customers are coming from so they can “start marketing to them before they get to the point where they are ready to buy.” For example, AARP now markets to people when they turn 45 and Cohn says insurance companies have been watching when customers marry or have children, and as such, have seen an increase in response rates to campaigns of 15 percent . B.J. Morgan, director of segment management at Unica, says the biggest difference in what’s occurring now versus a few years ago is that, in the case of the financial services industry, instead of just monitoring large deposits, financial institutions are monitoring inactivity. A good example, he says, is when a customer opens a checking account, but doesn’t write any checks. “Activity and lack of expected activity are important,” Morgan says, so the company can intervene appropriately. According to Mark Klein, CEO of Loyalty Builders, other industries take a similar approach by analyzing a lack of action or missing purchases in a cycle and then using that information to offer win-back promotions. Additionally, he sees many deeper data patterns emerging, such as combining a customer’s last purchase with his purchase history to look for emerging purchase patterns and recognizing when a customer has left and then returned. In the case of the latter, “the typical response is, ‘They’re back, I’m going to fire off a bunch of stuff,’” Klein says. “You want to approach them without overwhelming them. When someone returns…having a meaningful communication is important.” DATABASE/ ANALYTICS Opportunities come with challenges The problem companies often still face in advancing these deep event-pattern strategies, says Van Mayros, president of Milan Group Technologies, is that they often do not correlate the data to their customer master data file, which prohibits them from responding to event patterns in real time. The barrier stems from the difficulty in integrating systems September/October 2008 41

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of 1to1 Magazine Demo

1to1 Magazine Demo Contents 1to1media.com Editor's Note Feedback Putting Care in Patients' Hands Loyalty at Work Redefining the Contact Center Agent Introducing Enterprise 2.0 Cigna Dental Drills for Loyal Customers On the Beat 19 Ways to Succeed Miami Heat Schools Its Staff on Sales and Service Marketing Lends a Helping Hand More Than Meets the Eye Customer Service by Committiee Textron's Business Soars by Tracking Customer Loyalty Resources Contact Center Agent as Trusted Advisor Mastering Global CRM Face to Face with Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D.

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