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A Marketer’s Guide To Unlocking the Value of Your Customer and Prospect Lists maxpoint.com
A Marketer’s Guide
To Unlocking the Value of Your Customer and Prospect Lists
maxpoint.com
© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
The Business Opportunity
The Solution Components
Factors to Consider
Key Questions to Ask
Leveraging Investment for Stronger Brand Reach
Enriched Data Sets for Powerful Shopper Targeting
Table of Contents
A MARKETER’S GUIDE
Unlocking the Value of Your InvestmentBusinesses will invest around $36 billion
in CRM systems, processes, and lists in
2017.* However, surveys from the early
2000s and even today indicate that most
of these investments fail to meet their
business objectives. These lists and the
related data certainly represent significant
opportunities for marketing efficiency,
better customer experiences, and
improved profitability.
But the potential of customer lists has
been largely unrealized so far.
As brands move toward truly omnichannel
marketing, demand grows for individually
addressable marketing tactics across
multiple channels—from mobile ads and
email to addressable TV and direct mail.
*Gartner, June 2013.
© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
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Market-leading brands are moving toward omnichannel identity-based
marketing. This approach leverages individually addressable marketing
vehicles across multiple channels (everything from mobile ads and email
to addressable TV and direct mail) and customizes each marketing
touchpoint based on an in-depth customer profile containing facts such
as purchase history, current interests, and psychographics.
Omnichannel identity-based marketing requires you to immediately
recognize and respond in a relevant manner to each customer
whenever and wherever they appear at a marketing touchpoint, whether
that’s in a physical store where your brand is sold, on your website, in
an advertisable moment on a third-party website, or anywhere else—
both online and offline. The goal is to deliver appropriate content to
each customer based on where they are in the purchase journey and to
market to first-time buyers differently from heavy, longtime buyers.
Your customer address lists are your most valuable asset.
Marketers Respond with Identity-Based Marketing
A MARKETER’S GUIDE© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
Getting More Out of Your Investment
There are now a variety of technology solutions competing to manage this process of
identifying, profiling, and activating customer lists. But which one is right for you? Keep
in mind your main objective: not just to know your customers better, but to use that
knowledge to improve brand performance, both in the customer’s eyes and in your
financials.
Identity matching and the ability to activate 1:1 marketing are critical parts of the process,
but forward-thinking marketers understand that it’s about getting enriched customer
profiles. They seek out new sources of data to learn more about their customers and
segment them in strategic ways. They evaluate new data types based on what is most
relevant for their marketing strategy, adds the most value to the customer experience,
and is the greatest source of competitive advantage.
Best-in-class marketers look for the freshest possible data they can get to enable as
close to real-time response as possible.
of marketers said they plan to increase their use of first-party data this year because of the value it adds to customer understanding and engagement. —Econsultancy2
“82%
It’s About Knowing Your Customers Better
Due to rising consumer mobility across devices, online properties, and physical locations,
merely recognizing an individual as one of your customers is no simple task. And you
must not only identify the specific customer, but also have a complete and continuously
updated profile of their interests and history of interactions with your brand so that
you can instantly activate a customized marketing message or offer via any one of an
increasing number of individually addressable marketing channels.
As B2C marketers pursue contextual marketing and contend with its inherent complexity, [connecting] the dots between customer interactions is a critical success factor. —Forrester Research1
“
1. Forrester Research, October 2015. 2. Econsultancy with Epsilon and Conversant, August 2016.
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Marketers who have an existing list of customers or
prospects with addresses—physical or email
Those who seek to enhance that list with digital
identities and richer customer profiles to support
omnichannel contextual marketing at scale
Particularly those whose targeting must be
location-aware due to regulatory requirements or
physical business locations
Who Should Read This Guide Questions Answered by This Guide
How can I use enriched customer data to increase
customer engagement?
What are the benefits of implementing a customer
identity system?
What steps are necessary to enhance existing
customer data with digital identities and enrich
customer profiles to support a holistic, identity-
based marketing approach?
What are some of the key issues to consider
and questions to ask when selecting an identity
solution?
What percentage of customers in an existing
customer database can realistically be matched
to digital identities and reached with marketing?
How have the real-world challenges of identity-
based marketing been successfully addressed?
A MARKETER’S GUIDE© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
Given the enormous opportunity to create new value, companies should pursue emotional connections as a science—and a strategy. But for most, building these is more guesswork than science.
—Harvard Business Review2
“Today’s market leaders deliver a seamless omnichannel customer
experience that, in a privacy-safe way:
Recognizes each customer wherever they are at the moment, in
any marketing channel, on any device
Profiles current interests, and other relevant variables the
customer in terms of their prior brand interactions
Activates contextually relevant marketing
In fact, one recent study reported that the vast majority of marketers
(84%) want to employ identity-based marketing strategies across all
digital channels.1
Why? To unlock the value of their CRM investment.
New marketing opportunities—Opening new channels
of communication, enabling new methods of segmenting,
and targeting your customers with more timely and pertinent
messages by linking your existing customer data with new online
data sources
Better customer targeting—Leveraging customer data for digital
ad targeting, enabling you to reach specific customers across all
digital channels and devices and supplementing traditional CRM
tactics like direct mail and email
Deeper customer insights—Dynamically augmenting existing
profiles with data available only from digital ad platforms, including
your customers’ online activity (e.g., site visits that indicate
someone is in the market for your product) as well as physical
location activity (e.g., store or dealership visits)
Great foundation for the future—Creating a foundation that
will support emerging strategies such as data monetization and
sharing, addressable TV advertising, and opportunities arising from
the Internet of Things.
1. Econsultancy with Epsilon and Conversant, August 2016. 2. Harvard Business Review, November 2015.
The Business Opportunity
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The Solution ComponentsMany technology platforms promise to help solve the challenges of omnichannel identity-based marketing. But how do you decide which one is right for you?
Match Enrich Activate1 2 3Match each of your customers by their physical and/or
email address with their various digital identities (device
ID, IP address, cookies, etc.). One of the challenges
here is the frequency with which people replace
phones and acquire new devices, so matching must be
continually updated.
Why This Matters
Matching a customer with only one or two digital IDs will
leave a lot of marketing opportunities—and customer
value—unrealized. With a comprehensive identity
graph, you will be able to recognize each customer
whenever and wherever they go, across all devices
and marketing channels, both online (retailer websites,
email, advertising opportunities) and offline (in-store and
direct mail).
Link each customer identity with an enriched profile
that includes the data you already collect—such as
their history of interactions with your business, both
online and offline—along with third-party data on the
customer’s real-time location, interests, purchase
intent indicators, and other contextual factors. The real
challenge here is appending the latest customer activity
instantly, as it happens.
Why This Matters
By enhancing customer profiles with current interests as
revealed by their most recent online activities and site
visits (not merely search terms), you will be better able
to anticipate consumer needs and where they are in the
purchase journey.
Export the now-enhanced customer data to activate
your marketing (display ads, social media, email, direct
mail) that reaches individual customers with relevant
messages at each stage of the purchase journey. To
stay current with your customers, you’ll also need
a process to continually feed data updates to your
marketing activation partners.
Why This Matters
You will be able to:
Target addressable advertising (display, mobile,
video, TV) to specific customers and customer
segments based on their brand interaction and
purchase history as captured in your CRM system
Target direct mail or email to customer segments
based on their online activity
A MARKETER’S GUIDE© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
More opportunities to engage with your best customers
The ability to respond to real-time customer interests and purchase-intent cues and then deliver personalized, context-specific content to each customer
Deeper customer engagement with your brand as well as greater customer lifetime value
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1
Factors to Consider
In Match, You Need Scale
The objective of matching your CRM list with digital identities is to expand your
opportunities to more meaningfully engage with your customers across all of their
devices and across all digital channels. In other words, to be able to assign digital
identities to as many of your known customers as possible.
Vendors can match from less than 40% to well over 70%. That’s a huge spread
determined by how the vendor deals with identity fragmentation.
When interacting with a specific brand, a customer may use different identifiers
depending on location and application. The ideal is to connect each of those identities
back to the individual’s name, home address, and assigned customer number.
WHAT VARIABLES IMPACT SCALE AND MATCH RATES?
Digital identities—The highest match rates come from being able to resolve
customers to three major types of digital identity: IP address, mobile device ID, and
cookies. Most vendors only resolve to one or maybe two types of digital identifiers.
Multiple devices—The more devices that can be linked to a given household or
individual, the better.
Physical addresses—The greater your vendor’s knowledge of physical addresses
and how to process them, the better it should be at matching your customers’
offline identities with online data.
Geographic specificity—If accurate geographic targeting is critical to your
marketing plans, due to regulatory requirements or physical store locations, how
do you ensure geographic accuracy in your customer identities?
NAME ADDRESS NAME ADDRESS NAME ADDRESS
NAME ADDRESS NAME ADDRESS
NAME ADDRESS BUYING INTENT INTERESTS
SWEEPSTAKESLOYALTY EMAIL
NEWSLETTER SURVEY
MATCH LIST
A MARKETER’S GUIDE© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
For Enrichment, You Need to Unlock Purchase Intent
Once you have a list of who you can reach digitally,
the next challenge is deciding what you say to them.
You may have already appended a variety of targeting
variables to your customer address list—demographics,
web interactions, past purchases, shopping preferences,
product ownership or service subscription, expected
repurchase or renewal date, and so on—but adding even
more insights can help you in several powerful ways:
Interests and purchase intent—A great deal of
information about an individual customer’s long-term
interests (e.g., college football or home maintenance)
and short-term purchase intent (e.g., shopping for a
new car or cell phone plan) can be gleaned from online
activity and attached to digital identity.
Household insights—Individual customer records can
also be augmented with neighborhood-level data, such
as income, the likelihood of homeownership, urbanicity,
and even shopping preferences.
Brand propensity—Some variables in your customer
database, such as likelihood that a given household
prefers or owns a particular car brand (or owns a car
at all and therefore needs car insurance) may have
been predicted but not known. List enrichment can
help increase that confidence level to improve targeting
efficiency.
Geographic precision—Location enrichment can
improve geographic targeting accuracy. This is of
particular importance to marketers who want to drive
buyers to specific store locations, service businesses
that want to grow their share in specific markets, and
businesses that are regulated at the state level.
2
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For Activation, You Need Portability, Recency, and Scale
Portability means the flexibility to export your new
customer file (with digital IDs and enriched profiles) to
any data integration platform, such as Adobe or Oracle
Marketing Cloud, for use with any digital media provider
(e.g., social media platforms, email software, addressable
TV networks, online publishers).
Portability of your enriched customer list can be critical to
realizing the vision of omnichannel contextual marketing.
Leading marketers are testing various combinations of
1:1 marketing vehicles—direct mail, email, digital ads, and
addressable TV—to determine what works best for different
audiences and to improve marketing ROI.
Recency means that the data you’re using for activation is
as up-to-the-minute as possible. This applies to identities—
recognizing when a customer gets a new device, for
example—as well as profiles. When it comes to profiles,
frequent or even continuous updating is necessary to know
exactly when to deliver ads and offers.
Scale is just as important at the activation stage as it is at
the matching stage. When your enriched customer file is
activated by an ad delivery platform, the technology may
enable you to reach more of your targeted audiences.
3
MOBILE
DISPLAY
DIRECT MAIL
TV
SOCIAL
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NAME ADDRESS
ENRICHED LIST
A MARKETER’S GUIDE© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
Unlocking the Value of Your Customer List
Process—Can you match a household to multiple
digital identities—an IP address plus all devices used
by this household, plus cookies?
Data source—What is your source for the digital
identities used for matching? Is it both comprehensive
and privacy-safe?
Match rate—What percentage of my customer
address list can you match to a digital identity?
Breathing More Marketing Life into Each Customer Record
Validation of existing data—Can you crosscheck
your existing data with my first-party data to improve the
accuracy of my data in some way?
Addition of new data—What new data can your
append to my customer file that can significantly
enhance my targeting? Can you provide weekly or even
daily updates to my customers’ online activity, long-term
interests, and near-term purchase intent indicators?
Geographic accuracy—If I need accurate geographic
targeting due to physical business locations or state-
by-state regulatory requirements, how do you ensure
that my digital IDs can be parsed geographically once
exported for activation?
Delivering a Seamless, Personal Experience for Engagement
Portability—Can I export and use my newly created
digital audience data to any data integration platform
(e.g., Adobe, LiveRamp, Oracle)? Can I export and use
my audience data with any digital media partner (e.g.,
Facebook, Marketo, addressable TV networks, online
publishers)?
Hosting—Where will my enriched customer file be
stored and how do I know it will be secure? Can I get
instant access to it at any time to activate a segment
for a particular campaign? Will I have access to the
data via some kind of user interface so I can develop
new knowledge about my customers and experiment
with different ways to segment?
Scale—What percentage of my digitally identified
households can you actually reach with digital ads?
Key Questions to Ask When Choosing a Customer Recognition Solution
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Do you have a database of current customers or
prospects that you’d like to reach with new marketing
messages or offers? Perhaps they’ve been ignoring
your direct mail or email efforts and you want to reach
them with digital ads, or maybe you just want the
ability to deliver a seamless brand experience across all
channels and devices.
Whatever your objective, everyone is trying to figure
out who their highest-value targets are, what the most
relevant message/offer is for them, and how to most
effectively deliver the message.
Get closer to your customers, understand them better, and
segment them more effectively.
Leveraging Investmentfor StrongerBrand Reach
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A MARKETER’S GUIDE© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
Once you have a list of who you can reach digitally,
the next challenge is deciding what you say to them.
This is where data enrichment comes into play. For
example, your customer database might hold contract
end dates, enabling you to trigger renewal ads at
appropriate times. But customers can decide to make
a change at any time, so how can you discover and
respond to that intent?
Leading marketers look at their customers’ online
activity for purchase intent signals, not just on their
own websites but also across the entire Internet.
Information on specific customers’ long-term interests
(e.g., investing or home maintenance) as well as
short-term purchase intent (e.g., shopping for a new
car or cell phone plan) can be gathered across all of
their devices, dynamically appended to your customer
database, and used to target marketing. Imagine
knowing that one of your current subscribers has been
researching alternatives in the past week, and you
can now to trigger timely retention marketing efforts to
them. It’s already being done.
After using a multipronged digital identity solution and
enriching customer profiles with customer interests
and purchase intent data, it’s time to activate the list.
A client with 25 million previously unreachable households
could now deliver advertising to over 17 million
prospective customers with multichannel advertising.
And most importantly, 1:1 targeting against enriched
customer prospect lists is proving to be more effective
in driving conversions than past targeting methods.
Additional use cases:
Existing customer suppression—Include data
on existing customers to prevent reaching them
with ads aimed at new customers and avoid
wasted impressions.
Cross-device targeting—Coordinate impressions
across all consumer device touchpoints.
Efficient multicultural targeting—Identify
households of a specific ethnicity or nationality
and serve ads to the websites browsed by
each household, thereby reaching all levels of
acclimation in the household.
Real-time performance optimization—
Dynamically remove low performing placements,
redirect ad dollars to high performing placements,
and find additional placements with similar qualities,
considering variables such as website, ad position,
ad size, time of day, day of week, and pixel data.
Enrich ActivateMany companies have acquired large name and
address lists and assigned each household a
propensity to purchase or customer value score,
which is then used to determine which households to
target with different campaigns. The challenge then
becomes: how do you activate these households
through any and all of the channels that suit their
needs and not just via direct mail? The most common
solution has been to match physical addresses
to browser cookies, but since the explosion of
smartphone usage, the match rate for a cookie-only
approach averages just 40%. The better solution is
now to use a multipronged matching approach.
Match
%
%
%
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Are you one of the companies with multilayer distribution
systems and corresponding marketing challenges?
Automakers, for example, have national brands, regional
dealer associations, a variety of online shopping tools,
and individual dealerships where purchases ultimately
happen. CPG brands not only have to worry about brand
marketing, but also shopper marketing to drive brand
buyers to the retailers that carry their products and to
support retailer-specific promotions.
If you have existing customer files, you can already
activate direct mail or email marketing to these customers.
But have you considered ways to activate them at retail?
What are you doing to expand the scope of your data
beyond your known customers to achieve the scale
necessary to move the needle on store-level sales?
How can you enrich your data sets to make
them more powerful for targeted marketing?
Enriched Data Sets for Powerful Shopper Targeting
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A MARKETER’S GUIDE© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
Once you have a list of who you can reach digitally, the
next challenge is deciding what you say to them. One
of the biggest issues for shopper marketers is aligning
buyer targets with a retailer’s shoppers to send ads
only to the households located in proximity to and
with a propensity to shop at a given retailer’s stores.
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for a predictive
model to give a high propensity to shop this retailer
score to households that are geographically nowhere
near a retailer’s store.
Appending online interests and purchase intent
indicators can also help refine which customers should
receive ads and promotions for specific varieties. An
online interest in healthy eating, for example, could be
used to determine which top customers should receive
offers related to a healthier product offering.
When preparing to activate digital advertising against
a specific customer list, there are three critical factors
that shopper marketers must consider:
EFFECTIVE DELIVERY
With the right technology partner, a CPG brand
can expect to reach about 60% of its targeted
CRM households with a single digital ad campaign.
Individually addressable advertising for a top consumer
target has been proven highly effective in generating
incremental sales.
SCALE
While advertising to only top consumers is efficient, it
doesn’t typically provide scale, nor does it reach the
new and infrequent brand buyers whose participation
drive a measurable increase in store-level sales. Thus,
the ideal ad campaign for shopper marketing will reach
a broader shopper base in addition to your brand’s top
customer file.
For maximum effectiveness, supplement your customer
file with similar households around your stores.
MEASUREMENT
Another critical factor for shopper marketing is
measurement. Both the shopper marketing team and
the retailer need to see quantifiable results from each
campaign. And once you’ve spent the money building,
matching, and profiling your customers, you’ll want to
determine whether the investment was worthwhile.
The current best practice for measuring individually
addressable advertising is to match your customer
lists against those of a company, such as the retailer
itself or a receipt-scanning promotion company, that
collects household-level purchasing data. You can
then analyze the impact of advertising on purchases
by each distinct household group.
Enrich
Activate
Let’s take the example of a brand that had identified
six million households nationwide as its top customers.
After matching its top customer list against a single
source of digital identity data (cookies), it was
ultimately able to reach less than 20% of those
households with a digital ad campaign. After applying
a multipronged identity match, the same brand was
able to associate over 70% of its top customers with a
digital identity and reach over 85% of those in a digital
ad campaign.
A multipronged matching solution ultimately reached 4x more top customers with digital ads than a competing cookies-only solution.
Match
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MaxPoint is a marketing technology company that generates hyperlocal intelligence to optimize brand
and retail performance. We provide a platform for brands to connect the digital world with the physical
world through hyperlocal execution, measurement, and consumer insights.
A MARKETER’S GUIDE© 2017 MaxPoint Interactive, Inc.
