FAQ

There are 3 key questions to ask yourself before selecting data for a campaign:

1. Who are my customers?
   • If you are launching a new product or service, this question will be very hard to answer, so we may need to assist you in building a testing methodology to uncover this in a live environment
   • There are likely to be some selections we can make straight off, to avoid wastage.  For example, a solar company will want to exclude people that live in a ground floor apartment / don’t own their home…
   • If you have an existing list of customers, but are lacking the detail to analyse what separates them from the rest of the population, a profiling exercise may be a good place to start
2. Why do they buy from me?
   • Is there a reason that your customers choose you over your competitors?  This may be based on your location, price point, customer service, exclusivity of product range or something else
   • By answering this question, you may uncover a way to select more people to target with a high propensity to choose you for the same reasons
3. Are all of my current customers equal?
   • Before simply targeting more people that look like your customers, ask yourself whether some of your customers are more profitable than others
   • By reviewing the profitability of your customer base, you may find that some customers spend more money than average / take less time to service / buy more often
   • A great campaign will target the right type of customer, to assist you in growing your bottom line without stretching your resources

Not all business customers and prospects are equal.

Understanding the makeup of your customer base will assist you in building a strategy for segmentation.

A successful segmentation might enable you to pinpoint:

1. Your most and least profitable customers
2. Prime targets for cross-sell / up-sell campaigns
3. Prospects with a high propensity to buy from you
4. Prospects with a low propensity to buy from you
5. Your best source of new customers
6. When to target market segments

B2B marketing lists can be selected according to a range of variables, including:

1. Industry
2. Business size
3. Location
4. Contact type

Some solutions also enable you to target companies based on trigger events.

You could also enhance your business data with segmentation variables, to enable you to target customers with relevant offers and messaging.

Cold calling carries a range of challenges for a telemarketer:

1. A significant percentage of the people you target with a cold-call campaign are unlikely to be in market for your product / service
2. Unless you have a very strong brand, they might not know who you are, so they are often less likely to trust you
3. It is often a natural reaction to say “no” to a cold caller, without really listening to the offer, as the contact has not been solicited

Performance-based warm leads often provide greater ROI than cold-calling, as they remove many of the barriers of a cold-calling campaign:

1. The consumer has opted in to hearing from you, so you know they are in market for your product / service
2. They have acknowledged your brand through their response, meaning that they will have a greater brand-recall when you contact them
3. It is much less easy for a consumer to say no to a business that they have requested to call them

The combination of these benefits sets up a campaign for improved efficiency and a reduced cost of sale.

It’s not a bad thing to admit that you don’t know what you don’t know.

Building a solid strategy for success often involves:

1. Evaluating who your customers are
2. Running an analysis of the profitable aspects of previous marketing campaigns
3. Setting up a range of low-risk marketing campaigns, that are geared to learn and improve over time
4. Considering new marketing options

The scale and timings of your activity will be dependent upon your budget and capacity to service the activity that the campaigns generate.

Building a marketing plan is not always easy, so looking to external parties is not always a bad place to start.

However, it is important to consider the difference between a sales consultant that is pushing product and an independent marketing adviser, when researching a solution.

There are many ways to learn more about your customers:

1. Depending upon how often they transact with you, you may find that an analysis of recency, frequency and monetary value of spend is a good place to start
2. Building an understanding of the profitability of each customer will enable you to rank them, so that you can ensure you invest more resources in supporting profitable customers and finding more like them
3. You may find that enhancing your data with variables that you don’t hold will unlock the ability to segment your data in a meaningful way
4. Customer profiling is a good option when you are unsure of how your customers differ from the rest of the market, so that you no longer look at your customer base in a vacuum:
   • Consumer profiling will enable learnings around age, affluence, gender, location and other consumer variables
   • Business profiling will enable learnings around industry, business size and location

Database segmentation enables a range of opportunities to manage your customers better.  Uses include:

1. Splitting a database to enable meaningful communications to people at different customer life-stages
2. Establishing opportunities and threats in terms of:
   • Up-sell
   • Cross-sell
   • Retention
3. Gaining a greater understanding of your customer base

Depending on the types of information you collect and maintain, you may not be able to segment your database in a meaningful way without enhancing it with external segmentation variables.