Archive for Data Marketing
Reach grieving New England fans with our new ‘Grieving Fan select’
We know it was a rough night for New England. Our heart goes out to all of the die hard fans and we know it must be a rough Monday morning. Tom Brady’s beloved Uggs aren’t enough to comfort this horrible loss. Even his stunning wife can’t help heal this wound.
V12 Group has developed a new select for ‘Grieving New England Fans.’ This data select makes it easy for marketers to target and reach any fan who is upset, distraught, and devastated due to the Super Bowl 2012 loss.
Just kidding! (Aren’t New York fans harsh?)
However, V12 Group does offer football and sports related email, postal and phone data to help reach and target the right fanatic. For more information regarding our data and our selects, contact us at 1.866.842.1001 or CLICK HERE to learn more.
In honor of the super bowl MVP (Eli Manning, #10), we are offering 10% off any data purchase this week only.
(New client orders only, on orders up to $50,000). Simply mention this email to your sales rep to receive your discount.
Data Rich Marketing, Now More Than Ever
The first few lines of this wonderful video by X-Plane make the case for working with the very best data in your marketing.
“It’s easier than ever to reach a large audience, but harder than ever to really connect with it.”
With all the different media options out there, all the competition for your target audiences’ eyeballs; how is a marketer to have meaningful 1-to-1 conversation with prospects? The old Volkswagen ad come to mind – “Think Small.”
The ability to “get micro” with robust data is what makes rapid digital engagements meaningful amid all the marketing clutter.
The V12 Group can help you make sense of it all and make your data more actionable. One way is by using our data services to understand “cluster behavior” within your list. In this, we look for common characteristics in smaller segments of your customer files and/or past purchases. Through customer profiling, specific behaviors can be isolated and then used to guide new marketing initiatives which might reward ongoing positive responses or correct customer fall-off. This power to zero in on a specific segment with precisely tailored messaging is a real advantage for your marketing efforts.
Another way to “get micro” in your data marketing is to acknowledge that your prospects have a preferred method of communicating and that you don’t know which of the many options it is. This demands a multi-channel marketing approach. The V12 Group offers Data Enhancement Services which will help you better understand which channel each prospect wants to use to continue a relationship with you, then adjust your communications accordingly at each stage of the sales cycle.
Data appending your customer files against our robust data can add email, direct mail, and mobile or landline phone data to your existing list wherever its missing or out of date. We can also add even more critical information to your customer file using any combination of our 260+ data fields. These include geographic, demographic, lifestyle, interest and behavioral information. This will allow you to better define your audience and provide you with a targeted approach to increase cross-selling/up-selling opportunities and drive customer retention.
If you’re ready to ride the wave of data marketing through all this media and have meaningful 1-to-1 conversations with your target audience, contact The V12 Group.
Data Marketing, The Future of Digital Marketing is Right around the Corner
You might have heard the terms “context aware computing” or “context aware advertising” being bandied about more and more lately. In its most basic form, context aware advertising is serving up on-line banner ads on a web site in sections where the ad is relevant to the site content. For example: serving ads for power tools in the do-it-yourself section of a home improvement magazine’s web site, or for ads for women’s lingerie in the lingerie section of a fashion magazine’s web site. “Context aware” advertising greatly relies on dependable, comprehensive marketing data.
But with today’s sophisticated CRM, mobile, web, and database technologies and functionality context aware advertising can go a lot further. Here’s how it works. With a comprehensive customer profile, when a consumer lands on a web site you know what time of day and day of the week it is, and you can tell whether they are on a mobile device or at a fixed location, and if they are on a mobile device with GPS you can tell where they are. With that information in hand and information on that consumer in a CRM database, you can make assumptions about where they are and what they are doing, and you can then tailor the content you deliver based on that context. Data marketing is in full effect here.
Data marketing knowledge enhanced by cloud computing and SaaS
So for example, if you’re a big box retailer and on a weekday somebody, who your database tells you is an executive who bought a flat screen TV from you a month ago, hits your site looking at surround sound systems from his or her smartphone at lunchtime from a location that is not their home, you can probably assume that something piqued their interest and they’re doing some quick research while they’re out for lunch. Or, if that same person hits your site using an iPad from their home address at 8:30 in the evening you can assume that they’re probably sitting in front of the TV, fantasizing on how much better it would sound with a surround sound system, and taking a deeper dive into surround sound systems, and more likely to buy at this time than someone hitting the site from a smartphone at lunch.
Right now, this level of functionality is probably only affordable for large enterprise, but now that cloud computing has enabled software companies to scale down their enterprise products and provide them to mid-sized and small businesses on a software as a service (SaaS) basis, it’s not unreasonable to think that mid-market companies will be able to take advantage of advance context aware technology in the near future.
On the online media side of the business, publishers and other online advertising providers will be able to offer advertisers more granular context sensitive advertising. Whether you’re a large enterprise or a mid-sized business the more robust your database the more you’ll be able to take advantage of context aware advertising.
At v12 Group we provide a full range of marketing data services for B2C marketing managers including data cleansing and data appending. At V12, our multi-channel Consumer Database is one of the largest in the direct marketing industry. The database is a hybrid file built from compiled and proprietary data sources and combines postal, email, phone, and mobile data, as well as 260+ selectors to improve targeting including demographic, geographic, lifestyle, interests, and behavioral data.
Contact the V12 Group to learn more about how our suite of data appending, direct and digital marketing services can help you increase the relevance and effectiveness of your marketing programs, enhance your customer experience and improve your return on marketing investment (ROMI).
Data Marketing for Business to Business Programs
In B2B e-mail marketing, in fact in any form of B2B marketing communication, relevance is the key to success. Relevance refers to both mapping your messaging to the prospect or customer’s pain points and locating where the prospect or customer is in the sales funnel and customer life cycle.
The key to achieving relevance, and the foundation of any successful data marketing strategy, is a robust, up-to-date marketing database that provides a comprehensive set of customer insights. Obviously, many B2B marketers know this but they find that they are constrained by outdated methods of tracking prospect and customer data, or multiple internal databases, a corporate culture that does not look at the database as an asset, and a lack of internal buy-in to migrate to current CRM, data marketing technology, and best practices.
Updated data marketing resources for effective B2B marketing
Breaking through these barriers doesn’t have to be a gargantuan task. Start by doing an audit of your current data marketing resources and consolidating all of your data marketing resources into one database. Next, map out an end state data structure that would provide you with the range of customer insights that you need to accurately pinpoint the prospect’s pain points and location in the sales funnel (buying cycle) and/or product or service life cycle. A gap analysis between your current state and the end state will give you a list of the data fields that you need to add which you can then prioritize and work with a marketing data services provider to append to your existing database.
But the sources for data appending are not limited to external vendors. Depending on what business you’re in, whether or not you have a CRM system, and whether or not all of your customer and prospect data is integrated into your CRM system, you might be able to start at home. In a lot of companies, marketing, sales, and customer service are still working off of separate databases. So you might find valuable data in places like: sales transaction data, customer service records, warranty registrations, RMA’s etc., which you can append to your marketing list.
Once you’ve appended all of the relevant data from your internal data resources, you can do another gap analysis and it to drive an RFP for marketing data services providers. At v12 Group we provide a full range of data marketing services for B2B marketing managers. Our multi-channel business database combines postal, email, and phone data, as well as more than 15+ selectors to improve targeting. This includes firmagraphic and contact level demographic data. The database has been DPV confirmed to have 99% deliverable addresses.
Contact the V12 Group to learn more about how our suite of data appending, direct, and digital marketing services can help you increase the relevance and effectiveness of your marketing programs and improve your return on marketing investment (ROMI).
Data Marketing in the Cloud
Even if you’re not in the information technology or business, you’re probably hearing the terms, “cloud computing” or “in the cloud” bandied about more and more these days. That’s because it’s the latest rage in enterprise computing and it’s beginning to get widespread adoption. And if you’re at all involved in data marketing, your head will soon be in the cloud.
Cloud Computing enables end users to buy both computing horsepower and/or software functionality on a pay-per-use basis –very much like the way you buy electricity. When you plug something into the AC socket in the wall you pay for the amount of electricity that you need for the amount of time that you need it. You don’t have to know anything about the power grid that supplies the electricity, like where the generators are located and how to operate them. And even more important, you don’t have to pay for their purchase, operation and maintenance.
Cloud computing does not require you to have any knowledge or bear any expense of the physical location, configuration, operations and maintenance of the systems that deliver the services.
Cloud Computing for Data Driven Marketers
OK, so you’re probably thinking, “What does this have to do with me? I’m in marketing.” The significance of cloud computing for data marketing is that it enables software as a service (SaaS). So, while virtualized servers in the cloud may not have any appeal to you, being able to access powerful CRM and analytics software on a pay-per-use-basis – which previously required large investments both the software and hardware to run it on – may be very attractive.
A good example of Software as a Service is Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com
an extremely powerful, feature rich CRM tool, with functionality comparable to big expensive systems from the likes of Siebel, Oracle and Microsoft, that you pay a rather modest price per user per year. It runs “in the cloud,” i.e. in one of their data centers. You access it through your browser. You don’t need a data center. You don’t have to worry about updates and maintenance. You don’t even need an IT department if you’re a small company.
As the move to cloud computing builds momentum, we think marketers are going to see more and more of the CRM, analytics and business intelligence software packages from the major ISV’s become available on a pay-per-use or pay-per-seat basis. Small and mid-sized businesses will be able afford software that was previously beyond their reach, and large companies will be able convert what was previously a fixed capital expense (capex) to a variable operational expense (opex). Whether you’re part of a small or large company, you’ll be able to use software tools that previously may have been cost prohibitive, to improve your audience segmentation, response rates and market penetration at a price that won’t break your budget.
Consumers in the Cloud Meet Data Marketing in the Cloud
We think cloud computing will also provide some interesting opportunities for on-line advertisers. Cloud computing and Software as a Service is starting to penetrate the consumer markets as well. Amazon.com, well known to consumers as an on-line retailer, recently announced a suite of storage-in-the-cloud services called “Cloud Drive” where you can store music, movies, videos, etc. in Amazon’s cloud, and play them back from any web browser or Android smart phone. We think that there’s a good possibility that, as companies like Amazon.com seek to monetize digital services in the cloud for consumers, they’re going to have to drive the price points well below what business will pay for similar functionality in order to sign up subscribers. One way that they can do that is by selling on-line advertising imbedded in the interface to the services. So, for example, a music company in the cloud storage service could serve subscribers banner ads for things like concert tickets or new albums based on the artists the user has in his or her library on the service.
V12 Group, Watching the Cloud
By now, you’ve probably guessed that consumer cloud services will probably also be a source of valuable consumer data that can be used to enhance customer marketing segmentation. At v12 Group our multi-channel consumer database is one of the largest in the direct marketing industry with over 208 million individuals and 110 million US households. The database is a hybrid file built from compiled and proprietary data sources, and we are always on the lookout for new data sources. Today, it combines postal, email, phone and mobile data, as well as 260+ selection parameters to improve targeting. These selection parameters include demographic, geographic, lifestyle, interests, and behavioral data.
Tomorrow, as new data sources become available in and from the cloud we will add them to the file. You can always be sure that the depth and breadth of our consumer data file will enable the highest levels of granular audience segmentation in the industry in order to help you to improve your response rates. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you to improve your audience segmentation and data driven direct marketing campaigns.