Customer understanding and retention marketing

Customer segmentation can help classify your customer base into recognisable cohorts or personas. This ensures that your marketing initiatives can be tailored so that you communicate in relevant ways, increasing the effectiveness of your interaction with existing customers.

Enriching your understanding of your customer base is invaluable. Adding more data signals helps to enhance your perception of your customers across a range of demographic, socio-economic and behavioural characteristics. This detailed level of insight is not always available through organically collected data. Using a combination of standalone signals such as disposable income, age or household composition from a trusted data partner can provide much-needed customer perspective.

Adding multiple research data sources, such as TGI and YouGov, can also provide insight into market behaviour and competitor profiles. This allows you to understand changes in the market by their key demographic audiences and to recognise sector-specific behaviours. This type of insight is particularly useful for brands who are customer data light or looking to launch new propositions. Talking to a data partner like Experian can help you find out how to link research data to your insights.

Many brands choose to invest in bespoke market segmentation developments based on attitudinal research data because out-of-the-box solutions don’t go deep enough. But having invested in these segment solutions, many organisations struggle to activate them within business scenarios. Reaching out to companies with expertise in this area can help you get the most out of actionable segmentation.

A key component of your strategy should be predicting how prospects and customers are likely to behave in the future. To achieve this, you need to rely on robust analytics and expertise that can give you a broad, long-range socio-economic forecast. Trust a data and analytics partner that can provide this economic view and find out how bespoke predictive modelling can help your business.

Having a consistent approach to understanding customers and populations allows organisations to perform high-level planning using a common language. Location and customer analysts, like those at Experian, can work with organisations to leverage both internal and external data assets to support this challenge.

Retention activity needs to focus on channels where existing customers are most engaged. Direct mail, partially addressed mail and door drops are critical channels and can provide exceptional ROI in cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Digital channels are also an excellent and cost-effective way to re-engaged lapsed customers. The right audience insight and expert channel guidance can help you navigate these complexities.

Data profiling and execution tools let you identify and engage your target audience and execute your campaign across a wide array of marketing channels. Building an audience once and executing against it across multiple channels allows you to seamlessly run omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Working with like-minded organisations to collaborate on marketing activity can have benefits for all parties. Where audience crossover and brand synergies exist, companies can work together on co-branded activity. This can be a very powerful strategy for customer reactivation and acquisition of prospects that have an affinity with a partner brand. Experian has several solutions that can help facilitate co-branded campaigns.

If you have little customer data or are entering a new market, it can be difficult to understand which areas or audiences are the best fit for your product or offer. Using market research and trends linked to competitors profiled with data from a partner like Experian can help you identify your target market.

Prioritise your resources based on lead scoring to ensure the most profitable customers are served first. When a customer or prospect interacts with your brand, adding in-the-moment data helps signpost the right offer.

Predictive modelling can highlight opportunities for cross-selling. By recognising how your customers have responded in the past to individual products or offers, you can identify how receptive they’re likely to be to new offers in the future. A solution like Experian’s Predictive Modelling can make this a simple task.