How to build a data driven marketing strategy

Why a data driven marketing strategy is crucial for your business.

To improve your marketing results, you need to be aligned with your audience.

Your audience now expect it.  

Sending the same message to the same people has limited effectiveness. Over time your email marketing messages will ‘lists’ fade over time.

The good news is a data driven approach to marketing will get you more engaged with your customers. 

Sending targeted relevant marketing that will increase your results overnight. See this chart!

The even better news is, if you are selling online, you will already have all the data you get started.

Data Driven Marketing will help you to be agile in your approach, but you need to set a data foundations in place to get things started.

A plan to help you understand your data – and therefore your customers – to get things started.

Getting started with a data driven marketing plan

Firstly, the good news, if you are selling things to customers, you already have all the data you need to get started.  

After all – No Customers = No Sales.

Data Driven Marketing is a customer focused approach.  We are looking to build marketing around the behaviour of the customer, AND the value of the customer to the business.

Getting this right results in a win-win.

The customer receives relevant, engaging marketing material based around their behaviour with your business.

Your strategy is driven by the value of the customer – so you are strategically targeting your marketing activity to the benefit of the business.

This is not a one size fits all approach.

The main drivers for a data driven marketing plan are understanding two key metrics for each individual customer.

Customer lifetime value

That is the total spend of each customer with your business.

Time since the last purchase

How long since the last purchase from that customer.

Recency, Frequency, Spend Reporting

Recency, Frequency, Spend reporting can help you to understand the overall position of customer value within your business (and your customer data).  

It’s important stuff, that’s why it’s the first thing you see when you sign into your Websand account.

The main change in your marketing metrics is that with a data driven marketing approach – these measurements are the foundation of your performance, and are therefore key to improving your marketing.

Email marketing is a core channel of a data driven marketing approach, and of course, opens and clicks are still important – they are however secondary measurements compared to customer value.

Building your data driven marketing strategy

Breaking down your audience based on time since last purchase and customer value helps to develop focused strategies.  

This is especially important in high frequency businesses and especially e-commerce. Where sales are online, and marketing rather than ‘customer value’.

The model below is driven by customer lifetime value, and separates your audience based on the amount of money they’ve spent with your business. As they say is all the good detective shows – follow the money!

For those with above average customer lifetime value, AND have purchased recently – then this group of customers could be regarded as VIP’s (these represent the current ideal customer), and you can build a marketing strategy based around rewarding their value to your business.

For those with above average customer lifetime value, AND have NOT purchased recently – this group of customers should be targeted for re-engagement.  They have demonstrated value in the past, so you need to understand why they have stopped buying and get them back to VIP status.

For those with below average customer lifetime value, AND have purchased recently – then this group of customers could be regarded as VIP’s (these represent the current ideal customer).

For those with below average customer lifetime value, AND have NOT purchased recently – this group of customers are unengaged.  You could target them for re-engagement – but do this based on the the.  They have demonstrated value in the past, so you need to understand why they have stopped buying and get them back to VIP status.

Once you have identified your ‘four’ value based customer audiences, your marketing can be build around targeting each group with the objective of moving a customer from one customer segment such as ‘lapsed customer’ to another segment such as VIP

Some other considerations to note when setting your data driven marketing strategy

Setting the ‘Recent’ purchase level will depend on what you offer as a business. As a default, we set a recent purchase as within the last 12 months.

However, it depends on the products and services you are selling. Looking at the behaviour of your most regular customers will help you to set the benchmark.

Understanding the profile of your VIP customers can help you to be more effective when targeting the acquisition of ‘New customers’.

This model is fluid.  

The value generated by your customers, and the time since their last spend, will change all the time.  

If you are using Websand, this data is managed for you.

The segmentation of your audience will be managed on the dashboard. It’s updated on a daily basis, saving you a load of time and giving you one less thing to worry about.

With the data side of your data driven strategy managed, that leaves you time to create the perfect plan and content to drive deeper engagement and growth from your existing customers

Get started, and grow…

Websand is built for data driven marketing, and will put your data driven marketing plan in play.  

If you need some help creating a data driven marketing strategy for your business, we can help with that too.  Sign up for a free 14 day trial and take control of your data.