Nick Baggott's CRM and Digital Marketing Blog

Who voted for who in the UK election? A great data profiling case study

As I am sure you are aware, the Conservative Party, led by Boris Johnson, won the recent UK government election comfortably. But who voted for them and where did Labour lose out? 

Traditionally, in the UK, you would expect the Conservatives to appeal to wealthier voters and Labour to the working classes, but Brexit and the appeal of the party leaders obviously had a huge impact on who voted for who. In the Times newspaper today, there was a fascinating article profiling the voters of the main parties and I thought it demonstrates perfectly the power of data analysis. Here are some of their charts: It seems class didn't have the impact that you would expect:

But age was the key differentiator as this demonstrates:

The most astounding analysis I have seen, is what the outcome would have been if only certain ages had been allowed to vote. You can see why Labour wants to lower the age range to 16:

Just to highlight the points at the bottom of this picture (it is a screen shot from my phone, so sorry it is a bit fuzzy):

• If only 18-24s voted: Lab 600, Con 0
• If only 25-49 voted: Lab 407, Con 171
• If only 50-64 voted: Con 354, Lab 215
• If only 65+ voted: Con 575, Lab 25

Finally, did the remainers all switch to Labour and Lib Dem who were campaigning for a new referendum or to leave? Actually, not as much as those parties needed:

If you ever wondered if data could tell a story and explain a complex situation more clearly, surely this is all of the evidence you need to see the power of data analytics. 

 

CHAID, is it the most under utilised marketing technique?

CHAID, less commonly known as Chi-Squared Automatic Interaction Detector can be a wonderfully powerful tool to use to help you to understand your customers. It can predict the future and help you to understand the past. So what is it and how can it be used? 

According to Wikipedia:

Chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) is a decision tree technique, based on adjusted significance testing. The technique was developed in South Africa and was published in 1980 by Gordon V. Kass, who had completed a PhD thesis on this topic. CHAID can be used for prediction (in a similar fashion to regression analysis, as well as classification, and for detection of interaction between variables. 

In practice, CHAID is often used in the context of direct marketing to select groups of consumers and predict how their responses to some variables affect other variables, although other early applications were in the field of medical and psychiatric research.

Like other decision trees, CHAID's advantages are that its output is highly visual and easy to interpret.

So, what does that mean in practice? 

CHAID allows you to create groups of customers (segments) who have similar behaviour. It also allows you to understand which of the groups is most and least likely to do something. For example, I recently worked with a data analyst who built a model looking at the profile of openers v non-openers of a client's quarterly newsletter. The model divided the previous recipients into groups with the "best" group being 10x more likely to open newsletters than the "worst" group. That has allowed the client to decide whether to stop sending it to the worst groups or maybe create a different version for the under performing groups with a different message. The latter is what they have (correctly) chosen to do, as these non-responsive groups are still customers who have recently opted-in to receive the newsletter but for whatever reason are not typically opening them.

How did the project work?

• Firstly, we agreed which recent campaign we should analyse (we chose the newsletter because it was sent to the most people, giving us the largest sample size to analyse)
• Then, we asked the data team at the client to extract 2 files. One file was the people who had opened the newsletter and the other was non-openers (as this is a B2B client the total volume is low, so we chose to analyse all recipients in both groups.If we had more data, we could have taken a sample of responders and non-responders rather than the whole file)
• In the data file, we asked for every piece of information known about the clients who had been mailed (extracting every field on the database for every record). With CHAID you never know which data field will be the most predictive, so you ask for as much as you can get and let CHAID work out which variables are most useful
• These files were handed over to our data analyst, who ran the data through his SAS CHAID software. The output was a report with 3 key elements:

            - A profile report comparing responders to non-responders for every data variable that we had available to us (eg country, job role, gender etc)

            - A CHAID tree diagram showing each of the segments and for each group what % of them opened the email. Allowing us to see which was our worst                 and best groups

            - A Gains chart which ranked the best to worst segments, so that we could easily see how predictive the model was and how much more responsive                 the best group was compared to the worst group

• These 3 things demonstrated to us that the model was highly predictive and allowed the client to very quickly see (in a highly visual format) who their best groups were and to understand the types of people who were not opening the emails. 
• The next month, they tested a new angle for the least responsive groups. They did a simple A/B test where half got the same email as the best performing groups and half got a similar email with a different subject line. We are awaiting results of that trial now...

So, how could you use CHAID? In reality, as long as you have a previous activity to analyse, you can use it to predict anything such as:

• High v low value customers
• Loyal customers v those likely to switch to a competitor
• Good payers v bad payers
• Early v late adopters 
• Attendees v non-attendees at events.....

The potential list is endless.

If you'd like to know more, let me know (email me at [email protected]) and I can discuss how you could use this massively under utilised statistical model.

Due to client confidentiality, I cannot show you my client's CHAID diagram. But, just so that you can get an idea of what the output looks like, here are a couple of example pictures I found online:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212571X1600007X

 

And this is what a gains chart might look like (again, one I found online):

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gain-plot-of-the-CHAID-and-CHAID-SPT-models_fig2_260062366

 

      

My 10 Top tips for Data Driven Marketing

Data driven marketing is still the key to marketing success. That is not just my view, a recent survey conducted by econsultancy revealed that better use of data, segmentation and targeting has become even more crucial, as they ranked it as the marketing related area that has jumped highest up their priority list for 2019. In second place, it is customer intelligence and having a full customer view, which is entirely reliant on having good quality data and superior analytics skills and tools. In 4th place, we have measuring ROI, which again is dependent upon good quality data.

In my opinion, from a data point of view, here is a checklist of the top 10 priorities for Data Driven Marketing:

• Make sure you have good quality, recently cleaned, GDPR compliant data
• Have effective data capture in all touch points
• Capture behavioural data, as a priority, as well as the overt data that is captured in forms (capture what they click on, download, open etc)
• Create automated direct marketing, that contacts the customer with relevant content, as their behaviour changes
• Build segmentation models that are simple to execute, using data that you can collect easily 
• Test and learn constantly, be agile and adapt as results come in
• Measure engagement as well as sales funnel and ROI
• Map out customer journeys from cold prospect to engaged customer, and plan out what data will be captured and how the experience will be personalised at each stage
• Don't forget to nurture cold leads who don't have an immediate interest in buying right now
• Dont just count how many people respond, profile responders versus non-responders and use analytics techniques like CHAID to build predictive models based on your results

 

Top Tips on Account Based Marketing

I have recently updated a course for a client which covers Account Based Marketing (ABM). So, I thought I would share some of the tips and references used in that training course. 

I thought that was a great quote. ABM is all about influencing the key decision makers at your target customer accounts. So why do it? Here is some stats from act-on's blog:

• Almost 85% of B2B marketers who measure ROI describe account-based marketing as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach, with half of those marketers citing significantly higher returns.
• Sales and marketing teams that do account-based marketing align better than other organisations.
• According to Bizible, “marketers doing ABM are about 40% more likely to report alignment with their sales team compared to marketers not doing ABM”

Here are their 5 top ABM tips, with my comments for each one...

1.Align sales and marketing strategy - make sure that sales and marketing plan and execute it together, not in silos

2.Have the right data quality - make sure your CRM system is regularly updated with all contacts and actions

3.Target and personalise - learn about each target contact and send them information that adds value to them and solves their problems

4.Have the right tech (CRM & automation) - I am personally a big fan of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as it is easy for everyone to use

5.Test, learn, measure and optimise - This is true of all marketing!

And here are some tips from me. I managed a team of 30+ Account Managers as Client Service Director of Chemistry Communications Group PLC

• Start conversations - I often blog about customers when I first meet them and then email them to ask for their opinion on my article about them, saying that I will correct any inaccuracies. It is a sure fire way to start a dialogue with them.

• Add value - send them content they might find interesting, take them to trade events like industry conferences and spend quality time discussing what each speaker says and how it affects them. 

• Ask their advice - become a trusted partner, by asking them for help. I used to use this often. If I was stuck with a strategic problem for one client, I would call up another client from a different industry and ask for their input. They love being asked and being treated as experts, it is intellectually stimulating for them and it means when they have a problem, they will be more inclined to call you!

• Develop account development business plans - get every account manager to draw up a plan for every client containing their objectives for the relationship (eg grow, cross sell, retain etc), stakeholder mapping, relationship building activities planned, how they will involve more people on the account to spread the connections between your organisations proposition, how they will measure success and targets.
• Segment accounts based on profitability, growth potential and the strength of your relationship and target each customer with relevant content.

Hope that helps you. Do you have any tips on account based marketing? If you do, please share them in the comments

Lack of testing and personalisation is common in email marketing

Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights has published a report on email marketing. The results were quite shocking to me, as I have been championing the need to personalise and test email marketing for years. That is email marketing's greatest asset and it seems that the message has not got through. Firstly, this graph shows how many marketers are simply pushing out the same emails to all customers and prospects:

And this data shows that marketers are simply not testing and learning:

If you do nothing else in email marketing, do some simple segmentation e.g. customers v prospects, or male v female, or event attendees v non-event attendees and test to see whether this works best than pushing the same message to all. Divide your audience into 3 groups:

• Test group 1 (e.g. event attendees)
• Test group 2 (e.g. non-event attendees)
• Control group (a mixture of attendees and non-attendees)

Send the generic non-personalised email to the control group and compare open rates and click through rates to the personalised messages that you send to the 2 test groups. It really is that simple!

 

Why Content Marketing and SEO are one and the same

Joe Pulizzi, in his book, "Get Content Get Customers", describes content marketing as: 

“How a brand creates, delivers and governs original or curated content to attract and retain customers, positioning the brand as a credible expert and, ultimately motivating a change in behaviour”.

Effectively, he is saying, develop content that your customers and potential customers can find when they are ready to buy, or are looking for information. That content can be original information or curated incorporating content for others. You may notice that my blog is a mixture of original and curated content (as is this particular post). But, in order to be found, your content needs to be optimised for search, and easy to share in social media (note the long list of social media links at the end of this post). So, search is crucial for content marketing, and of course, content is crucial for search.

Think of the things that Google likes, that will get your site higher up the rankings - external links, keyword usage and the like. These are often driven by content. Basically, write interesting, thought provoking content and others will link to it. Use the words and phrases that your customers will search for in your content and again, Google will look favourably on your page. Some recent research from BrightEdge shows how content and search are becoming one and the same in the minds of marketers.

That is pretty clear! In the article, Jim Yu from BrightEdge also says that 51% of all web traffic is driven by SEO. So, you better be focused on it.

This article on SearchEngineWatch has some great tips from Jim Yu on how to incorporate search engine and content marketing strategies. Here are his top tips, but for more info please read his excellent article:

1) Know your audience (research their behaviours, analyse customer journeys)

2) Have a purpose (mine is to help marketers understand how to develop and execute more effective digital marketing and CRM programmes)

3) Create and optimise your content (mapping content to your audience personas, using keywords that they use, choose relevant topics and optimise for mobile)

4) Combine quality and quantity (I advise my clients to write often, but only speak when you have something useful to say)

5) Measure results and iterate (test and learn constantly).

Don't forget, if you are not sure whether a topic or service is of interest to your customers, you may be able to test interest in it first using paid search ads. I often advise clients to first do some quick, low cost PPC ads on Google to see whether this content is of interest and if it is, then go ahead and develop the detailed content and SEO strategy to the market. You could just do a paid Google ad, leading to a page saying "Content coming soon, leave your details if you want us to keep you informed". This has worked well with clients that I have worked for who are considering embarking on a new product development plan.

Don't forget, content is king, but promotion is queen! So, if you are building a content strategy, the most important promotional tools you have are SEO and influencing the influencers (see my separate blog about that). This post is designed to help you to maximise the effectiveness of a combined SEO and content strategy. 

 

 

Shortlisted for CRM Writers' Awards

This blog has been short listed in the Discover CRM, CRM Writers' Awards under the best independent blogger section. If you enjoy what I write, please vote for me (thank you)

http://discovercrm.com/crm-writers-awards-2017.html

 

How to humanise your brand through content marketing

Last night, I did a one hour webinar for CIM's Practical insights series. I talked about why content marketing is so important and gave some tips on developing engaging content marketing programmes. 

I thought it would be useful, to summarise some of the key points here. So, here are my top tips for content marketing:

1) Content marketing can be curated or created. You don't have to produce all of the content yourselves - it is OK to share content from industry experts, influencers or your customers.

2) Focus on pull, not push. Most consumers will research before they buy and are typically 70% of the way through their buying journey before they speak to a possible vendor. So, make sure your content can be found in Google and social media.

3) Focus on earned, rather than paid media. Your campaign may need some paid media to boost awareness initially, but consider how and why your readers would share your content with their peers.

4) The best creative ideas tell stories. How do you humanise your proposition by telling engaging stories to bring your message to life. In B2B that could be case studies, in B2C it could be about the customer experience

5) You need to set objectives and measure customer engagement as well as revenue and sales. I use the 4 step model of Acquire, Participate, Engage and Share to measure engagement. Focus on acquiring their attention, then getting them to respond to your owned media (participate), where you get their permission to continue to engage through social media, mobile apps, blogs, events or email. Finally, consider how you will get engaged consumers to share your content with their peers, which should start the acquisition cycle again

6) How will you influence the influencers. Your content will reach a much wider audience if you can get celebrities, industry experts, bloggers or consumers sharing your content. What is in it for them? Why do people share? Normally, they do it to make themselves look good (smart, funny, caring, expert etc)

7) Treat different customers differently. Segment your customers using their behaviours and develop engaging propositions based on customer insights for each group. Behaviours are typically much more predictive and definitive than demographics (or business demographics)

8) Develop a content calendar, leaving space for evergreen, topical and event related content. Evergreen content will be searched for today and into the longer term. Topical content gets you noticed and gets your content shared. Event related content allows you to promote your launches, events and at key times of the year such as Christmas, Father's Day, Back to School or the key industry conference.

9) Make sure you use social listening tools to search and then reply to customer comments about your content. There are free tools like www.socialmention.com and more expensive tools like Sysomos and Radian6, that provide a more comprehensive service.

10) Treat different comments differently. Do you have a process for dealing with comments from simple positive comments to a lone complainer to a social media crisis? Make sure you are not making up your process when you are in a crisis!

I hope you found these tips useful. I'd be interested in your tips too, if you'd like to share them. Or if you are interested in learning more about Content marketing or need some consulting services, you can talk to me directly or book a course through CIM.

Web 3.0 is coming. Personalisation is Marketers key focus in 2016

The excellent eConsultancy / Adobe Digital Trends for 2016 report is out. 

The key chart for me is this one. It shows how the marketers surveyed from B2B and B2C around the world, said that their most important priority for 2016 is personalisation. The personalised web or semantic web is already here for many brands (Google, Facebook, Amazon etc) and it looks like this has become a key priority for the majority of marketers going forward. Expect to see more behavioural segmentation, covert data capture and implementation of CRM tools as a result:

7 Tips for Improving the Digital Customer Experience

I have been thinking about how brands can improve their digital customer experience. What are the top tips that any marketer needs to consider, to ensure that their customers engage and share their good experiences. Here are 7 tips from me:

1. Mobile is crucial:
   • 50% of google searches are on mobile. Before you do anything else, make sure you have a responsive mobile optimised web site. Google SEO rankings penalise brands who don’t have mobile optimised responsive deign sites
   • SoLoMo – Don't neglect the importance of considering social media, local content and mobile as a combined experience
2. Treat different customers differently:
   • Segmentation is key and behaviours are typically more predictive than demographics
   • So, all owned media must be set up to capture customer behaviours (clicks, downloads, comments) as well as to data capture forms
   • Then personalise your content based on their previous behaviours. You don’t need to ask lots of customer preference questions, as you will personalise based on what they do, not what they say they will do. Remember, observed data is often more reliable than claimed data
3. Design your customer experience based on Persuasion Pathways: (Thanks for the terminology David Coe)
• Where will you find potential customers?
• How will they find your content?
• Where do we want to send them?
• What do we want them to see / watch / sign up for?
• What is our desired customer behaviour as a result / CTA?
• How will they move through your site in as few clicks as possible, to get the information that they need, in a way that allows you to capture what they need based on their clicks?
• Don’t design web sites assuming everyone comes into the home page first, they won’t
4. Pull rather than Push comms

• Target consumers when they are ready to buy, learn or find out more
• Develop content that they will find when they are looking for a solution 
• Customers are typically more than 50% of the way through the buying process before they contact a vendor, so make sure they find your content by focusing your content on useful / helpful information that will help them to decide.
• Think about what they search for at this time and optimise your content for SEO for these words
• Think about who influences them and how you can get those people to distribute your thought leadership content

5. Insight is crucial to driving content strategy

• What is your customer objective?
• What are the emotional and rational barriers that are stopping them from doing what you want them to do?
• How do you overcome those barriers?
• What content do you need to convince them? Where will they discover it? How will they share it?
• Develop a content calendar with topical news and evergreen content, based on these insights
• Develop segment or customer specific propositions (a customer not product plan)

6. Focus on developing engaging content that customers will share:

• Make it easy to share with “tweet this” type buttons
• Why will they share it? What will it do for them?
• Who are the key influencers? Influencing these people is more effective than trying to get each individual customer to share (think of Disney Moms programme or Nando’s Black card or Ice bucket challenge)
• Consider who is the best person at your company to create the content. The subject matter expert is often more authoritative than the comms manager

7. Customer experience in B2B is about providing the right tools to the account manager

• Capture customer behaviours and use CRM tools (like Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce.com) to inform account managers about changes in their customers’ behaviours and needs
• Automate the process and develop business rules for comms frequency and ownership
• Make the customer feel that it is their account manager who understands them and is communicating with them, rather than a piece of software doing it

Hope that helps. What do you think? Any other good tips that you can share?