Recession Marketing: Best-In-Class Strategies
Reeling from the fallout from the worst financial crisis in recent history, chief marketing officers and other senior marketing practitioners are under more pressure than ever to minimize marketing waste and maximize in Return on Investment. How can Allant help you continue to attract, retain and increase the value of profitable customers even as these same customers become increasingly reluctant to spend money? Read below to learn about our best-in-class strategies and example results achieved by our customers!
Improve Customer Acquisition
Allant offers award winning prospect marketing database solutions that have proven to reduce costs and increase response rates and speed to market simultaneously.
Because Allant is data independent, we are able to multi-source and optimize the purchase and use of competing prospect data sources to achieve maximum coverage at an optimal price point. This approach is unlike other service providers who primarily sell their own data products. Our analytic expertise, data independence and history of helping clients successfully launch or re-launch acquisition programs through a proven test and learn approach provides you with increased value.
Allant can perform an assessment of your acquisition marketing and provide back to you a potential impact analysis on how we can reduce costs and increase revenue within specific time frames. We can also assess how all direct and non-direct media allocations are spread against your target market and outline recommendations for spend re-allocation or reductions without impacting performance.
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Improve Customer Retention / Loyalty
As acquisition challenges continue to become more difficult and costly in the face of an increasingly cluttered, fragmented and economically sensitive world, optimizing retention performance through analytical insight into your best customers’ attitudes and behaviors is critical.
Improving customer retention requires commitment to a broad set of database marketing practices that are designed to achieve one primary objective: a high impact communication strategy that optimizes returns at the customer segment level year after year. And to achieve this objective, businesses must develop deep, robust customer insights based on attitudes, behaviors and demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle characteristics that are continually evaluated, mined and enhanced to increase predictive power.
Allant has pioneered market leading approaches for developing rich customer insights and applying them effectively with high impact communication strategies that optimize returns. An effective communication strategy, which must span new, existing and previous customers (acquisition, growth, retention and winback), needs to incorporate the following five elements:
The Aberdeen Group found in its recent survey of over 250 diverse businesses that “61% of survey respondents report that precision marketing effectiveness (defined as sending the right message to the right person through the right channel at the right time) has a higher priority now than before the recession.”
Growth and retention efforts require more than a customer database. To realize the significant financial payoff that comes from systematically optimizing the value of your customer portfolio, an intelligent and comprehensive approach to supporting the full range of activities that make growth and retention a reality is required. Allant can help you assess the current state of capabilities and programs you have in place as well as provide a range of services and solutions that can complement existing investments and dramatically improve results.
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Increase Customer Profitability
For most businesses, 1% to 5% of customers account for up to 40% of revenue or more. Yet very few companies even know who their top customers are, let alone treat them differently. Therefore, increasing customer insight to understand customer’s characteristics, behaviors and attitudes is critical to driving communication strategies for “customers that count.”
 Understanding customer profitability is not a simple exercise because it requires the calculation of lifetime value to truly understand the profit potential of a customer over time in addition to a long term customer level investment strategy designed to produce the highest yield.
Allant’s approach is to first develop a robust customer segmentation architecture that segments customers into groups that have similar value, characteristics, product affinity, behavior and/or needs. Allant then assesses consumer needs and motivations, develops marketing objectives and strategies, defines marketing programs and creates the business case for program execution under various scenarios.
The following information is utilized to generate a customer segmentation architecture that incorporates value, behavioral propensities and descriptive information to enable effective customer communication strategies that focus on increasing the acquisition, growth and retention of profitable customers.
- Customer Level Purchase Behaviors (e.g., RFM, Margin, Velocity, etc.)
- Customer Product Purchase Behaviors (e.g., Product Trend Clusters, Departmental Purchases)
- Customer Characteristics and Demographics (e.g., Income, Gender, Distance to the Store)
Customer value is more important than ever given today’s economic climate. Allant can build a robust value based customer segmentation architecture to enable the effective application of customer profitability measures across acquisition, growth and retention programs and their associated investments.
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Improve Cross-Sell and Up-Sell Effectiveness
Increasing share of wallet is critical to improving the profitability of your customer portfolio and ties directly to improving customer retention. Like acquisition, optimizing growth starts with defining a customer growth strategy that addresses contact, channel and treatment. The elements of an effective growth optimization strategy include defining customer characteristics, behaviors and attitudes and then leveraging those definitions to create customer segments that are meaningful and actionable.
Improvements in cross-sell, up-sell, usage, risk, value and profitability are among the many opportunities for customer growth through predictive analytics. Advanced analytics that leverages unique information that can be derived from combining internal and external purchase history among other demographic, life stage, and attitudinal data to create unique buyer profiles to drive strategy is a powerful mechanism for growing customer value.
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Increase ROI / Demonstrate the Value of the Marketing Organization 
Increased visibility and accountability creates the need for increased discipline to create ‘CFO Relevant’ business case materials to obtain and protect investment dollars. Increased visibility and accountability also demands increased precision and sophistication in budget planning and management tools.
The Allant Group provides financial tools for marketers specifically to meet the need for a disciplined, fact based process to monetize marketing value and systematically increasing return on investment. Three characteristics of note:
- Disciplined, budget planning and management tools designed with CMO-CFO dialogue in mind.
- Proactive, performance based approach to the ongoing management of marketing programs and infrastructure that demonstrates strong stewardship of corporate resources.
- Market tested solutions with over four years of quarterly ROI analyses and business cases for leading marketers in Financial Services, Retail, Telco/Cable and Consumer Marketing Sectors.
Allant ultimately creates a customized ROI report for each client situation, typically during the initial phase of ongoing marketing engagements. However, most business case initiatives fit into one of the following categories:
Smart Tools. Smart Marketing.
Clients rely on Allant for a unique combination of sophisticated analytics that deliver actionable customer insights and operational excellence that has won industry recognition for client satisfaction. The combination of the two is what makes the difference between a great idea, and a great idea that produces results that can be measured and improved.
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Reduce Marketing Costs
Reducing marketing costs is a top priority for every business today. There are many different ways to approach eliminating waste, redundancy or inefficiency in terms of marketing activity and spend. From Allant’s perspective, it is best to look at cost reduction potential across the dimensions of data sourcing, campaign or programs (marketing and operational) or at a budget or customer level.
Data Sourcing
Many companies overspend on external data, often because of redundant purchases across siloed products, channels, regions or departments. Additionally, the price/performance trade off, if not understood within or across users, can be sub-optimal. Allant is data independent and can help you centrally source, evaluate and optimize your data purchasing investments to reduce cost, maximize value and consolidate purchasing activity.
Campaigns/Programs
Optimizing campaign performance or eliminating unprofitable programs are two areas where companies are looking to reduce spend. Eliminating waste within campaigns at a channel level is an obvious place to start. Eliminating duplicates, improving contactability, reducing returned mail, reducing the number of contacts per campaign, improving opt out/suppression accuracy and increasing postal discounts are all standard cost reduction opportunities. Based on campaign volumes, incremental improvements can yield big returns.
 Another cost savings opportunity is to shift activity from more expensive channels to less expensive ones such as direct mail to email. Channel preference is overlooked by most marketers. Additionally, using channels in combination (e.g., driving customers to a website using lower cost postcards versus first class letters) can significantly lower costs.
Mailing fewer pieces per campaign without decreasing response rates through improved analytics is another opportunity to eliminate waste. Also, companies often target, unintentionally, potential customers unlikely to be profitable.
Budget/Customer
Marketing budget allocations across product lines, channels and media lack an informed customer-centric view to optimize investment decisions. Increasingly, print advertising, broadcast and TV - all forms of mass advertising - are in decline and historical budget allocations are under attack. Media Mix Analysis tied to customer purchase data is a basic first stept to understanding potential cost reductions and reallocations.
Online versus offline investments are also more in isolation from each other without consideration for cross-channel purchase behavior. As a result, marketing spend isn't synchronized across channels from the perspective of the purchase lifecycle. To accomplish this and optimize investments, online purchases to offline campaigns and vice versa is important to understanding the cost savings opportunity. Furthermore, managing investments from a customer value perspective helps to drive investments to the optimal customer level as high value, repeat customers warrant a greater degree of spend than episodic or low value customers.
Allant can perform an analysis of customer promotion and purchase history across online and offline channels to outline cost savings opportunities that shift or remove investments from unpredictive or irrelevant communication efforts.
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Improving the Customer Experience / Customer Satisfaction
Recent research demonstrates that customers aren’t satisfied with company interactions, especially in the contact center. Delivering the right message at the right time to the right customer remains an elusive goal for most organizations who still rely on simple business rules vs. advanced analytics that are built on rich customer information.
Allant provides the ability to differentiate offers and messages through advanced customer insights and predictive analytics. Insight enabled interactions not only improve the customer experience but have a broad and significant impact to both the top and bottom line.
ROI Impacts Resulting from Improving the Customer Experience
- Increase Sales Volume
- Increase Sales Conversion Rates
- Increase Lifetime Value
- Reduce Churn
- Decrease Cost Per Contact
- Reduce Complaints
- Win-Back More Customers
- Reduce Contact Oversaturation
- Improve Compliance with Contact Preferences
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- Create New Sales During Service Calls
- Increase Sales Rep Productivity
- Reduce Call Resolution Time
- Optimize Payment / Billing Plans
- Reduce Number of Delinquent Accounts
- Prevent Potential Returns Through Proactive Communications
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Allant can help you implement closed loop interactive marketing capabilities powered by advanced analytics to influence customer purchase behavior during inbound interactions. Response rates experienced by marketers in their Inbound Marketing efforts average 15% - 20% . Real time access to pre-scored / profiled customer data and delivery of offers / content across various inbound marketing channels is achievable today. Work with Allant to develop your interaction marketing strategy.
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