Optimizing marketing strategy can be accomplished through three different approaches; customer acquisition, growth and retention. Each approach can leverage an analytical and / or a marketing automation infrastructure depending on the current state of existing marketing systems.

Acquisition
Increasing the number of new, profitable customers is important to all marketers. Improving customer acquisition performance often requires both analytical processes and improved execution of acquisition campaigns. As previously discussed under list optimization, the acquisition process involves a complex set of activities and is often disjointed across product lines, departments and locations. Optimizing acquisition performance starts with defining a strategy that addresses the elements of contact, channel and treatment. Optimization requires a continual tracking and measurement of each dimension of strategy to adjust strategic and analytic processes. This can be accomplished by maintaining a Predictive Intelligence engine that feeds marketing automation systems where execution occurs, or by implementing new marketing automation solutions that integrate all elements of strategy, predictive information and analytic processes. Creating a reusable prospect universe in either environment provides an enhanced ability to maximize performance by increasing the number of new sales, increasing sell through rates and increasing average sale amount.

Growth & Retention
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. Cross-sell, up-sell, usage, risk, value and profitability are among the many opportunities for customer growth through predictive analytics. Predictive Intelligence 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 increasing customer value.

Extending best customer retention is increasingly a focus for most organizations as 20% of the customer base often drives 80% of the company's profits. As acquisition challenges continue to become more difficult and costly in the face of an increasingly cluttered and fragmented world, optimizing retention performance through deep analytical insight into best customer attitudes and behavior is critical. Again, optimizing retention strategy involves defining the elements of contact, channel and treatment. Specifically, understanding and predicting best customer behavior is critical and ties directly to effective customer loyalty programs that drive the desired results. Predictive intelligence that stores a historical view of customer behavior enables continual decomposition of native demand, marketing demand and causal demand. Evaluating each of these demand characteristics creates an opportunity to find patterns in the data that provide the insight to enhance loyalty programs, improve customer retention and increase the opportunity to win-back or activate inactive customers.