5 Easy data-led marketing strategies

Terms like big data, data-driven and data-led marketing are often thrown around with little thought to what they actually mean. It’s a bit of an art form to be able to look at data and work out the best possible way to apply this to your next campaign to improve upon your last campaign. 

You may also think that the offline marketing world doesn’t have the capability to be able to apply data-led strategies, right? Wrong, there are many ways your offline marketing campaign can benefit from being data-led, and they are easier than you think. 

So here are our top data-led marketing strategies that you can easily apply to your next campaigns.

Start at the beginning.

Data-led marketing tip 1 clean your data

CLEAN YOUR DATA! We would shout this from the rooftops if we could, but we got arrested last time for trespassing. This seems like an obvious point to make on a data-led marketing blog post but it is surprising how many marketers don’t have a grasp of their current customers and prospects. 

Arguably your most valuable asset to your marketing team is your data. You could have the perfect creative accompanied by the best conversion creating copy. But without a list of people to send it to you won’t get anywhere. 

Keeping your data clean is akin to keeping a classic car clean, oiled and serviced if you don’t, it will rust away to nothing. Your information is exactly the same. Your data will degrade by over 30% each year if not properly maintained.

If not regularly audited and cleaned, the cost of postage could increase, you’ll be wasting time, energy, and most importantly money sending mailings to people who are no longer there.

There are a few ways that clean data can save you money but first let us explain what PAF is. 

PAF – The Postcode Address Finder or PAF is a database that Royal Mail must keep up to date by law. When we run your data through audits, we compare it to this database to see how many matches your data has.  

How does clean data save money?

Save Money – Incentives are a great way of saving money on campaigns. We have multiple blog posts on incentives here. But importantly, your data must meet criteria to qualify, usually a PAF score of 90% or higher.

Higher postage rates – Not meeting PAF criteria can also increase the postage costs from Royal Mail. 

As you can see, it pays to clean your data. There is another final reason to clean your data too, on to point number 2!

Know where you have been to know where you have to go.

Data-led marketing tip 2 check you know who your demographic is it may have shifted over time

This sounds like a line from a cheesy movie, but it does apply to your data. 

Every business will have a picture of what their demographic base looks like. Whether they are male or female, affluent, retired, working and so on. This may have changed, and you may not have realised.

We can all agree that 2020 has been a wild ride and for better or worse, people’s habits have changed. 

This includes their spending and shopping habits. The IMRG have reported that many businesses have seen different demographics purchasing from them for the first time. Therefore their ideal demographic may have also shifted. 

That’s why our number 2 point is to get your current customer data profiled. By doing so, you can accurately target the right people at the right time. 

This is quintessential data-led marketing. You are reviewing the data you have and letting that guide your decisions. If you suddenly find you have more retired customers, you can change your approach to better suit them to drive conversions. There might be a whole demographic ready and waiting for you.

We are offering a free demographic profiling service. Click here to find out more. 

Better reporting

data-led marketing tip 3 create better reports

Let’s talk about reporting. As an offline marketing agency, we focus on results-based marketing, black and white figures, not just brand awareness. As part of our data-led marketing ethos, we have developed the easiest method to track offline marketing campaign success. 

Offline Marketing has always been tricky to track. Of course, you can use unique codes on your mailing, but we know that not everyone will use these codes. You can use personalised URL’s, but again some people who receive your mailing will Google your brand and visit your website that way. Plus a myriad of other methods which do work as an indication of campaign success.

The team at PSE wanted a way of showing our customers, precisely down to the penny and person, how successful a campaign was. After long nights and lots of trial and error, we cracked it! 

Using ‘fuzzy lookups,’ we can compare your mail data to your sales data. This allows you to compare the two in great detail, giving insights such as exactly who bought something from you after receiving a mailer, average basket cost for people who received the campaign and so on.

This hyper-detailed method of reporting back will help you make more informed decisions on future campaigns allowing you to run accurate A/B testing either on creative, mailing lists, segments, etc. 

Offline Marketing industry reporting

If you have read any of our other blog posts, you know that we are a big advocate of JICMail and what you can learn from them. If you are new to our blog posts, here’s a brief guide to who JICMail are, what they do and how it can help your data-led marketing strategy. 

JICMail has been established by an industry-wide group to provide the same metrics for Mail that are available for other channels and are used by planners regularly to help plan media campaigns.

In short, they survey 1000 continuously rotating people about the actions they did when they receive a piece of advertising mail. These actions range from looking at it, discussing the article with someone, visiting a website, purchasing a product or service and everything in between. 

This data is then arranged and sorted by industries, actions and demographics. Using this data, you can extrapolate predictions on how campaigns in your sector should perform. 

Using the information collected by JICMail, you can unlock data-led marketing on a huge scale. Not only are you learning from your own campaigns but every other offline marketing campaign in the UK.

Below are some examples of the type of data you can extract.

The real power of JICMail comes from the downloadable, ever-growing database that shows every logged piece of information such as company name, actions, dates and so on. This big-data can then be used in your own planning, in a way that suits you.

Programmatic Mail

Data-led marketing tip 4

Data-led marketing is at its core using data that people have given you to target your prospects and customers more accurately. With the innovation of Programmatic Mail, you can do this automatically. 

Programmatic Mail fuses the speed of digital with the conversion rates of offline. This service is predominantly used for abandoned baskets, allowing you to send a personalised piece of Direct Mail if a customer abandons a basket. But that is not its only use. 

Using the data that you already have on your own customers. You can send birthday greeting offering birthday discounts, or if they haven’t used you for a while, why not send them a ‘we miss you’ mailer. Or even if a person spent a long time looking at a particular product but didn’t continue to the checkout, send them a mail showcasing similar products.

Plus you can set triggers all along the customer journey. For instance, a customer signs up to a trial sample of your product. You can send an automated Direct Mail offering the second month half price and so on. 

This automated marketing channel not only utilises data at the start of the campaign but at every stage of the campaign. Because you can track users on your site, you can compare customers who received the mailing against those who didn’t. You are unlocking data such as browsing habits, checkout conversion rates and much more. 

The data that you collect will allow you to tweak every part of your campaigns, seeing constant improvements. Programmatic Mail is the embodiment of data-led marketing. 

Conclusion

There you have our top 5 ways you can implement data-led marketing into your marketing activities easily and quickly. 

If you want to know more about our products and how we can help you with your data-led marketing, you can contact one of our experts here. 

Marketing you can trust.

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