I attended Marketing Week Live! earlier this week - a two day marketing event at Olympia that show-cased a variety of speakers and case studies across the broad areas of Insight, Data Marketing, Online Marketing and Instore.
There were plenty of really good, interesting speakers, a couple in particular spoke of the importance of getting maximum value out of any client, customer, competitor or industry data available to you, and not just stopping at face value insights and results.
A good example of this was provided by James Morgan - Head of Consumer Intelligence at O2. He made the point that for brands such as O2 who have various product offerings (phone, broadband etc), the very simplest of questions such as “How many customers do we have?” can be unanswerable unless you have centralised, detailed data. Because O2 have this data and more, they were able to identify who amongst their customer base were social influencers by looking at phone records to reveal who sat at the centre of social hubs and had large networks of contacts. They then supplied these users with free iPhones and watched as significant numbers of their contacts signed up to iPhone contracts.
A closer to home example came from John Whitehead, Supporter Planning and Insight Manager of Wateraid. As well as being extremely well informed about the charity sector (how many other charities their donors gave to, how the recession might affect donation levels, the impact of a shift from cash donation to direct debit etc), he displayed an advertising results chart that went a step beyond what we are used to seeing, and past the point where we’d ordinarily stop analysing.
Wateraid used DRTV, press inserts and face to face recruitment to drive new donor sign ups. Each encouraged direct debit donation (as this is proven to deliver longer term results, as you’d expect). Face to face interviews drove the greatest sign up, followed by DRTV - while comparative CPR/CPAs were not shown, let’s imagine they justified face to face recruitment as the most cost effective recruitment method.
Where Wateraid had gone a step further was to consider direct debit lapse rates by media for a 24 month period after sign-up. This showed that inserts delivered a less than 10% lapse rate after 24 months, while face to face interviews resulted in a circa 70% lapse rate. Wateraid therefore stopped using face to face recruitment.
By going an extra step with their analysis and using the data available to them, Wateraid got a level of insight and learning that most clients would have missed, and illustrated the importance of using any data available to you as thoroughly as possible.
