3 steps to getting started with data

With all the talk around big data, getting started using data to drive your marketing communications is feeling harder than ever, even though there is plenty of research showing that using data can drive significant revenue.

At the DMA Awards, last year Starbucks won the Gold award for best email marketing by using loyalty data to drive customers in store. The ‘heart’ emails achieved incredible engagement with 42% opening the launch email and 73% clicking through. Subsequent ‘soul’ emails drove behaviour that was directly attributable to them - 15% tried a new blend announced only by email.

There are of course lots of different pieces of data that can be used in email marketing campaigns. Where should you start?

Start small
Well you don’t need to start by building an entire loyalty programme! Put that big pile of data to one side and first map out the touch points where customers interact with your brand – whether online or offline. At each point look to see whether you have the opportunity to identify the customer and nudge them further along the journey.

There are plenty of options – welcome campaigns, in-store registrations, purchase, recently browsed, basket/process abandonment, community reviews, loyalty and even birthday campaigns to name a few!

Test and measure
Using data to customise email campaigns take more time than those that don’t make use of data. Thankfully, the returns usually more than outweigh the extra time spent. But some give better returns than others and so before you dive in and spend all that precious time... wasting time, use a sample of the data to test it first and see whether the uplift is significant. You can find out more about testing for significance here.

Record and repeat
Using data to create email campaigns can rapidly increase the number of campaigns being sent over the course of a year, so it is not unusual to want to automate them as much as possible. Doing so allows you to focus on expanding your marketing communications further. Whenever automating though, there is a danger to load it up and forget. Keep a log book of all your automated campaigns including who they go to and what the content is.

Riaz Kanani, Operations Director, Profusion