StrateScapes - 360° ... from every angle

Excerpted from
StrateScapes - Volume 7, Number 1

360° ... from every angle

The very exercise of building a model allows you to capitalize on unseen opportunities.

Predictive modeling is a technique used to forecast future behavior and anticipate the consequences of change. It’s a quantitative approach to dealing with future uncertainty and to provide business intelligence such as:

Who are your most profitable customers?

How much is each customer worth?

What product is a customer likely to buy next?

How do you prioritize prospects?

When you develop objectives for any model, you’re building little bits of data that can help you with other initiatives, unearth some ah-has or reveal new opportunities — other ways to turn hard data into actionable strategy. While en route to building a customer acquisition model, for example, you develop a clean customer profile which can also help you develop media placement strategies for reaching audiences matching your customer profile.

Switching Perspective

When CCG developed a customer profile for Einstein Bros to help it with customer retention, we also recommended taking a look at the data to see how it applied to acquisition efforts. This allowed us to help Einstein Bros more effectively allocate acquisition marketing expenditures by targeting the newspaper zones with large pockets of best customer look-alikes.

Payless ShoeSource started their data modeling efforts by commissioning CCG to combine customer, transaction and demographic data to build a detailed customer profile. From there CCG had the data it needed to also analyze the impact of advertising efforts on customer behavior.

Seeing Other Angles

Below is a sampling of CCG’s own modeling options, developed by our IntelliStats Analytics Group. Each model, while developed for a singular purpose, can also be leveraged to provide additional business intelligence. So when you’re ready to unravel such mysteries as ...

How can I most effectively reach my target audience?

What are my best customer segments?

What kind of return can I expect from this offer?

How likely are my customers to switch to my competition?

... the answer may just lie in the data you’ve already gathered. Call 800.525.0313 x152 to speak with Bill Schneider about how CCG’s IntelliStats Analytics Group can make the most of your customer data.

CCG model:	Use it to:	And possibly for:
RESPONSE	identify characteristics that maximally differentiate responders to a particular direct mail solicitation from non-responders.	suppressing names from a direct mail campaign.

BEST CUSTOMER LOOK-ALIKE	identify existing customers who take on the characteristics of your best customers, but who have not exhibited transactional behaviors that qualify them to be classified as a best customer.	targeting one-time buyers for conversion into repeat customers.

CUSTOMER ACQUISITION	identify the most attractive new customer prospects from a larger universe of prospect names.	developing media placement strategies that include television, print, radio and online channels for reaching specific target audiences matching your customer profile.

REACTIVATION	find lapsed customers who could be converted back into active customers.	providing insights about the characteristics and types of prospects to avoid in campaigns devised for recruiting new customers.

ATTRITION	pinpoint those customers who are most likely to discontinue transacting any business with your company.	providing an overall measure of how vulnerable your company is to competitor influences or impending fall-off in demand for your product or service. This might trigger a series of promotional campaigns designed to boost market awareness.

NEXT-BEST-SELL	gain insight into the types of products that existing customers are most likely to acquire in the future.	supporting cross-sell or upsell marketing opportunities to increase the penetration of products into the existing customer base.

STRATESCAPES and STRATESCAPES SUPPLEMENTS are published by Customer Communications Group, Inc., a full-service agency specializing in relationship marketing and customer communications. Our comprehensive, turnkey services include data analysis, customer segmentation, strategic consulting, account management, creative execution, print production and multimedia solutions.