Maths, Marketing and Sleeping Dogs

Maths and Marketing Podcast interview with Mark Smith, Portrait Software on Love Digital
http://www.lovedigital.com.au/index.php/love-digital/podcast/maths-marketing

Using analytics to make informed decisions about what to cut from your marketing budget -which channels, campaigns, customer groups to reduce or remove from your marketing activities.

Marketing to less customers
Some marketing can have a negative effect. For example, by making customers aware that their service contract is up for renewal, some will take the offer and renew, while others will be driven away by the opportunity to snare a better offer from another provider.

One of the interesting points raised in the interview is the piece about "recontracting". In particular, Mark talked about telcos sending offers to customers at the expiry/renewal of mobile phone contracts. While some customers will take up the offer of a new handset or extra credit, others will be driven away by the opportunity to snare a better offer from another provider.

A telco client refers to this paradigm "don't kick the sleeping dog". So the big challenge is identifying which customers are the sleeping dogs and which ones will "go fetch".

The same concept applies equally well to Financial Services, Energy, Healthcare and most B2B operations.

I expect that some of this behaviour must be driven by customer satisfaction - how much they enjoy (or loathe) using your product or service.

There are many ways to measure customer satisfaction across a range of channels – call centre complaints, survey scores, email response, competition entries and product/service usage.

By analysing the numbers generated by the history of past behaviours, marketers, with the help of mathematicians, can better identify which customers to target in which channel, as well as identify the customers that are best left alone.

Returnity's Intelligence service is well equipped to help our clients build these profiles.