Science versus Art

Many times, the data discussion starts and ends with a classically trained businessperson who's ended up in a marketing role. Although it's an overgeneralization to say all marketers begin from a place of less data than more data, it's absolutely true that marketers are not commonly bred from IT and business analyst types (who generally think numbers first). This means that the average marketer who's newly in charge of a decent-sized budget, a couple of staff, and some vague pressure to deliver revenue probably is not likely to rebuild the entire effort around data—even though that's almost always the most profitable way forward.

In some cases, the marketer has a direct background in—or has been significantly influenced by—the pure creatives on their team. It's easy to test different colored buy buttons in email creative and pick a winner to drive 3.6 percent more conversions; but it's much harder to rethink who you're targeting and when. This is the crux of whether you're a data-driven marketer. For those who think data first, the initial question is one of segmentation (who's getting this message?) versus one of creative execution (what's the call to action in the message?).

So although the science and art of marketing can absolutely co-exist in harmony, there is a very clear order to how we queue these two up. Any marketer today can instantly become more effective and behavioral-driven by improving their thinking around audience selection. The beauty of applying science (segmentation) before art (message) is that you'll almost always reduce the size of your audience, but almost always increase the relevance and revenue driven from each campaign.

In fact, I have at least five customers that drive in excess of 40 percent of their email-based revenue from less than 5 percent of their email volume. One scenario involved an ecommerce retailer who was having massive deliverability problems that caused them to hack off the least interactive 80 percent of their database (those who hadn't opened or clicked in the previous three months). And guess the outcome; yes, their revenue increased. How is this possible? Because the 80/20 rule is probably even too conservative in its theory that 80 percent of your revenue is driven by 20 percent of your customers.

For more market-side evidence, look at Amazon Prime members' spend versus non-Prime members. They've stated publicly that an average Prime member spends just over $1,500 annually, which is more than double the amount of non-Prime members at $693 annually. And don't forget the Prime members pay $100 for the privilege of doubling their spending.

At the end of the day, marketers need to think in terms of being significant catalysts for change—not just order takers. We need to own this transformation on behalf of our companies. Many days, we'll be able to directly measure our results in terms of increased sales or rising lead scores; but we need to have the courage to undertake this journey for a much larger reason. The relationship between your company and your prospect or customer must be based on two core elements: relevance and trust. And, yes, relevance depends on the science of marketing, and trust is driven by the art of marketing.

Why You? Why Now?

If we can become more data driven, chances are we'll also become much, much more effective at our jobs. So if this is such a great idea, then why isn't every company doing it? The simple reasons are effort and inertia. It's basic human nature to continue doing what we did yesterday, particularly if we've just taken a new role or if we're unsure about how to proceed. And yes, change is hard; but it's always easier when you're leading the change versus having to figure out how to adapt to it.

Let's look at a few common reasons why you bringing this mentality to your marketing programs is the right thing to do:

1. Revenue cures all ills: Although change of any kind can be hard to institute, the magic bullet that makes it all better is revenue. If I could give a single piece of career advice to any 25-year-old marketer today, it would be to drive more revenue based on the data you have at hand. You're going to have to prove yourself in your career, and now's the perfect time to start on a path few others will take because of the increased effort it requires.
2. No one expects you to: One of the coolest things about bringing these concepts to your role is that no one ever expects marketers to add business value. Our colleagues often see us as a shared service to the company, but the reality is we have massive amounts of customer data at our disposal. Knowing each campaign's response rate or seeing how web visitors get hung up in specific ecommerce flows are key insights we can turn into solid recommendations back to our business partners. Relish in the fact you're underestimated—and prove everyone else wrong.
3. It begins with elements you control: Don't think about trying to change the entire company's data approach right out of the gate. Find four to five ways you can make your world more data driven and show immediate lift. If you're an email marketing manager, use open data to segment users into active and nonactive users and then experiment with follow-up mailings to the most active openers. Once you prove lift in your world, then use that to gain permission to tackle bigger, company-wide efforts.
4. Because no one else has: Unfortunately, it is too often the case that everyone is utterly content to do it like we always have. If you hear this phrase at your company, consider it your single biggest career opportunity and get down to business. If you're new to a job where this dynamic exists, go directly to the top of the organization with a rational, informed plan to lift revenue by being more data focused. Once you get their approval, just begin executing. You'll likely have lots of flack to deal with along the journey, but as long as revenue is going up, you're golden.
5. Executives love sales: It's worth saying out loud that this approach will absolutely get you promoted faster and more often. Increasing sales or spiking customer satisfaction is a sure way to bring kudos to you and your entire management chain—especially if you've pulled it off in a creative or resource-constrained way. It's up to you how you leverage these wins, but I know plenty of brilliant marketers who are content to make their boss, their boss's boss, and their colleagues in other departments the stars. I've always operated from a place of empowering my peers while clearly merchandising my effort to the smallest group of executives who guide my earning and promotion potential. This is an epic moment to be a team player, and if you're that personality type, you'll earn the undying trust of your peers—and they'll do amazing things for you down the road.

Data at the Speed of Business

For as long as I've been in tech (since the early ‘90s if you're keeping track), there's been a mantra to be more data driven. I remember in the late 1990s days of spending more than $800,000 on a booth at the world's largest technology tradeshow (Fall COMDEX in Las Vegas) to bring in Team Rollerblade. Imagine a 40-foot-high half-pipe in the Sands Convention Center with music blasting and elite athletes flying 60 feet above the floor. Amazing to watch? Yes. Related at all to our software business that targeted designers and illustrators? Not really. Was it data driven enough to at least capture booth leads based on the pure excitement of the show? Definitely not.

Certainly we've all run programs and campaigns we couldn't prove worked well. And we don't always have the luxury of making every element trackable and quantifiable. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Being data driven is a journey. We're not going to get it right all the time, but every small improvement moves us closer to our destination.

This is why I always caution marketers to tackle data issues at the speed of business and to pick your battles carefully. Can you take a new role in the company, and immediately force changes in data policy? Maybe if you're the new chief marketing officer, but probably not.

You also need to stage up these changes over time for the simple reason of organizational continuity. Even if you could wave a magic wand and transform everything, it'd still take months to train and reorient your colleagues around a more data-driven approach. In fact, many groups beyond marketing will likely be your biggest challenges. If you've not been through the full budgeting and spend approval processes with a true finance department, you might not have seen how slowly the wheels of progress can move—but let me assure you that rapid change is not their specialty.

So although you need to be steadfast in your progress, you can't simply ignore the challenges associated with significantly changing a company's way of business. Becoming more data driven is not a one-time, week-long choice. It's a years-long journey that will have its wins and losses along the way. Set a strong pace that's comfortable in the benefits it achieves even if some of the old guard aren't as comfortable with the machinations along the way.

Hygiene or Capture First?

The final think topic we'll address before diving into tactics is how to effectively index your effort for capture and/or hygiene. It's difficult to do both initially and simultaneously, so you'll be more successful if you pick one to focus on first.

This decision is best made by looking critically at your current data set. If you're a mature marketing company with a CRM system already installed and thousands of customers and prospects in the buying cycle, then hygiene is probably your best first move. The reality is you already have 8 to 10 key data points on much of your customer set, and the most important question is whether that data is improving your closing ratio or not. Many times, key groups like inside sales or marketing ignore these additional data points because they're unsure of the data's reliability.

In this case, maintain whatever current data collection strategies you have in place but turn your eye toward more layers of validation. This might take the form of scrubbing your data against external sources to confirm you have companies classified in the correct standard industrial classification (SIC) codes to ensure the correct inside sales group is calling on the correct accounts.

It might also take the form of marketing-driven activities such as producing whitepapers on key customer topics, and then asking for specific additional data points from known users in the database. Confirming that you know exactly who the buyers and influencers are within your top 20 key accounts is a powerful place to work from. Regardless of how you get there tactically, your goal should be to make the data so bulletproof and insightful that the organization couldn't imagine not having it on hand to power smarter customer interactions.

If you're a new startup just building your prospect list or a company that drives most of your leads through paid media and other outbound strategies, then your weakness is much more likely to be depth of knowledge on your customer. I work with many marketers who only know the AdWords click source or referring URL for every prospect that lands on their site. They might actually have to engineer an entire sales process without ever even knowing their customers’ email addresses.

If this sounds like your business, your job is to increase your depth of knowledge. The whitepaper registration tactic mentioned earlier works just as well here, so I always suggest this process start with a fully fleshed-out content strategy. We'll expand on content later in the book, but suffice to say you've got to build a solid exchange value that informs your prospect beyond your solutions and gets you deeper insight into your prospects' buying process.

One of the most important steps in driving deeper understanding of brand new prospects is to implement visitor tracking on your website. Any solid marketing automation platform like Silverpop has this capability immediately available, and it can assign unique identifiers to both known and anonymous users across your marketing spectrum. Once you've tagged the identity, you can begin associating multiple behaviors with that specific contact—ranging from follow-on site visits to registration events to email opens.

Using your site to begin tracking anonymous users and developing specific marketing programs to drive registration provide the foundation for building a much deeper knowledge set on your prospects. This is compelling for many reasons, but don't underestimate the power of understanding the lead source of a profitable customer. Knowing that your $6 cost per thousand (CPM) LinkedIn paid media effort is driving customers worth eight times as much annual revenue as your $3 CPM AdWords campaigns is the type of knowledge that will transform how you deploy your acquisition budgets.

It's also critical to think through how you expand your customer-level data through additional capture and appending. At Silverpop, we offer a feature called progressive forms that allows our clients to add up to hundreds of customer data points they'd like to capture from a specific prospect. Each time customers download a whitepaper or talk to a support rep, they're prompted to answer the next two to three questions in the queue; and it's completely personalized to the individual based on the sum total of what you know about them. After 60 to 90 days of this program running, marketers have a much deeper picture of a contact and have achieved that insight without throwing out a 15-field form that a buyer is sure to abandon (or fill with junk data) before completion.

From an external data sense, there are literally thousands of options and many ways to accomplish deeper insights. Some approaches will require your IT colleagues to add API (application program interface) calls to specific services that match your data up with external sources from credit reporting bureaus or other big data sources. If that's beyond your grasp, software-as-a-service options like InsideView allow a user to upload a spreadsheet of contacts to the system that returns an enhanced view driven by editorial, crowd-sourced, social, and webcrawled data. In fact, consulting firm Sirius Decisions summarizes the thinking this way: “Strong data organizations realize a 66 percent revenue advantage over those in the average category.”

Five Key Tactics

Now that we've set our thinking straight on becoming more data driven, let's look at five foundational tactics for doing so. Again, there are hundreds of ways to arrive at the same level of improvement, and most of them are greatly dependent on your current status. Therefore, there's not one single path to enlightenment, metaphorically speaking. You can only make sure that you're covering the core functions, and place yourself on a long, steady journey of improvement.

Following are the big five items you need a definite plan to address. You don't have to be brilliant at each one before beginning deployment, but you do need a basic framework of a plan, and you need to be prepared to iterate quickly while in execution mode.

Conclusion

Although moving to a more data-driven marketing approach isn't easy, its benefits are clear. By segmenting our audiences into smaller and smaller buckets, we earn the opportunity to deliver smarter and smarter messages. And those smart messages convert at two or three or four times our normal one-to-many messages. Yes, it means more work, but there's a sizeable prize in the form of more revenue.

You can deliver on this data approach even if you control only the smallest slice of marketing data. Do the absolute best with the data you have, and find a solution that allows you to factor in more data over time as your organization sees the benefit. Maybe you'll only start with a simple welcome program that breeds loyal customers, but eventually your revenue success will convince your organization to integrate ecommerce purchase data into your system; then you'll see exactly what success looks like.

As I often say to our customers, don't let great be the enemy of good. Pick a starting point based on your current systems and skills, and chart a course for the next three to four quarters. Don't worry about making each iteration perfect. Any degree of data-driven insights you can plug into the process will help you drive better content and better results, so get started this week!