Using Data To Competive Advantage:
Ad:Tech 2005 - New York, NY
Jeff Einstein and Sunil Gupta's session on using data to your competitive advantage could have had a more descriptive title - but if you're into receiving practical information (as we are) then you could not have attended a better session. A better title may have been "How to get leads and make sure those leads are Great!" but regardless, the information they both provided on leveraging online marketing to acquire customers and what to do with that information once it is in your list is immensely valuable to anyone that understands and sees the value in building and maintaining in-house list files.
Why build your house file?
As a business owner or online marketer you have a few options when it comes to increasing the numbers in your list database. Buy a list, rent or lease a list or build your own. The advantage of building an in-house list is better performance through a higher response.
How do you compile a list?
Well, chances are good that this may be the primary reason this Ad:tech session was packed. As CEO of Prospectiv Online Marketing, Doyle recommended looking beyond using website registrations alone (as most web site owners tend to do) and adopt alternative or additional compiling strategies such as the use of off-line marketing, micro-websites, affiliate marketing, online surveys, dynamic polls, email append, call center, co-registration, list rental and paid search. If you simply cannot afford to compile a list through multiple channels, that's OK! Doyle claims that precision targeting is much more valuable than multi-channel marketing.
There are several critical success factors in compiling lists. If you play on going it alone, select a reliable provider that abides by best practices, provided access to multiple channels and is trusted by major consumer brands. While we don't agree completely with Mr. Doyle in that there are other list compiling solutions that do not cater to the major brands, it is at least important to make sure that the solutions provider use advanced technologies to ensure premium response.
Sunil Gupta, a well respected expert in marketing, took over the reigns of the afternoon session, taking the audience to database marketing and beyond. While you may need a doctoral degree and a marketing glossary to follow along with much of Gupta's segment of the session, he touched on at least one concept that was of great interest to the audience.
Compiling noteworthy in-house lists or building (through third-party acquisition) corporate lists, requires that consumer/customer databases contain information on customer transactations, promotion history, data enhancement and service history and not just contact information. Successful data compilers use this information profitably to manage campaigns and mine data in order to build predictive models used for segmentation and testing. With a quality list, marketers can use such modeling to predict not only general preference and tendency but also go beyond that to assess whether consumers will make a purchase on actual visits.
Overall, an exceptional session - many thanks to Ad:tech, Jerry Doyle and Sunil Gupta!
