What are the key channels to be considered for Promotions

How to Find Right Channel for NBO

One of the key feature of Next Best Offer is to provide the right promotion through Right Channel. It is worth to listdown the channels that should be considered normally.

Channels for NBO Delivery

• call centers
• direct mail
• email
• in-store display
• in-store staff
• kiosks
• mobile devices
• POS receipts
• web recommendations

The Channels are not limited to the above.

Tools and Metrics to Understand Mobile Data

Courtesy: www.telegraph.co.uk 

Mobile users contribute to more than half the percentage of traffic for many Retailers. The Mobile shopping, however hasn't grown with equal pace

Mobile Data Analytics involves collecting, understanding and reporting the insights based on Mobile data

Mobile Data Collection: 

Collecting mobile data has its own challenges. The variety of devices and the Applications prevent a standards for mobile data collection technique

Tags are key for Mobile Data Mining. Tags are small piece of code embedded inside the apps which relay information back to the provider

Mobile Websites (mobile version of websites) are similar to the normal Website but light weight and simple design for mobile.

Real-Time Next Best Action Based on Mood - Voice Analytics

Real Time Delivery of Offer is always a challenge, whatever the Channel might be. It's even challenging in Call Centrer where the CCE (Call Center Executive) is talking to the customer over phone. Now, Computational Voice analysis is helping the executives identify the mood of the customer on the other end. This is also called as emotion detection / mood detection

Identifying the mood of the customer can help drive more insights into the customer herself. Yuval Mor, the CEO of Beyond Verbal the company which has created mood detection algorithms for call centers says the program can also pinpoint and influence how consumers make decisions. “If this person is an innovator, you want to offer the latest and greatest product,” Mr. Mor says. “If this person is a more conservative person, you don’t want to offer the latest and greatest, but something tried and true.”

The company is also providing APIs for developers to develop Emotional rich apps

+Flurry, Inc., which had been an App analytics platform developer has extended it to Mobile Web as well

Email Marketing - An effective tool till date

Email marketing has been and remains a primary marketing lever for businesses," said Geoff Alexander, +iContact . It's always been a tool and with Dynamic Messaging (Hope your remember Microsoft's Bing campaign)

How to Find Social Influencers using analytics

How to Identify the best influencers from a given data


Who are these Social Influencers ?

One can associate a Social Influencer with :

One who has the maximum followers
One whose opinion is considered by his social circle (who can influence others easily)
One who creates and shares content regularly
One who makes most calls; accepts most calls etc

Benefits of identifying Social Influencers

Identifying influential persons within a circle will help the marketers expand the business; for example, they might be selected for a Test Drive (as Ford did), evaluate a product/service (Beta Programs from Microsoft etc), conduct surveys and thereby spread the word.

How to Identify the Influencers

Identifying Influencers is a broader statement. There are scores like Klout score etc available to weigh the influence of one in social media

The Klout score is an useful one for Social Media

However, a more deep data mining exercise would be more helpful. This would be more helpful than a specific score as the business goal of the datamining would pave the way for the most appropriate social influencers for a goal.

For example, if a Telecom group wants to acquire (poach in fact) new customers, it can identify customers who are good influencers and whose circle/friends are from different telecom network etc.

Building a robust dataset is very important. One needs to collect all possible information (from the call records - CDRs ) and roll-up the same for each customer,

Once the Data is created, one can use Supervised learning techniques or Link analysis to find the best scoring customers.

Is RFM Model Outdated (Emergence of RFM+ Model)

Recency, Frequency and Monetary (RFM) is the standard model used by many retailers/banks and financial institutions to segment their customers. This model is a time-tested one and has never failed.

 

So

 

The RFM is slowly becoming outdated.

Emergence of Social media, Mobile devices has made the researchers to go with the RFM+ (RFMPlus Model). The RFMPlus includes social media information, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Last Visit / Latency / Frequency between visits.

Segmentation Standards / Framework

Nielsen is the market leader in Segmentation. It's framework/system - PRIZM has more than 66 distinct groups/segments (mostly for US Customers) based on their demographic, geographic and purchase behaviour. They have catchy nicknames, images and behavioral snapshots that     help the marketers better understand the customers

P$YCLE is a segmentation system that evaluates consumers using key demographic factors that have the greatest effect on their financial behaviors, such as income, age, presence of children, home ownership and Nielsen’ proprietary measure of IPA. This is mostly used in Finance and Insurance industry

The advantage it is to identify consumer segments who have the resources and propensity to purchase specific financial products and services

Advantages of Segmenting - A case study

Women control over 80% of purchases of most products and services. Many companies have yet to fully capitalize from marketing and selling effectively to women. Insights in Marketing is dedicated to help increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts towards women!

Elasticity of Demand / Demand Elasticity in Customer Analytics

We briefly touched upon Price Sensitvity in the last post. Let's study a bit on the effect of Price on the customer using Demand Elasticity / Price Elasticity of Demand (PEoD).

PEoD = Q_New-Q_Old/(Q_New+Q_old)
              ------------------------
              P_New-P_Old/(P_New+P_old)

Where
Q_{New and} P_New  
             

stands for new quantity and price respectively.

Product	Price Elasticity	P(old)	P(new)	Qty(Old)	Qty(new)	Elasticity	Column1
Wheat	-0.11	10	15	120	117	-0.06329	-0.06329

The above table shows the Calculation of Price Elasticity for Wheat  the effect of change in Price on Customer's buying behavior

The following table shows the elasticity for some common products

Product	Price Elasticity
Wheat	-0.11
Eggs	-0.14
Milk	-0.21
Onions	-0.67
Cigarattes	-1.1
Beef	-1.3

Negative price elasticity shows that when the price increases, demand decreases. The above table shows that the customer is more sensitive to Beef than Wheat. An Offer on highly sensitive product can induce the customer to buy more.

Identifying price sensitivity of products/category , the subtitute products and its sales over the period would help to get the right price / product for promotions

How to measure Price Sensitity of Customers

How to know if a Customer is Price Sensitive?

Understanding the customer based on his price bracket has lot of benefits. This would help the retailer stock products of appropriate price in the category and help the marketing team with sending suitable discounts / promotions.

What is Price Sensitivity?

Before we dive deep into this, it's better to have it defined to avoid ambuigity later. This is the change in buying behavior of the customer of a particular product / category due to the change in price. This means a customer will have different price sensitivities for different product or categories. This is sometime called as Price change sensitivity too

How to measure the price sensitivity?

There are various ways to measure it for a customer-product. One way is to find the demand elasticity.

We will discuss in detail on demand elasticity with some examples

Can a product's sales increase even when there is increase in Price. Though strange there are chances that it would be - these are called Giffen goods

What are the steps in NBO (Next Best Offer) to give Personalized Promotion

Personalized Promotion / Next Best Action (NBA) in Retail

Increased Personalization is a trend that is common in all industries , particularly, the Retail one
According to a Research, a personalized upsell or cross-sell offer is 30% more effective when delivered within two seconds of initial product selection

The steps, models or algorithms in NBO (Next Best Offer) to give Personalized Promotion are shown below:

The combination of these models would provide a great insight into the customer behaviour and his product and offer preferences, which in turn can be used to provide him context and location senstive appopriate product as the promotions


Big Data and Personalized Promotions

With the advent of Big Data - the Analysts can store huge amount of data and analyze them using Big Data Analytic tools. One such is +SAP HANA , which can be used collect personal customer information and provide optimized offers based on their individual histories and preferences

There are many open source softwares like 'R' and +Hadoop that are spear heading the personalized promotion algorithm development

With the cost of big data hardware on the decline this trend is definitely going to speed up

How Recommendation Engine Works

Recommendation engines are a craze these days. +StumbleUpon  recently fired half of their marketing staff and hired Data Analysts to build a recommendation engine that predicts accurately (or more accurately) the links that it provides to the customers

Recommendation engine work on the same principle of other statistical engines - they are sometimes called personal promotional engines. The key here is to

1) Analyze Data
2) Create Segments / Groups
3) Create Models (Statistical)
4) Send and Measure Offers
5) Re-Calibrate the Model
6) Re-Issue Offers

How to Create Personalized Direct Mail Offers based on Shopping Patterns

Kroger - one of the world's leading grocery chain creates personalized offer on individuals (not segments).
Kroger tracks each customer as an individual. The quarterly mailers it sends contain 12 coupons specific to an individual household and are carefully designed, thanks to dunnhumby's insights. Each part of the coupon is carefully popluated with product choices from the customer's previous
shopping patterns. The last two coupons are for experiments, such as adjacent products — a purchaser of baby food who doesn’t buy diapers might see an offer for diapers.
Apart from suggesting the offers for the customers, dunnhumby also provides insights on placement of these products with the help of data analysis

CVS issues weekly sales circular using a feature called myWeekly Ad. 

This feature uses insights generated based from customer data and transactions to arrive at appropriate offers