Our focus on leveraging analytics to drive richer insights, stronger targeting, and accurate measurement enables the optimization of three core areas of marketing; represented by the integrated customer marketing framework: the campaign, marketing mix, and customer portfolio.
Campaign Optimization:
The tangible application marketing is the campaign. It’s the tactical implementation of customer and prospect strategies designed to drive changes in behavior. Our analytics support the optimization of campaigns within and across all media and channels (mail, email, telemarketing, mobile, social, display, print, mass, and other media) as well as all customer and prospect lifestages.
Marketing Optimization:
Traditionally, marketing was defined by the 4 P’s – price, place, product and promotion. However, in today’s landscape, for the most part, marketing really only has control over one of those aspects – the promotion – or in other words, media. At Merkle, we believe at the core of marketing optimization is media mix, which is effectively a media budgeting and allocation game. Marketing optimization, however, is the natural evolution of media mix by the introduction of customer and product dynamics; as well as an understanding of the influence of sales and service.
Customer Portfolio Optimization:
Ultimately, the customer – the mix of potential and current customers - is a company’s most strategic asset. The most important decisions that marketers make involve the allocation of their scarce budgets. Marketing mix optimization (MMO) deals with informing this allocation at the media or marketing tactic level, while Customer Portfolio Optimization (CPO) addresses the allocation from the customer (and prospect) level. Customers and prospects have unique value-generating characteristics and potential. Understanding the portfolio effect of acquiring, retaining, and stimulating different segments of the marketable universe is the root of customer portfolio optimization. Key competencies in effective customer optimization include the ability to identify, predict, and act on meaningful customer segments –drawing on all types of insights spanning research, segmentation methods, and business intelligence solutions, to continually identify what is, in fact, meaningful. Bolstered by predictive analytics, these insights lead to effective targeting decisions and corresponding measurement across campaings and the marketing mix which provide the building blocks of a healthy customer portfolio.
A significant enabler of this is enterprise segmentation – the creation of interesting, relevant, and durable segments within a marketable universe. These segments are used as a lens to view the business through; revealing opportunities to think about and treat groups of customers differently.
