Leveraging Data Quality and Marketing Analytics to Lower Costs, Improve Efficiency, Increase Profitability – A Global Retail Firm
The client is a global retail firm spanning 150 countries, all of which are covered by the firm’s wholesale distribution network. This is complemented by an extensive retail network of approximately 9,000 stores in North America, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. The client was running various marketing campaigns with different offers on the product catalog. An example is direct mailing where a direct mailing product catalog was sent to several hundred thousands customers from the base of over few million customers with the response rate of less than 4%. The direct mailers were later followed up with SMS and email messaging. The client was facing predicaments in targeting potential customers and optimizing their customer reach. Some of the business challenges were pricing pressures and revenue stagnation. The client wanted to understand its customer behaviors, improve customer satisfaction and do target marketing.
Key Challenges
- How to transform large quantities of raw customer data into actionable insights for tactical decision-making and sales
- Poor quality customer data residing in a variety of legacy systems
- Lack of proper insights into customer behaviors
- Every person should receive the same mailing only once. As a direct or indirect customer of firm’s several products or services, a person could be found several times in database with different naming standards and addresses. This would cause several mailings to the same person
- Mailings couldn’t be delivered because the existing address information was often inaccurate, incomplete or outdated. Addresses needed to be updated manually
- No impact analysis of marketing campaigns except a broad level consensus of its poor ROI
- Manual or compartmentalized reporting across the organization
- Miscommunication or no communication between business users and data analytics team
Benefits
- The client was able to formulate a robust market analytics study to improve their offerings, understand ROI from various marketing campaigns and penetrate across niche market segments across the globe
- The client was also able to identify the cumulative value generated by customers, while minimizing total mailer cost
- The client was able to reap half-a-million dollars cost benefit in the very next quarter after the project went live
- Having a single and enterprise view of customers resulted in a $90,000+ reduction in monthly mailing cost just in North America
- Understanding of customer behavior, buying patterns and predicting analytics helped the client in positioning right products to customers, and improved customer satisfaction at the same time
- Increase sales and decrease customer acquisition costs
- Automated dashboards and reports across the organization providing useful information on key marketing performance indicators
Implementation Highlights
- Performed data cleansing, data profiling activities and developed reusable data quality components resulting into removal of <90% duplicates
- Developed a comprehensive business intelligence and marketing analytics solution combining enterprise data, social media, and data available in public domain on a big data (Hadoop) platform
- Developed enterprise-wide reports and dashboards for various metrics needed to produce key performance indicators for various management personnel
- Missing address information is automatically updated before data is used for mailings as an ongoing continuous data quality assurance program