May 5, 2020  |  Kelly Holder

A Fresh Approach to This Spring’s Marketing Challenge

Using your customer information and technology to build a better path forward.

Now more than ever we need to look at fresh ways to solve our business challenges. Be willing to give up what worked before but doesn't work now. Explore what we know and don't know about our business, customers, systems, and team. Look at fresh ways to tackle old problems, solve new ones, and ultimately, to deliver more value for customers.

Last week, my colleague Larry Buchweitz shared some good ways to demonstrate your company value during the COVID-19 pandemic. My focus is on creating more value for you, our MCH customer. Many of you reading this are using technology in expanded ways to create value during this crisis, while others may need some fresh ideas to bring your plans to forward. As chief data and technology nerd and leading customer integrations at MCH, I want to share some examples of how we are helping clients better understand their opportunity, get actionable information more quickly, and ultimately, to deliver more value to their customers.

Profile, profile, profile.

The oldest sales adage is that it is easier to keep your existing customers than it is to find new ones. And that is true, staying connected to your customers now is critical. But the more you know about your customers, the easier and more cost effective it will be to find new ones. The end of the school year is typically an ideal time to do data profiling and spring cleaning – and this year, more than ever.

When our clients profile their existing customers, they improve their marketing programs. That is, they have higher email deliverability because they aren't just blasting and praying, they have higher open and click through rates, lower print mail costs, and they find new customers faster. All because those MCH clients understand the type, size/enrollment, location, buying power, penetration rates, and key attributes of existing buyers who are responding to their marketing. Our profiling services are an easy first step to deeper understanding of your best opportunity areas for prospecting.

More than a profile.

Entity matching is at the core of profiling, and every other data cleansing and appending process. Making sure you are talking to the right decision makers at the right institution is an essential function of good marketing data, and why data hygiene is an ongoing requirement. Profiling is really about clearing out the noise in your data and building a road map from your own customer insight.

Over the last couple of years, we've built a suite of fast, cost-effective ways to help you clean and maintain current customer information by automating your data matching, cleansing, and appending. One way we do that is by simplifying and managing integration with your marketing technology. Across multiple email tools and using real time APIs available as part of most email platforms, we can manage your suppression lists so the MCH data you license is already suppression-ready when you create campaigns in your marketing platform. All of the uploading and downloading of suppressions is eliminated, and you get the most up to date contacts on the MCH database. As the contact data changes for us, it automatically changes for you, every time you access it. We do this by using the MCH Data Cloud.

Using the MCH Data Cloud

The tangible, new, and very cool benefit that MCH is providing marketers is a data partnership that keeps your existing house data fresh – whether that is your own customers or the prospect data we license you – and shows you what additional data you might add based on our comprehensive entity matching, our ongoing compilation processes, and your business requirements. The power of these services lives in the MCH Data Cloud and the rapidly emerging tools that help you – and us – do more to improve and expand data.

Can you see yourself in these scenarios?

• You're a great marketer who knows the power of data and what you want from it but may not be a technologist.
• You struggle to get the information you need to really understand your business from sales, finance, technology, and customer support.
• Marketing needs never seem to rank as high on the technology checklist as you would like, so you try to live with what you can get until they have time for you.
• Meanwhile, you know there is gold in your systems and wish you had the data at your fingertips, in real time to show how your work is impacting sales and the overall health of the business.

I've heard your challenge.

You are not alone. At every customer meeting I attend I hear these challenges and stories.

You want the flexibility to access your marketing information whenever you want with an interface you are familiar with like Excel, and you don't want to spend hours uploading and downloading files across systems.

Or, you have some excited IT partners who want to connect via APIs, use integration tools, or are already running their business on a cloud provider such AWS, Azure or Google. [Note: When MCH gets involved your tech team becomes your advocate. They benefit from the partnership and technology that saves time, money and resources.]

Or, maybe your entire database is integrated with the unique identifier from a different data company and you need help figuring that all out.

We've solved for these issues and built dozens of clients their own marketing cloud as part of licensing our data. And as a result, we've eliminated the pain in maximizing the use of data.

Moving from a contact database…to a real marketing database.

Technology makes our products and business more accessible, more effective, and more cost efficient. Delivering this efficiency and insight is more important than ever in these changing times.

When you have real-time, access to the best customer insight – purchasing, behavioral, demographic, firmographic – you can take the lead in identifying new opportunity and sales. Let me share an example of how one of our customers is using the power of cloud technology to build their marketing database:

A wonderful MCH customer sells reward and appreciation products. They were challenged to define their best targets across the many verticals they use in MCH's education, healthcare, and government files. They know the cost of every name they buy from MCH, but they wanted to better understand what every name was worth. By hosting our client's data in the MCH Data Cloud, we built real-time calculations of return on advertising spending. When their sales data uploads to their secure database, we've built the code that gives them immediate marketing analytics. As a result of this unprecedented level of insight, this client has increased response by 25% and average order value by 21%. Overall, the client was able to reduce marketing costs by 18%.

A fresh start for the road ahead.

Taking a fresh look at customer information and integration systems might not have been on your list of priorities for this spring before COVID-19, but the changing environment may give you the space to think about it. The power of new technology and a data partnership with MCH can help you get the insight you need to move ahead.

I love talking about this stuff and never shy away from a technology challenge. I'm happy to chat about how we might help you. Shoot me an email and we'll get a call set up right away.

Be well,

Kelly