Data-driven marketing when done right would take your marketing game to the next level, helping you reach the right customers and convert them with fewer resources and guesswork taken out of the picture. The article below will provide you with examples of some of the data-driven marketing strategies done right.
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Data is the new gold – how many times have you heard this statement? Well, the statement is correct if you consider the rate at which companies but small and big, tech and non-tech are rushing to get their hands on data.
Without data in this century, all of your work would be guesswork and that would make it hard for you to compete against other businesses that take away the guesswork and use data to make informed decisions. Data have become so important now that it is now part of the decision-making process throughout the production chain.
Our focus in this article would be on data as used in marketing and how that can help your campaign. We will do this by providing you examples of businesses that use data-driven marketing and the result they got which are quite interesting. One thing you need to know is that the process requires a specialist that understands the specific data he needs in other to fine-tune the process and optimize your marketing campaigns.
Before giving you the examples, let take a look at what data-driven marketing is.
What is Data-Driven Marketing?
From the name of the term, you can tell that it is marketing that relies on data or simply put, making marketing decisions based on data. Data-driven marketing is a method of marketing that relies on data to determine who your ideal customers are, their behavior, preference, and motivation, giving you a better understanding which ultimately helps you to optimize your marketing performance.
The result of a good data-driven marketing campaign would be a more personalized connection with your consumers, increased marketing profitability, and the ability to rely on more than guesswork.
There are many sources of data that you can rely on to use for data-driven marketing. The key question you will need to ask is – will the data source provide you real customer insight?
If yes, then you can use it. If you own a website that your customers visit, then you have firsthand information you can use. Data provided by the analytics you have installed such as Google Analytics can be used such as page views, traffic by device, demography, average session duration, traffic by source, and many others.
Lead generation metrics, email marketing metrics, and even e-commerce metrics such as shopping cart abandonment rate are useful. Data from other sources either provided to you directly or gotten via web scraping can be used for data-driven marketing.
Some Examples of Data-Driven Marketing with Good Results
If you are looking forward to carrying out data-based marketing to optimize your marketing effort performance, then you need to know that you are not alone. There are tonnes of other businesses that do that including the big businesses around the world.
Let take a look at some of the examples of how companies and businesses use data-driven marketing to optimize their marketing.
1. Vineyard Vines Uses Data-Driven Marketing to Facilitate Personalised Marketing
Vineyard Vines is not some sort of wine brand. It is an American clothing and accessory retailer founded in 1998 that deals in high-end ties, hats, belts, shirts, shorts, swimwear, bags for men, women, and children. It has over 100 stores across the United States and the brand items are being sold by 600 other retailers.
This brand has an online storefront that it uses to sell items online. It has always wanted to provide personalized services but as its customer base grew, that becomes difficult and it has to deal with the batch-and-blast method of communication which is not personalized and inefficient.
- Solution Using Data-Driven Marketing
In 2016, e-commerce wanted a solution that will keep in touch with the dynamic nature of their customer base and provide personalized communication to improve revenue generation. They contacted a company known as Bluecore, a retail marketing automation platform to get that done for them.
Using the huge amount of customers behavior and interaction data with the online store, Bluecore developed an AI-decisioning engine that using the behavior of a user and interaction on the site, decides which product to recommend to him and the best marketing channel to use for reaching him in a personalized manner.
- Result of Data-Driven Marketing Exercise
The result gotten was astonishing as they were able to expand their reach without sacrificing relevance. It created a cross-channel marketing opportunity that resulted in a 180% ROI, generated 124% higher revenue per email than the average for their women’s campaign, help them create new customer segments, and make the one-to-one level of communication possible as opposed to the regular batch-and-blast method that is inefficient.
Overall, data-driven marketing has not only helped Vineyard Vine understand their customers better but has also optimized their marketing campaigns, earning them more money with less money spend on marketing.
2. Amazon Uses Big Data For Product Recommendation
The Vineyard Vine is not a very popular company to many especially outside of the United States. So, let the second example be with a brand that is known to many around the world and that company would be none other than Amazon, the world’s number one e-commerce platform that sells virtually every retail item you want.
Being an online marketplace for millions of items, users can be caught in a web of not knowing what to buy or the best thing to buy except they actually know what they want before going to the platform.
Amazon wouldn’t want to lose a visitor that could be turned into a potential customer and buyer on their marketplace. What then did they do to get this problem solved?
- Solution Using Data-Driven Marketing
With the number of people that visit Amazon’s website and the diversity in demography, interest, preferences, and income level, you can tell that building a recommendation system would be a difficult task. Well, Amazon was able to do that by using a huge amount of customer data both the one provided by the customers themselves as well as the ones collected as the customers interact with the service.
Using the big data available for each individual, Amazon is able to know each customer including income level using your shipping details and other data it has collected and inferred. This together with other details is used to build a recommendation system that converts.
You maybe like, How to Scale up Your E-commerce Game through Instagram?
- Result of Data-Driven Marketing Exercise
The Amazon recommendation engine built in-house is one of the best recommendation engines built so far in the e-commerce space. It has been able to use the huge database of user behavioral data, personal, and contact data to understand customers better and recommend the items they would most likely buy. Two persons with high differences in their earnings wouldn’t get the same item recommended for them.
The engine has been built in such a way that the product that would be recommended is not only a product you would like but also a product you would likely afford, amazon seller data is also can be involved.
Using the Huge amount of data at their disposal, they have been able to build a system that personalizes marketing and improves their chances of selling their products.
3. Mercedes-Benz Uses Data For Marketing Automation and Customer Retention
The third and last example given on this page is how Mercedes-Benz utilizes data to improve marketing and customer retention. Mercedes-Benz has dealerships and workshops just like other brands. And like other brands too, customer loyalty seems to be dropping drastically which, to be frank, was expected.
However, Mercedes-Benz knows that it is not alone and there is definitely a way out of this. It understands that there is something it is getting wrong and once that is sorted out, it would be able to keep getting return customers without their loyalty dropping as it use to.
- Solution Using Data-Driven Marketing
Mercedes-Benz choose to develop 1:1 customer communication but as you know, with a huge number of users, that can be difficult to get done. So they developed an automated marketing campaign that seeks to improve customer retention and increase the number of customers who will continue to buy and return. They use customers’ data and details about the actions the customer carried out – or didn’t to determine how best to serve the customer.
The data provide answers to such answers as did they open the email sent to them or not. Are they satisfied? Did they buy any items? And much more. Let say a customer wasn’t satisfied, the automated marketing system would send such customers to detail to the support team to make things right.
- Result of Data-Driven Marketing Exercise
Mercedes didn’t provide the statistics for the automated marketing campaign. However, they did make it public that the data-driven marketing which was part of the automated marketing campaign was successful. They saw an improvement in the number of return customers, were able to recommend other products and understood their audience base more than they use to.
Overall, even though we do not have the actual details in numbers, we can tell that using data-driven marketing, the company has been able to improve its marketing campaigns and improve sales.
A Word About Data Size for Data-Driven Marketing
From the examples given above and most of the other examples on other web pages, you will have the thoughts that you need big data with complex relationships to adequately carry out data-driven marketing. In reality, it is not always like that. If your business does not handle big data but deal with regular data, you can use the data at hand.
Take, for instance, as a blog, we use data analytics to determine the best traffic source to focus our campaign on based.
All we needed to use is the data provided by Google Analytics. It is when you have a complex marketing task and that complexity can come in else, simple techniques would also work.
Conclusion
The above are just 3 out of the hundreds of thousands of data-driven marketing examples. It is hard to pinpoint a big business nowadays that does not make use of data for its marketing campaign. Smaller businesses are catching up and this has further increased the value of data and strengthened the statement that data is the new gold.
However, just having access to data that gives customer insights isn’t enough, you will need to know how to use it and that is where a specialist comes in.
