12. Conclusion
• Your customer data is important
• Technology can help
• Use your expertise to gain wisdom from
your data
Notes de l'éditeur
Good morning. Introduction. Pleasure to be here etc. In my role over the past 2 years or so has invlved using the data we hold to aid our marketing efforts. So I’ll try to pass on some of that experience to you today. Nick mentioned yesterday about coming up with an interesting title, well I dint even get to come up with this title.
I have got an hour to fill so please feel free to ask questions as we go along.
So what I’d like to talk about today is about the use of customer data, and in particular using technology to maximise the use of customer data. The data that you hold, or have the potential to hold can be invaluable to marketing teams, and finding the right technology to use alongside it can be critical to a company’s, or council’s, success.
I’ll try to give you an overview of what Talis wants to achieve through its customer data and show you how we go about achieving it. I’ll even do some demos for you.
Data are attributes of a set of variable.
DATA - In its rawest form it can just be an Excel spreadsheet (other spreadsheet technology is available) and generally have little significance beyond the fact it exists.
INFORMATION – Data that has been given a meaning.
KNOWLEDGE – Appropriate collection of information, with the aim for it to be useful to the owner.
WISDOM – Brings in many other different variables (examples of that include moral/ethical codes, ie the bit that technology cant necessarily help with).
A nice example here would be a student who is revisiong for an exam. Knowledge is remembering enough to pass the exam. Wisdom is understanding the principles and applying your own theory and interpretation to what you have learnt… to which the answer might not necessarily be know.
I think we need to remember that with data…that technology can help make the most of it, but there still needs some human interpretation to fully realise its potential.
Now I’m not going to get into any complex database theory and creating SQL commands and all that business, mainly because I don’t know any, but having a database is very important.
It is a deposit of all the data you hold on anything. For us, that is customer data, prospect data, competitor data, contact data of individuals from all of these. You can keep whatever you like in here.
Having a comprehensive database management system is a good place to start to ensuring that your data can be easily interpreted. It will be structure your data and will have the technical capability to execute queries without needing the in-depth database query language knowledge. It will begin to add the relations between things in your raw data.
Database Marketing – So with relations between things being formed we can begin to do some database marketing. But what is database marketing?
Well, it’s a form of direct marketing to generate personalised communications to promote a product or service.
Where has database marketing come from?
Main drivers have come from :
Changing role of direct marketing:
move to customer relationship marketing for competitive advantage
decline is effectiveness of traditional mass media
Changing cost structures:
* lower electronic processing costs
* increase in marketing costs
Changing technology:
* Firstly the internet came along
* Ability to more easily target different types of customer with tailored communications.
Changing Economic Conditions:
* The need to measure and justify marketing activity and impact of marketing effort
[Contacts] – drop down view at top with various contact groupings. Some default, some custom.
[click through to contact] – run through top level stuff – core information. Scroll down to show all the data held.
[click through to account] -
[campaigns] – where we store all information around any campaign we may have.
parent/child campigns - smaller, more tactical campigns as part of a larger strategic campiagn
[reports] this is where we can query all our data to provide insight and affect decision making.
After a period of time we take a data export and delete to free up space.
‘Starts to build the knowledge needed for integrated marketing from all the information’
I thought I’d just quickly mention the Data Protection Act at this point. When you hold data you need to make sure you’re compliant. Most of the security issues will be taken care of by your database supplier. If you are holding data on spreadsheets then you may need to be extra careful with permissions given to files. Thee information we hold is personal but not sensitive data, so the rules and regulations around this are more relaxed.
mark.travis@talis.com
Security Token: gLXpUHiAAAbDuXEoWUBDE6ksG
As part of our integrated marketing campaign we send targeted monthly newsletters – Talis Customer News, Talis Public News, Talis Academic News, amongst others.
Emsil is a lot cheaper than direct mail… costs us less than 1 pence per email.
To do this we use vertical response – integrates with salesforce to allow us to track customer data in one place.
A/B testing of newlsetters – [say what it is]. helps evolve newsletter over time to determine what provides the best performance. Changes in content, style, design.
To do this we need to track the performance of the emails. [show VR Statistics tab]
There is also software out there that can send your email at a time it has worked out is best for the individual.
Need for statistics – look at usage levels, how often things are used. GA Set over a period of time. Using the information to make informed decisions.
Easy to install, customised, attractive interface and it’s free!
High level overview – allows you to easily see numbers of visitors over a certain period of time. The default time period is a month, but you can easily change that to see historical data. It also shows the total page views, number of pages per visit, bounce rate and average time on site. It also shows the percentage of new visits. Which is always useful to see how the traffic is growing.
Set up weekly emails, don’t need to keep remembering to keep going back
Traffic sources overview
(Click map) You can also click down further to see where people are accessing your site from. Presented attractively on a map, but also scroll down to see more detail on where people have come from to have a look at your site.
{Visitors}
[content - entrance paths / keywords]
[content - site search – overview] useful to find out what people are after. So with OPAC search terms. You can begin to understand how people navigate the site and perhaps more importantly, what they are searching for.
{in page analytics} nice way of showing the analytics overlayed on your site.
[goal setting]
Gives a lot of very useful statistical information that is important to making decisions.
Now if I can just show you this screen shot from Google Analytics to show how the University of Northampton have recently benefited from using google analytics. recently to look at how students have been using Talis Prism at the start of the academic year. [click to next slide]
This here is the University of Northampton library catalogue usage for the start of the academic year.
The students by Monday 27th, Talis Prism 3 is handling twice the previous traffic. On Tuesday there were 39,000 and by Friday they had reached 59,000.
By week beginning 4th October, students are returning, but freshers continue to make their presence felt on Google Analytics. The important metric Average pages per visit decreases as freshers log on to take a look at the system and play around with a few cursory searches before lectures start. On a similar vein, Average time spent on page has dipped and the bounce rate is up.
When looking at the stats you can start to see how usage patterns emerge. It seems obvious that the weekends have the lowest usage stats for the library catalogue but Fridays are now always the lowest weekday and Wednesdays/thursdays are the highest.
Need for statistics – look at usage levels, how often things are used. GA Set over a period of time. Using the information to make informed decisions.
Easy to install, customised, attractive interface and it’s free!
High level overview – allows you to easily see numbers of visitors over a certain period of time. The default time period is a month, but you can easily change that to see historical data. It also shows the total page views, number of pages per visit, bounce rate and average time on site. It also shows the percentage of new visits. Which is always useful to see how the traffic is growing.
Set up weekly emails, don’t need to keep remembering to keep going back
Traffic sources overview
(Click map) You can also click down further to see where people are accessing your site from. Presented attractively on a map, but also scroll down to see more detail on where people have come from to have a look at your site.
{Visitors}
[content - entrance paths / keywords]
[content - site search – overview] useful to find out what people are after. So with OPAC search terms. You can begin to understand how people navigate the site and perhaps more importantly, what they are searching for.
{in page analytics} nice way of showing the analytics overlayed on your site.
[goal setting]
Gives a lot of very useful statistical information that is important to making decisions.
Now if I can just show you this screen shot from Google Analytics to show how the University of Northampton have recently benefited from using google analytics. recently to look at how students have been using Talis Prism at the start of the academic year. [click to next slide]
With all this data collected we can start to shape users’ different content consumption methods. Many people prefer the less formal written style that comes across in blogs. At Talis we have a few different blogs, ranging from the Panlibus blog, which is a general library news blog to product specific blogs, with all the latest news relating to that product.
Podcasts are a useful medium to get some thought leaders ideas across to the marketplace.
We find videos are a great way to get information across in short bursts. The cost of these is small with price of technology and online editing software
Allowing people to comment helps us to understand and track our customers thinking. This can be classed as useful data and can provide insight into how the market as a whole is thinking.
Other technologies that I’m sure have been discussed already this conference are twitter, facebook, linkedin, and the other social technologies – although these are the main ones, and the ones which will bring most reward. Mainy because they are the largest, so the greater number of your customers will be on them. They also don’t seem to be a fad like many of the other web 2 applications (remember secondlife?)
Now I don’t pretend to be an expert in these web 2.0 marketing techiques but as a user, and i think you’ll probably agree, I would say that you need to make these fun channels of communication. This is likely to be where your friends are, so when you are there you’ll be in a frame of mind that may not necessarily be work. So the news you see and post needs to be interesting/informative but not too professional. {orkney libraries twitter nominated for an award for being funny and informative].
Data is important
Technology can help you get the best out of the data
But I have to stress that the quality of data is most important of all, much more important than what goes in your email or flyer. It can help you become a vibrant part of a vibrant community.
Questions to ask the audience:
What issues do you have with data?