Ten tips on how to make your marketing MI system using unique telehone numbers (UNTs) efficient, effective and accurate.

1. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Ten tips: Getting the most from
your Unique Telephone Number
Marketing MI system
Martin Wright
Martin Wright Associates
The Studio
15 Bloomfield Grove
Bath BA2 2BZ
Tel: (01225) 336977
martin@martinwrightassociates.co.uk

2. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Most companies struggle with
measuring marketing effectiveness
• Growing channel diversity and increasingly complex customer
behaviour has made marketing measurement a lot messier.
• UTNs (unique telephone numbers) have become the method
of choice for most large direct marketers
• Different telephone numbers used on each test cell can work
across all media and is more accurate than source codes:
– Customers don’t have to look up codes, nor Agents ask for them
allowing both to focus on the customers’ needs.
• Here you’ll find 10 practical tips to help you get the most from
your UTN measurement process. If you want more, or just to
pick my brains you can contact me on +44 (0) 1225 336977 or
martin@martinwrightassociates.co.uk

3. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 1 – Reduce admin: Manage your
UTNs efficiently
• Companies with a large Direct Marketing spend will need a
bank of 300 – 400 UTNs.
• A simple database is needed to record:
– What campaigns each UTN has been used for
– A start date and end date
– A detailed description of the campaign (see 4).
– And it should show, at-a-glance, what UTNs are available for any future
start date.
• Best practice is to ring-fence subsets of numbers for use
against a specific product and media:
– This minimises the impact of long-tail response and can reduce
production costs.

4. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 2 – Speed up reporting: Use
response curves to shorten
measurement windows
• Accuracy and reporting speed need to be balanced :
– How quickly do you want your marketing campaigns to evolve?
– Will results released 3-months after a campaign create impact?
– Do campaign managers have to analyse twice?
– Do you have enough UTNs to allow a long maturity cycle?
• Across a basket of offline media it will take 12 weeks on
average for results to fully mature
– Cutting off and analysing at 95% maturity reduces that to 8 weeks
– And at 90% maturity to 6 weeks.
• Run a few campaigns to completion to build response curves:
• Call time at 98% for press and email and 95% for other media.
• ‘Immature’ results can then be weighted to allow for full maturity.

5. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 3 – Avoid errors: Test every UTN
before every campaign
• This sounds basic but, before you go to production check
every number:
– Proof read against the database
– Check the campaign description on the database
– Ensure the number is live
– And that it is routed to the right team
• Otherwise mistakes will happen that may invalidate expensive
test programmes, create customer irritation and undermine
marketing credibility.

6. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 4 – Make analysis intuitive: Use
a strict campaign description
• Good naming can give transparency when looking at reports.
• Consistency ensures like-for-like comparisons are made over
time and trends to be seen.
• A naming convention must cover all eventualities but not
create too much complexity obscuring the big picture.
An example of a naming convention
Category Data Category Data
UTN 0800 123 4567 Contact type Follow-up
Drop date dd/mm/yyyy Size/Format DL
Stop date dd/mm/yyyy Creative Control
UTN Code abc 012 Offer None
Product A Test Timing + 5 days
Medium Direct Mail Description Long-hand description
Title/list Database A Contact volume 11,000
Segment Risk adverse Cell Cost £x

7. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 5 – Analyse call handling
efficiency: Measure repeat callers
• UTN analysis can give marketers sight of quality issues like
out-of-hours, abandoned and engaged calls. Just as important
are repeat calls
• These often indicate poor sales processes or call answering
and vary by medium and time of day
– For one Client the most efficient medium generated half the number
of repeat calls (1 in 6) than the least efficient (1 in 3)
• Avoid being mislead and investing in inefficient campaigns by
de-duplicating using the CLI (callers telephone number)
– Repeat calls also provide a good measure of call answering
effectiveness and can be used to analyse the opportunity cost of lost
callers.

8. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 6 – Understand call quality:
Measure call duration
• If UTN data cannot be appended to customer sales records
(see tip 8) then a sales proxy is needed
• The most successful approach, pioneered by UTN outsource
provider Rapport, is call duration
• By timing how long it takes to get through the IVR and the
minimum time it takes to make a sale, an indication of call
quality can be produced:
– Any call less than the IVR time + minimum sale time is very unlikely to
have resulted in a sale.
• Whilst not perfect it gives a ready proxy for call quality
allowing a comparison of the number of high value calls test A
generated compared to test B

9. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 7 – Track callers’ IVR behaviour:
Apparent ROI can be wrong
• How callers use the IVR can skew results:
– Some people use the first number they find to contact a company
– Others seek 0800 numbers to talk to customer services for free
• A FS client saw very different behaviour for different products:
– Product A had a large, long-standing base. B had a smaller, newer base
– The estimated response value for each product was wrong. Analysing
call flows through the IVR is simple but important if response values
are to be estimated accurately
Product A Product B
Calls to sales UTNs 100 100
Estimated value £9,000 £6,000
Calls transferred to
Customer service
37 11
Calls transferred to other
product sales team
12 3
Actual same product sales
calls
51 94
Actual value £5,310 £5,430

10. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 8 – Create a joined up picture:
Add UTN Code to the customer
record
• ROI is best measured by appending a UTN Code to the
customer record
– This can be automated or done manually by Agents inputting a code
presented to their screen or whispered into their headset.
– Because UTNs are recycled a unique ‘UTN Code’ for each UTN/date
range combination is required.
• Call data remains useful to monitor
call quality and handling efficiency.
Ultimately three data sets can be
combined using UTN Code as the
common key:

11. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 9 – Empower marketers: Build
an automated reporting system
• With data processes and appending routines in place
campaign evaluation can begin with confidence!
• Standard reports need to be designed providing all the
standard answers needed by marketing every month. Many
companies need two sets of reports:
– Those for business usage - ‘In January we spent £x and generated £y’
– Plus those for marketing evaluation purposes - ‘We spent £x on
campaigns in January that generated £y in the subsequent x months’
• A reporting system that allows non-technical people to
interrogate results is very powerful
– Whilst some central reports are vital, IT support is normally too scarce
to support every required campaign deep-dive

12. Direct Marketing
Consultancy
Tip 10 – Do it right: Get experienced
help
• Marketing MI can be complex but don’t be put off, it’s simply
too important.
• Spending the time and money required to get it right will pay
handsomely by avoiding inefficiency, inaccuracy and ill
informed marketing decision making
• In high pressure marketing environments direct marketing
consultancy support ensures all the detailed planning is done
and the right systems created and embedded.
• If you would like more information, or a free impartial view of
your marketing analytics challenges then contact me on +44
(0)1225 336977 or martin@martinwrightassociates.co.uk