Beyond Demographics—Do you really know your customers?

The ultimate way to reach out to your customers and prospects would be to get to know each one individually—learning their individual tastes and interests; whether they prefer a phone call, an email or a visit.  You would begin to keep track of birthdays, the birth of children, vacation plans. You would begin to tailor everything about your offer and approach to their unique preferences, stage of life and life events.

Finding cost-effective ways to approach this level of personalized communications has always been the Holy Grail of sales and marketing.  Demographic characteristics—age, gender, marital status, presence of children, ZIP Code™—have been available for a long time and are tools that continue to provide valuable targeting information.  But times change.

Economics, cultural change and technology are increasing the demand for communications that are more personal, more appropriate and delivered with pinpoint timing.  The Internet and social networks are taking personalization to new levels with user-generated content.  The pace of life is quicker, so marketers have only a split second to capture attention with a mailing, an email or an ad.  Rising costs are driving marketers to continually find better ways to improve return on investment by increasing response and lowering costs. 

Fortunately, one of the consequences of the data revolution is that our ability to store ever-increasing amounts of information about consumers at a lower and lower cost provides marketers with better and better opportunities to address customers as individuals.  The quality of the data is improving as well.  Advances in micro-segmentation, behavioral data, transactional information, trigger life events and online data gathering are combining to create databases with vast stores of information that are the key to more personal and effective customer communications.

One of the biggest challenges for marketers today is not accessing the data, but finding a cost-effective way to make it actionable.  It’s not that difficult for marketers to work with a fairly limited set of demographic attributes to create a targeted mailing list.  But with the vast amount of data now available, we need technology not just to store the data, but to apply it as well.

Acxiom is the market leader in developing analytic and predictive modeling tools that can help you leverage the power of consumer data with Acxiom’s PersonicX® and Acxiom On Demand Targeting™, an integrated suite of services.

Our experienced account team can take you step-by-step through a marketing program that uses PersonicX to help you get to know who your customers really are—and then uses that portrait analysis to develop a predictive mailing model to improve results.

Here are the three steps to more predictive results:

Step 1:  Analytics help you know who your customers really are.

The most reliable way to find new customers is by understanding the look of your existing customer base—their demographic characteristics, their behavioral attributes, their transaction history, their life events, their wealth indicators, their interests and affiliations.  Acxiom can provide you with a customer portrait report and a customer acquisition model that provide the foundation for more targeted customer acquisition campaigns.

Acxiom can analyze your customer base by correlating it with thousands of nationwide consumer selection criteria to find those factors that correlate most highly with your customer base.  We score every household from 1-100 on their likelihood to respond to your campaign. Acxiom covers 99% of all households in the U. S. using more than 100 independent data sources, providing the ability to recognize more than 1,500 household characteristics.

You get the most in-depth portrait analysis of your customers that can be obtained.

Step 2:  Enhance your customer file for improved results

Based on the results of your customer portrait report, we can enhance your customer and prospect database by appending the demographic, wealth, lifestyle and behavior data that correlates most highly with your buyer portrait. This enhanced customer information can help you cultivate your current customers more personally and effectively.

You can also enhance your file by adding email addresses and phone numbers.  A well-coordinated, multi-channel approach to marketing communications will improve results.  Email, in particular, is a very effective and less expensive way to reinforce your message and send timely offers.

Acxiom data hygiene services can save you money by helping you keep your customer file contact information up-to-date. 

Step 3:  Increase response to your marketing campaigns

Acxiom can provide you with a predictive customer acquisition model that can significantly increase the response to your marketing campaigns.  You receive a list of prospects from Acxiom’s InfoBase-X™ Consumer File that is specifically created to target your best prospects.

Acxiom’s InfoBase-X Consumer File is the most complete, comprehensive and accurate source of consumer data available covering 124 million households and more than 200 million individuals.  

When you combine the Acxiom InfoBase-X Consumer File with PersonicX and On Demand Targeting, you can make use of the full potential of consumer data and predictive modeling to deliver significantly better results and return on investment.

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