Make a Great First Impression on Your Prospects Using Big Data

Targeted marketing possibilities become endless when you use Big Data to help you understand your prospects on a more intimate, personal level. The opportunity for capturing data about prospects and customers has grown exponentially and, consequently, so has the information in our databases. When used properly, this “Big Data” can be used to segment, target and understand leads.

As long as you don’t cross the border into creepy territory, most consumers will appreciate being marketed to in a way that shows businesses understand what they want and need. By tapping into the information provided by Big Data, companies can further target messages to a point where they approach consumers as helpful and direct, rather than blasting irritating emails that reach everyone but really say nothing.

Tailor Your Email Campaigns

Big Data helps email marketers find better ways to speak to customers and tailor their campaigns, thus making a better first impression. Take one example of a massage offer described by Greg Samson, Vice President of Marketing for CheapAir.com, who spoke on a panel about Big Data at the Email Insider Summit held December 2011: Men were not converting on the offer as often as women, so the company used information it had to segment a group of married, home-owning men and crafted a message specifically for that group. The message was along the lines of “Next time you’re in the dog house, skip the flowers. Instead have a massage ready to go.” The conversions skyrocketed because the data had been used in a new, targeted way.

Imagine if the company would have sent out that message the first time around; the conversion rate would have been even higher without having had made a bad first impression.

Moving Toward One-to-One Marketing

The ultimate goal for email marketers should be to evolve past mass marketing toward one-to-one marketing; marketing is now about getting the right message to the right person at the right time in the right way.

The good news for marketers who haven’t been collecting data like this is there is third-party help that can be extremely effective. Specifically, demographic appending services can enhance your customer database with elements such as postal address, income, marital status, values, interests, lifestyle types, email addresses and phone numbers. In fact, TowerData can add hundreds of attributes to your database by matching email addresses or postal addresses to our consumer or business database. While we may not have reached one-to-one messaging yet, segmenting lists allows for much more targeted messaging.

If you are ready to dig into your own Big Data or simply expand on the information you are collecting about your leads, consider trying a demographic appending service that can provide the information needed to customize marketing. To learn more, contact TowerData today.

Photo credit: chrisjfry