David Shepard Associates Blog

Everyone agrees that optimal Data Driven Marketing involves promoting the right product with the right offer to the right person at the right time. Everyone also acknowledges that this is easier said than done.  Paying attention to seven critical factors will drive your success.

The concept of selecting the proper product to promote using the best channel makes considerably more sense to me than traditional product centric approaches which may degenerate into the senior product marketing manager getting access to the best customers.

That said, the way in which the optimization software is being marketed to marketing management, appears to dismiss some of the major factors that must be addressed in order to make its use successful. This paper is intended to identify these complicating factors so that they as they surface marketeers are at least aware of them and can work on solutions to address them.
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Want to drive higher responses and find a wealth of viable prospects in your database?

You’ll have to brave a bit of math. That is, you must segment your file and apply predictive models to it. And that’s a complex task. Above all, you have to know what models can and can’t do.
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At the DMA conference, the long standing debate over hosted (service bureau) vs. in-house marketing databases will continue.  In our experience, there is no one right answer.  Each organization must consider the issues of costs, speed, development, equipment and specialty software.

Which is cheaper?

Some claim outside service bureaus. There is the age-old argument of mark-up versus leverage. Some say if you do it in-house, you can avoid the mark-up of everything that is done by the service bureau. That is true to some degree. The other argument is that the service bureau can leverage equipment and resources across multiple clients. That is also true to some degree. It all comes down to:

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Does this sound familiar? You work for a retailer with a large catalog and Internet business. Your bosses figure out that not all customers are the same when it comes to brand loyalty, and that their purchase behaviors reflect this disparity.

They decide to divide the buyers into manageable clusters. Then they hire a market research firm to survey customers on their needs and perceptions.

And guess what? They put you in charge of the project.
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About two hours into our first meeting with a potential client we got around to asking The Big Question: what do you do when you get a new customer? And, the possible answers we were expecting to hear were:
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