Why It's High Time You Jumped In The Pool
2006 has seen a huge increase in the development of prospect pools to the market. From the traditional mail order sector, to health & beauty, to Insurance and Financial Services, the demand for pools of customer and enquirer data is outstripping most data service provider’s expectations, which only looks set to increase into 2007 and beyond.
Educating data contributors as to the power of their data in the commercial marketplace is by far the largest hurdle in building any prospect pool. Marketers bandy-around buzz works like “return on investment”, but how many truly apply that to their own marketing databases? With ever-increasing cost per click rates (the motor insurance market regularly reaches £8) and an average conversion rate of 5%, where’s the smart thinking in spending a pile of money and leaving it to stagnate for up to 12 months before re-soliciting for business?
Data is increasingly moving up the agenda from the marketing team up to the boardroom – who now want to see their assets being leveraged in the most beneficial way, without impacting on their own current marketing practices.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be one of the big boys to be involved in data pools. They key ethic of a pool should be the scarcity and therefore the value of the data as opposed to simply the number of records you can add.
The benefits of pooling and accessing information from a range of sources are numerous:- enabling marketers to reach outside of the typically skewed lifestyle audience, a range of capture routines (high street branches, call centre, internet) allows a multi-channel route to market, a shared common trigger-point and unparalleled load/timing turnarounds (in some cases data can be traded immediately at point of completion by the customer).
But how do you police the prospect pool to ensure transparency and integrity for all? Increasing the amount of contributors instantly ups the data stocks available, but inevitably leads to more complex and intricate data survivorship strategies. It is theses strategies that lend the date its richness – providing a full path of life stage and transactional history for each individual.
Policing the pool also extends to ensuring responsible turn, churn and high performance management. Strict rules need to be commonplace, and a good datapool manager will be able to clearly demonstrate the ring-fencing capabilities of their database software to ensure the control of communications frequency and type.
With the hey-day of the “pile it high, sell it cheap” lifestyle data industry ebbing away, marketers are increasingly looking for smarter ways to get more flesh from their pound – turning away from a numbers game to a think smarter, work-harder data ethic. What can prospect pools bring to the data mix?
The essence of prospect pools are being increasingly well-recognised by data buyers across multiple industries – they are more cost-effective, can be better targeted, contained more accurate, transactional information and are consistently update, refreshed and replenished.
The flexibility to licence the date in a variety of ways, ranging from single use sales, dual/multi use to annual licence and data tagging arrangements, mean the user can select the means to market to best suit their purpose.
The accuracy of the data can be put to great use when harnessed in actively “de-selecting” customers who are unlikely to ever respond to your offer as much as selecting those who will. Given the breadth of information available before point of contact, marketers can run a risk-analysis prior to mailing and dump out those “unprofitable” prospects without even paying so much as the price of a stamp.
The data pool may sell less in volume terms but the performance on that data is exceeding many of the traditional lifestyle sources due to its unrivalled accuracy. There are a growing number of clients turning away from a multi-data approach with all its associated administrative nightmares, to a solus data pool approach – thereby still spreading performance risk across a number of data sources, but centralizing the buying approach.
This centralized buying approach not only leads to a clearer in-tray but has an arguably greater benefit for the buyer – as a sales negotiation tool. Buying everything “under one roof” means the arm-wrestling over prices better reflects a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.
The ultimate aim of a prospect pool is to continually build on the customer centric view, not only around the transactional nature of that customer but also by building in invaluable behaviour and response predictors (for example key buying and lifestage triggers).
Companies are increasingly looking at prospect pooling as an alternative, or at the very least as an addition, to lifestyle data. Prospect pooling has a big future – 2007 will be its biggest year to date!
(Precision Marketing - 2007: The Year Ahead)
Educating data contributors as to the power of their data in the commercial marketplace is by far the largest hurdle in building any prospect pool. Marketers bandy-around buzz works like “return on investment”, but how many truly apply that to their own marketing databases? With ever-increasing cost per click rates (the motor insurance market regularly reaches £8) and an average conversion rate of 5%, where’s the smart thinking in spending a pile of money and leaving it to stagnate for up to 12 months before re-soliciting for business?
Data is increasingly moving up the agenda from the marketing team up to the boardroom – who now want to see their assets being leveraged in the most beneficial way, without impacting on their own current marketing practices.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be one of the big boys to be involved in data pools. They key ethic of a pool should be the scarcity and therefore the value of the data as opposed to simply the number of records you can add.
The benefits of pooling and accessing information from a range of sources are numerous:- enabling marketers to reach outside of the typically skewed lifestyle audience, a range of capture routines (high street branches, call centre, internet) allows a multi-channel route to market, a shared common trigger-point and unparalleled load/timing turnarounds (in some cases data can be traded immediately at point of completion by the customer).
But how do you police the prospect pool to ensure transparency and integrity for all? Increasing the amount of contributors instantly ups the data stocks available, but inevitably leads to more complex and intricate data survivorship strategies. It is theses strategies that lend the date its richness – providing a full path of life stage and transactional history for each individual.
Policing the pool also extends to ensuring responsible turn, churn and high performance management. Strict rules need to be commonplace, and a good datapool manager will be able to clearly demonstrate the ring-fencing capabilities of their database software to ensure the control of communications frequency and type.
With the hey-day of the “pile it high, sell it cheap” lifestyle data industry ebbing away, marketers are increasingly looking for smarter ways to get more flesh from their pound – turning away from a numbers game to a think smarter, work-harder data ethic. What can prospect pools bring to the data mix?
The essence of prospect pools are being increasingly well-recognised by data buyers across multiple industries – they are more cost-effective, can be better targeted, contained more accurate, transactional information and are consistently update, refreshed and replenished.
The flexibility to licence the date in a variety of ways, ranging from single use sales, dual/multi use to annual licence and data tagging arrangements, mean the user can select the means to market to best suit their purpose.
The accuracy of the data can be put to great use when harnessed in actively “de-selecting” customers who are unlikely to ever respond to your offer as much as selecting those who will. Given the breadth of information available before point of contact, marketers can run a risk-analysis prior to mailing and dump out those “unprofitable” prospects without even paying so much as the price of a stamp.
The data pool may sell less in volume terms but the performance on that data is exceeding many of the traditional lifestyle sources due to its unrivalled accuracy. There are a growing number of clients turning away from a multi-data approach with all its associated administrative nightmares, to a solus data pool approach – thereby still spreading performance risk across a number of data sources, but centralizing the buying approach.
This centralized buying approach not only leads to a clearer in-tray but has an arguably greater benefit for the buyer – as a sales negotiation tool. Buying everything “under one roof” means the arm-wrestling over prices better reflects a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.
The ultimate aim of a prospect pool is to continually build on the customer centric view, not only around the transactional nature of that customer but also by building in invaluable behaviour and response predictors (for example key buying and lifestage triggers).
Companies are increasingly looking at prospect pooling as an alternative, or at the very least as an addition, to lifestyle data. Prospect pooling has a big future – 2007 will be its biggest year to date!
(Precision Marketing - 2007: The Year Ahead)
