Are You Getting the Most Value from Your Data?
You may remember the BASF commercials back in the 80’s and 90’s that always included the tagline, “We don’t make the products you buy, we make the products you buy better.” That line always stood out to me and I recently realized why. That line reiterates a core reason why companies partner with us and trust us to develop their customer experiences. Our clients have the tools at hand but rely on us for the strategy, implementation, enablement, and administration of those platforms and their related services.
On the analytics team, we improve the functionality of tools like Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target and increase the value they drive for our clients and their customers. As invaluable as technology is to marketers, solving business problems with data science is ultimately a human-centric endeavor.
3 Ways to Get Better Data
Almost every business question can be answered using an appropriate statistical model and the right data. To keep this focused, I would like to highlight three core pieces of analysis that expand the out-of-the-box functionality of Adobe Analytics and Target.
1) Group Like People
Most clients are trying to make sense of the audience segments that browse their site. Behavioral segmentation through cluster analysis can help companies utilize their first-party data to better understand what affinity groups exist. Clustering is an unsupervised learning technique that leverages an algorithmic approach to deal with the vast amount of information collected and surface segments in a way that drastically exceeds the capability of an analyst developing business classification rules. To accomplish this for our customers, we take the data out of Adobe Analytics, use statistical programming languages like SAS, R, or Python to develop statistical models, then pump that information back into Adobe Target to reach the audience with the modified personalized experience.
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2) Define the Customer Journey
It may not be an overstatement to say that there are as many paths through a company’s website as there are stars in the sky. A typical question we get from clients is ‘what path is most preferable’. To answer this, we specify the starting page, define the desired result and then study the sequence of events based on Adobe Analytics data. We use a machine learning technique called a Markov chain to pinpoint optimal steps in the journey. We can then optimize each page along the journey and better highlight the route with the highest probabilistic link to the customer achieving their goal. Experiences can then be modified in Target and measured to understand the improvement over the baseline.
3) Incentivize Purchasing Behavior
A valuable outcome-based segmentation approach is achieved through a modeling process called recency/frequency/monetary analysis, commonly referred to as RFM. RFM surfaces segments based on the Recency of their last purchase, the Frequency of all their purchases, and the total Monetary value of their purchases. The result allows us to do things like :
- Target groups who are high value, but missing in action, with targeted emails through Adobe Campaign
- Highlight groups who are biggest spenders who do not need additional incentives to convert
- Identify loyal customers and supply a welcome back message asking how they enjoyed their last purchase and promoting similar or complementary items
Is your Business Getting the Most Out of Analytics?
Adobe Analytics is a powerful tool that can provide fuel to talented data scientists working to solve problems like the ones above. By having a robust Adobe Analytics implementation and doing the right offline analysis, we can help take your digital analytics program to new heights – by providing data-driven insights to the organization, tailoring digital experiences for your customers, and measuring the ROI of those efforts.
Learn More About Our Analytics + Optimization Capabilities
Blue Acorn iCi’s Analytics team helps guide you and your organization to create actionable plans based on the data they’re receiving, as well as helping them collect data they never thought possible. This gives you the opportunity to deliver the right message to the right person through the right medium, on the right device, at the right moment. Contact us today to get started.