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Sound familiar? You're not alone if it does. These are some of the comments we most often hear from our clients. The focus of Havill's Marketing Information Services (MIS) business group is to help answer these questions using business data. The mission of the MIS group is to turn data into useful business intelligence and actionable marketing leads. The MIS group provides four types of projects to support this mission.
Market Opportunity Analysis
Market Opportunity Analysis reports provide snapshots of market share and opportunity on a market by market basis.
Site Analysis Site Analysis projects can provide you with a profile or your current sites, or provide you with site specific information needed to evaluate the attractiveness of specific new locations under evaluation.
An array of Database Development, Mining and Modeling services are also available through the MIS group. In the most basic form, the MIS group can compile prospect databases for personal sales and direct marketing efforts. Using research and/or information from existing customer data, prospect data can be enhanced to help you identify potential sales on a prospect by prospect basis. Prospect databases can be scored to identify the prospects that look like your best customers.
Finally, Havill’s MIS group can help you make the most of your efforts through Direct Marketing Campaign Management. Havill can fulfill the data needs for your direct mail, telemarketing, and lead qualification efforts, manage the campaign, and then provide back-end analysis.
Market Opportunity Assessments
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Where should I focus my marketing efforts? |
| What markets offer the most opportunity? | |
| What is my market share in each market? |
One of the most common requests we receive is for market opportunity information. We have found that many of our clients know who their customers are, but don’t understand what their penetration is within individual markets, or how much opportunity remains. In the most basic market analysis, Havill’s MIS group can utilize your proprietary customer information, D&B business data, D&B data, and GIS software, to identify your market opportunity on a Regional, State, MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area), or block level basis.
More advanced analysis considers your existing facility locations and considers existing customer and prospect proximity to those facilities.
The most advanced Market Opportunity Assessments consider additional related demographic variables. For example, clients engaged in business-to-business marketing might consider population, number of businesses, individual market unemployment rates, and number of related businesses in their market opportunity assessments. Using economic indicators, these demographics can be expanded to predict future market opportunity.
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How can I determine if this site is attractive? |
| What is the demographic makeup of my existing locations? | |
| How does a potential site compare to my existing location? | |
| What locations are most attractive in this market? |
Identifying attractive sites for new locations can be a challenge. Havill’s MIS group takes the guesswork out of the equation, and provides useful, relevant data to be used in the site selection evaluation process.
Site Selection Assessments
Site Evaluation Study For some of our clients, the most useful first step in evaluating future sites is to evaluate existing sites. Unless you’re unique, it’s likely that some of your existing facilities outperform others. And, chances are, some grossly under-perform. Although gross over- or under- performance could be the result of marketing, an evaluation of existing facility demographics helps shed some light into factors that can be used to predict facility success or failure. Havill’s MIS group will plot your existing facility database relative to the appropriate market demographics. This information is analyzed for statistically significant trends, then reported back to your management team.
Once criteria differentiating successful and unsuccessful facilities are understood, they are used as part of future site selection. Sites under consideration are plotted relative to significant market demographics. Sites are evaluated for their potential performance. Findings are reported back to your management team.
In scenarios where locating a site relates to a new market entrance, it is not uncommon to pre-screen potential customers to gauge their receptiveness to your brand, product, or service. Using D&B data, potential customers around a site under evaluation are selected, then passed on to Havill MRC group for lead-qualification. Not only do you get information on the site potential, but also you are able to get insight into potential customers attitudes and opinions towards a potential new location.
Database Development, Mining, and Modeling
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Help! I need leads! |
| How can I associate sales potential with individual prospects? | |
| What do my best customers look like? | |
| How can I improve my direct marketing efforts and improve the response rate? |
Topic Overview
Okay. You’ve evaluated your markets. You’ve evaluated potential sites. You are ready to sell… but who do you sell to? How do you pick the best prospects? What sales opportunity does each prospect bring to you?
Havill’s MIS group offers an array of database development, mining, and modeling services to help with these problems. Filling the most elementary need, the MIS group can help you build a central sales and marketing database using D&B, third party, and proprietary prospect data sources. Next, potential sales opportunity can be attached to each prospect record using a data enhancement model designed for your product. Good Customer models are used to identify the prospects that look most like your best customers. Marketing Channel models help you identify prospects that look most like customers acquired through a specific marketing channel. Direct Mail and Telemarketing Response Models developed by the MIS group are designed to improve direct marketing campaign response rates.
Prospect Database DevelopmentIt’s surprising how often we encounter clients that do not have a centralized sales and marketing database. While the home office may be purchasing data for direct mail and telemarketing campaigns, sales reps may be relying on third party lists and their own grunt work to generate leads. Often, these lists are from different sources, redundant in some manner, in different file formats, and of varying degrees of accuracy and completeness. Furthermore, few clients take the time to compile this information into a central repository. After all, who has the time? The most common project performed by Havill’s MIS group involves compiling informative, useful, and centralized sales and marketing databases.
Typically, the MIS group will use D&B data as a basis for these databases. Existing customer data and prospect data is melded into this database, ensuring that your hard work to-date is not lost. Customers are flagged as such and the source of each data record is noted for tracking purposes.
Databases can be used later for direct mail and telemarketing program fulfillment. Likewise, these centralized sales and marketing databases can be handed off to Havill’s RMS (Relationship Management Systems) businesses for use in a system built and customized around your specific business needs and marketing practices.
The bottom line: You use one, centralized database for all of your sales and marketing efforts.
Data Enhancement Models Data Enhancement Models allow you to attach useful information to prospect records to identify how much opportunity a prospect can bring to your business. These models are built using your own business intelligence, research collected by Havill’s Market Research and Consulting (MRC) group, or from industry and government statistics. For example, a commercial fleet card company or fuel marketer may want to attach fuel consumption to individual records. Such a model would be built using data gathered through Havill MRC syndicated studies of the commercial fleet market. Similar models can be built for tires, paint, or another other vehicle related data.Since the data appended to the records relate back to a businesses sales, number of employees, SIC codes, and other business demographics, information can be appended for just about any industry.
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Good Customer Models & Good Customer Profiles Do you know what your customers look like? Sure, you know how many widgets they bought last month. And, you know they paid their bill on time. But, do you know how many customers you have in that industry? How many employees they have? Their sales volume? Number of locations? Although it may not seem to matter, it probably does. Chances are that you attract certain types of customers. Your sales and marketing efforts would probably benefit if you would focus on that type of prospect. Havill’s MIS group can append useful business demographics to your existing customer database, then use that information to build a profile of those customers. This profile, or template, can then be applied to a prospect database to identify prospects that fit the same demographic profile as your existing customers. This approach is especially useful when the existing customer data set has fewer than 10,000 records. A more sophisticated approach can be taken with larger customer data sets. Using historical sales information in your customer database, a model can be developed to forecast sales opportunity associated with each prospect. Or, in a similar sense, each prospect can be scored to identify how well it resembles your best customers. The bottom line: Good Customer Models can focus your sales team on the best prospects. |
Marketing Channel Models
Although it’s not true for every product and company, we’ve helped our clients find trends within the marketing efforts themselves. Some prospects lend themselves to telemarketing and direct mail, others to personal sales.
Direct mail, telemarketing, and personal selling efforts by soliciting customers most likely to respond to a particular marketing approach can improve your marketing efforts. If your current customer database has historical information differentiating the marketing channel used to acquire new customers, then prospects can be scored on how well they resemble customers picked up through different marketing approaches.
Direct Mail and Telemarketing Response Models Another approach to streamlining your direct mail and telemarketing efforts is to develop a direct mail and telemarketing response model to improve your response rates. This model uses historical information from previous campaigns to identify the prospects most likely to respond to a future campaign.Although similar in intent, response models differ from marketing channel models. Marketing channel models are especially useful when trying to identify prospect types that do not lend themselves to particular marketing channels. But there’s another side to the coin.
Some of our clients believe direct mail and telemarketing to be cost-effective ways to maximize exposure at a reasonable cost with little effort. But, response rates can suffer with this approach. Response models use historical campaign information to isolate subsets of your prospect data that are unlikely to respond.
Direct Marketing Campaign Management
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How can I improve my direct marketing programs so I am only contacting qualified contacts? |
| How can I improve my direct mail and telemarketing response rates? | |
| I need a better understanding of my direct mail and telemarketing campaigns... |
Direct Marketing List FulfillmentTopic Overview
The most frequent comments we hear from our clients about their direct mail and telemarketing campaigns is that they suspect under-performance. They don’t know if they are mailing to the right audience. They don’t know if they are buying the right list. Although most clients know what their response rate is, they don’t understand why it’s not better.
Havill’s MIS group is often called upon to play a role with client direct mail and telemarketing campaigns. In addition to supplying the data and analyzing the results after the campaign, we may be asked to coordinate the activities of the different partners to ensure that the campaign goes off without a hitch.
Clients most frequently rely on Havill for list fulfillment services. The MIS group can quickly fulfill your data needs for direct mail and telemarketing campaigns through our partnership with D&B. In addition, we can supplement your data needs with third party sources of your choosing. If we have helped you compile a centralized sales and marketing database, we’ll usually draw on that source for the list.
But the real value is what we can do with that data. If we have helped you build a marketing channel or response model, we’ll apply that information to the prospect data set to improve your direct marketing audience. Or, if you have your own model, we can apply that too. The MIS group will also help you geographically select your prospects to ensure you are not wasting mail or telemarketing dollars on a prospect that is unlikely to become a customer. And, if your campaign involves a pre-approved solicitation, we will forward the target prospect data to D&B for credit approval using their criteria or yours. This way, you are paying only for records and credit scores for records you intend to use, helping you get the most bang for your data dollar.
Direct Marketing Campaign Results AnalysisSo, you have mailed 500,000 pieces and you have another 8,000 customers to show for it. Who accepted your offer? Are they the type of customers you want? What about next time? How can you improve? Do your respondents fit a certain business demographic profile based on sales, number of employees, and SIC code? Is there a geographic trend? Both? Neither? You don’t know unless you look.
By coding each mail piece before it goes out, then coding it when
it goes into your customer database, the results of your mail campaign can be analyzed to
identify who responded and who did not, and to analyze that data for trends that can be
incorporated into future campaigns. Depending upon the quantity of data you have available
for analysis, a response model or marketing channel model can be developed to help you
more scientifically select future prospect data.
Most of our clients have experience working with specific vendors for list fulfillment, creative, and mail drop. Representatives from the MIS group participate with these other vendors on the direct marketing campaign team, and will often coordinate timelines and action items for our client. But, if you are looking for a change and have little experience in coordinating these direct marketing efforts, Havill’s MIS group will work with you in coordinating your marketing campaign. Havill has established relationships with companies that provide creative and mail drop services and will coordinate their efforts for you, providing you with a one-stop-shop.