Aug 2015 | Marketing Solutions

Customers are individuals

Customers are different and have specific behaviours and preferences which dictate how, and when, they want to be communicated with.

However, with potentially many millions of customers (or prospects) with whom to communicate, many different channels available, a multitude of messages and products, as well as limits on the volumes and timings of when those messages can be sent, it’s very difficult for organisations to determine what to send, when to send it and how.

Back to basics of business communications

If we go back to the basics of business communication, the problem that organisations face can be summarised by the simple question: how do I communicate with my customers in order to deliver maximum value?

The answer to this question must take into account the message, channel, contact details, location and frequency in order for a campaign to be successful.

We know that there is no simple answer as it can vary greatly depending on the customers and the channels. It would be impossible for organisations which have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of customers to manually design a bespoke contact strategy for each individual customer.

But there is a solution…

One of the solutions is to use a mathematical approach in order to design a process that accounts for specific customer behaviours and preferences, and builds a personalised contact schedule. This approach is called optimisation.

Optimisation takes the constraints – like the contact rules, budget or maximum campaign volumes for a given channel – and calculates the very best possible schedule. This saves time and generates value by sending the best message at the best time via the best communication channel to every single customer, whilst meeting any business constraints. It also ensures that organisations maximise the value of each message while ensuring they don’t over contact their customers.

What would you do?

By way of example, if there are five campaigns, seven days of activity planned, and each campaign is allowed to run on each day, then for each customer 35 choices are needed about whether to select them for a campaign or not. That may sound relatively straightforward, but it amounts to 34 billion different potential contact schedules – the planned communication activities – for just a single customer.

When making 35 choices for 6 million customers, the number of possible contact schedules is so large that it’s hard to think of a physical comparison. The number of stars in the universe doesn’t come close; the number of grains of sand on earth is tiny in comparison. So it needs a pretty smart way of making these choices which is exactly what Experian’s optimisation solutions do.

If you want to find out how Experian’s Optimisation solutions can help your organisations create a contact schedule tailored to each of your customers and, in doing so, help you to increase profitability, please call us on 0844 481 5638 or download our whitepaper.