Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Adnan Arnautlija
Digging through sources and materials for our weekly topic on business intelligence and predictive analytics, I felt a bit overwhelmed with the sheer volume of what you can find, but also with what you can do with this technology. I wanted to know more about its applications, and more importantly, the results! As things started settling in place, I ran across a couple of case studies that vividly show the impact of IBM’s solutions for data driven marketing on business results.
The first one to surface was the case study of Studio Moderna, which is behind many brands widely known and respected in the SEE region, including Top Shop, Delimano, Walkmax, Kosmodisk and so on. This company has a reach of over 300 million consumers in 20 countries across Central and Eastern Europe, and handles 8.5 million orders across a range of more than 300,000 products. It manages 150 transactional websites, 100+ Facebook pages, 311 retail stores, 30+ call centers and has coverage on over 400 TV channels, including three of its own. Now you can imagine that such a network provides a vast pool of data to use, but a few years ago Studio Moderna realized that it wasn’t using its potential to its full.
Despite the wealth of data, the company had no way of using it to optimize its marketing. Most of the emails the company sent out ended up in spam folders, or weren’t opened up and acted on. So in an effort to increase ROI, the management decided they wanted to achieve three goals: growth of revenue through improved email deliverability; higher customer lifetime value through an increase of opened emails and click-through rates by making their emails more relevant to individual consumers through the sophisticated use of behavioral data; and email marketing efficiency through the automation of processes, while still enabling a high level of personalization.
They decided to utilize IBM Marketing Cloud to help them establish an automated system for delivering highly relevant emails to new and existing customers. The solution consisted of three key elements. First, the IBM Marketing Cloud team focused on ensuring that emails from Studio Moderna actually arrived in the intended recipients’ email inboxes by improving the company’s whitelisting reputation. They also set up a dedicated IP address used as the source of all communications, and aligned the send-out phases with those of the big regional ISPs. Second, Studio Moderna built individual user profiles by integrating data about its online, email, TV and offline shopping habits, combining it further with other data sources such as loyalty program and purchase history information. Here, IBM Marketing Cloud gives Studio Moderna a wealth of insight to use in tailoring campaigns with dynamic content aimed at specific users. And third, the automation of email marketing enabled Studio Moderna to process increasing volumes of data and react with user-specific communications that increase the likelihood of a sale.
The results were spectacular. The white-listing reputation work increased email deliverability from 20% to 99.9%. The ability to combine data sources made Studio Moderna’s communications far more relevant and timely, resulting in a 59% increase in email open rates, and an 8% year-on-year increase in click-through rates. What does this all mean? Well, Studio Moderna now generates 30% of its total revenue through automated emails enabled by IBM Marketing Cloud.
Studio Moderna Head of Digital, Jernej Petrin had this to say: “We needed an automated email messaging solution that would be able to generate behavioral data, and then process and correlate it based on defined events, in order to trigger personalized messages at exactly the right time in the buying process. All of this needed to be automated, and ensuring maximum delivery rates was also crucial. Since implementing IBM Marketing Cloud, we have seen a considerable increase in ROI by streamlining the deliverability of emails at source and providing bespoke content that is highly relevant to the recipient. None of this would have been possible without IBM Marketing Cloud.”
Another satisfied customer is Conrad Electronic Ceská Republika s.r.o., a subsidiary of the Germany-based online retailer Conrad Electronic SE. This company offers a wide range of products including computing equipment, multimedia devices, modeling systems, home-automation tech, etc. Conrad Electronic also wanted to increase their revenue, bring in new customers and enhance customer loyalty. Their goal was to decrease the email bounce rates and increase email open and click-through rates. They employed IBM’s Silverpop software, now known as IBM Marketing Cloud, to the same end as Studio Moderna. It enabled them to dynamically build tailored emails and promote products with the particular customer in mind.
In collaboration with their business partner, VIVmail.cz, Conrad developed seven new automated marketing programs using the new platform, including a welcome program that helps acquire new customers, a cart-abandonment program that targets customers who did not proceed to purchase, so that Conrad can offer help with the completion of the order or send discount emails, and a reactivation program that offers specific discounts to idle customers. All these programs are triggered based on the customer’s actions and behaviors, or the time when the customer meets specific segmentation criteria.
And what were the results for Conrad? An increase of annual revenue by 56% within six months, email open rates grew by 79%, click-through by 50%, email delivery rate jumped to 99.22%. Business wise, this meant an overall increase in turnover since implementation of the tool by 220%.
Another interesting document I came across was a research note from Nucleus Research, which conducted research into the experiences of IBM customers. In October 2014 Nucleus Research examined the aggregate data of ROI case studies published on IBM customers, and found that during the first three years of deployment, for every dollar spent a company got back an average of $14.79. This year, as a follow up to these activities, Nucleus independently decided to reassess the results achieved by IBM’s customers, and found that the average ROI per dollar spent has increased to $15.82 – an increase of 7% compared to 18 months ago.
This latest study included US and European companies and government agencies using IBM applications across sales and merchandising, marketing and analytics. According to their conclusions, key elements to the financial success of their projects included: rapid implementation times, as customers were able to implement their projects in weeks or months, or were able to break them down to self-funding phases to achieve incremental returns at each steps; focus on productivity, where implementation of more scalable and usable solutions enabled marketing and analytics users to automate processes, freeing up time for other activities; IBM solutions’ enablement of new lines of business, where customers were able to use IBM’s applications to open new commerce channels or support completely new lines of business; and integration, where IBM’s solutions could be integrated with existing or new applications and data sources, with the ability to execute integration projects more rapidly and predictably.
Given all the information above, and the insights provided over the last week, it’s easy to recognize the value of data in marketing today. And yet, in the SEE region there is still some resistance to embracing digital in business, most commonly explained with “we’re not tech people.” Every job has its tools, and with the evolution of technology comes the evolution of marketing as a job, along with the evolution of tools that have to be used to do this job properly. IBM has a perfect tool for the job in its Marketing Cloud, tailored to help marketers in adopting data driven marketing without having to have a technical PhD, as evident from the video below. With tools like this, creativity gets the wind of data in its sails, enabling Mad Men to become Math Men.
https://youtu.be/y92VBwViqn4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Gt71B7e_Y
You can find more about data driven marketing in South East Europe here: https://ibm.biz/Bd4k7N