Every action taken in a business setting is a data point. Nowhere in business is more data generated than in the fields of marketing and customer relationship management. A great deal of the software and techniques developed to manage big data are grounded in the marketing function.
Assurety Consulting has developed and maintained some of the largest marketing and sales CRM solutions and databases in the world. Our work in updating them to focus on both physical and digital consumer and address profiles allows us to provide the following insights.
It’s imperative for your business to build a high-functioning customer analytics program, including conventional marketing metrics like customer satisfaction, lifetime value, and purchase frequency, as well as ones specific to the postal and parcel setting, like optimal routing, delivery days and times. Your business must obtain an opt-in to reach your customers digitally, learning their social media profiles to provide improved, customized services and cut your own delivery costs.
A McKinsey & Company study revealed that only highly sophisticated and organized analytics teams bring substantial value to the businesses that pursue them. Thus, implementing data analytics is a major investment that should be considered as such.
Rather than nursing a fledgling program along for years, organizations must develop a firm vision and allocate the resources necessary to achieve excellence. Let’s explore a few benefits of a robust analytical approach to managing your customer data.
Improved Marketing
Analytics give eCommerce, mailers, shippers, parcel and posts both bird’s-eye view and more granular insights into how consumers interact with and respond to their mail pieces and parcel products and services.
Lifetime value analysis
In order to run a profitable mail program with savings driven by logistics first mile opportunities for commercial mailers and eCommerce shippers, customer lifetime value must exceed the cost of acquisition. Customer analytics illuminate the total revenue each customer brings to the business, and can identify trends in geographies or demographics that deserve additional focus.
For posts and parcel delivery organizations, lifetime value analysis drives the development of new products and services for an offer to consumers and to business partners. The goal of this analysis is to improve the customer experience and simplify the end-to-end fulfillment, sortation, transportation, and delivery processes, all the while meeting or exceeding service performance metrics.
These efforts build trust with receivers of mail and parcel products and improve marketing ROI.
Targeted offers (reducing costs)
Customers acquired from disparate sources will carry with them behavioral and demographic profiles of varying detail. Multivariate analysis can unveil new market segments, leading to highly targeted campaigns which, although carrying higher setup costs than blanket campaigns, resulting in greater efficiency and reduced overall cost.
Predicting consumer behavior (increasing revenue)
Predictive analytics can be used to survey past customer interaction according to segment and develop a set of likely conditions for purchase. Factors like seasonal purchase history and records of the purchase of complementary goods help create campaigns that reach the customer at exactly the right time.
Parcel and Post organizations that are delivering direct mail and direct marketing product sample parcels to consumers can build a centralized database to track and improve the profiles of the address and consumers at the address. That data on who is sending what to an address can help develop future marketing data-driven products by the Parcel and post industry. These can, in turn, be sold to marketing organizations while remaining compliant to PII and GDPR rules through intelligent addressing schemes that don’t give out actual consumer and address data to marketers.
Fewer mailing errors
Your mailing costs are driven by how hard the Parcel or Postal delivery organization such as USPS has to work to get your mail in the hands of your customers. Capturing data at every touchpoint in the process and parsing it through purpose-built analytics drives efficiency and reduces both errors in the first mile and last mile planning and the USPS’ workload, and thus your costs.
Improve Distribution
Data analytics can bring together information about sortation, delivery routes, and customer expectations to deliver significant bottom-line savings. Classical problems like route optimization exist within every delivery company, but a strong analytics program can factor in details about the customer experience to make these calculations even more robust, assigning priority based on time-to-delivery and additional dimensions like per-customer benchmarks for prior deliveries.
Identify production bottlenecks
Managers may have intuition or direct observation about slow-downs in the production process, but data analytics can reveal bottlenecks and stoppages that aren’t easy to observe. Consider the old adage about the millions in savings resulting from putting one less olive into the jar at the factory—in a delivery setting, finding ways to shave seconds or minutes off of repetitive processes can deliver huge cost advantages. E.g., understanding how many times a piece (letter, magazine or parcel) is touched before it is ready for delivery and then optimizing and minimizing those touches through lean, six sigma-driven data analytics.
These activities can reap benefits in millions of dollars for tier 2 and 3 parcel and post organizations and in billions of dollars of cost savings for tier 1 delivery organizations. An enterprise-wide focus on six sigma-driven policies, processes, and data capture and analysis can cut costs and improve customer experience.
What’s the Status of Your Analytics Program?
Analytics are key to better understanding customer needs and then meeting them through excellence in delivery and marketing. Assurety Consulting has helped mailers, express organizations, and posts around the world take advantage of these opportunities, drawing from experience working with some of the largest players in the eCommerce, postal and parcel logistics industry.
We invite you to download our research on Big Data and Analytics or to contact us to discuss your challenges and opportunities today.
