In the past few years, we have seen an explosion in customer interaction channels, and customers utilizing all of them to make a purchase decision. Today, customers may receive a catalog or direct mail piece, search the web, receive and email and then go into the retail store to complete the purchase all in one transaction. So, which marketing effort should get the final credit for the transaction?
Most response allocation is determined by the channel that executed the campaign. Search would take credit for the purchase if it were made on the web, email would if the purchase came via a link in the email, the catalog would take credit if the purchase were made within a specified time frame of the catalog drop and the retail store would say that it was due to the Sunday insert they put out in the area. But...is it not true that all marketing efforts had a hand in the purchase?
How does one know where to spend the marketing dollar if we are allocating transactions to more than one source?
Enter the new era of response allocation
The solution resides first in having a solid methodology for data consolidation. One must be able to determine that the Joe Smith that came via search, is the same jsmith@email.com that is registered for the email program and the same Joseph Smith that made a purchase in the retail store. At Entiera, we utilize over 80 different sophisticated methods to consolidate customer data into a single marketing database. This enables the marketer to properly understand both the marketing efforts applied (be it search, email, direct mail, etc) and where the transaction occurred. From there, we can utilize one of three methods to ensure proper response allocation:
- Inferred Direct Response – Here we apply a rules based approach to determine which marketing campaign gets 100% of the response allocated.
- Fractional Allocation – with this method, Entiera applies a complex rules based approach that applies a portion of each response dollar to the proper marketing channel. For example, if a user receives an email, does a search and purchases on the web, we may apply 75% of the response dollar to the email and the rest to the search effort.
- Market Mix Model – the most complex of methodologies will employ statistical models to determine the optimal marketing mix across all channels.
|
 |
|