With the large number of options that customers have today, it is becoming increasingly tough to hold their attention. The situation is so competitive that the minute they leave your website, your store or your office they are at a risk of being pried away by your competitors with some new marketing gimmick, tactic or strategy.

If you have had the good fortune of acquiring some customer and doing business with them once, you must make sure that they continue to come back for more. The need of the day is to block competitors away. However, you cannot stop the competition from approaching your customers. Therefore, you must work on your customers in order to ensure that competition cannot take them away.

The whole idea is to engage in customer loyalty marketing so that you can ensure that the customer is no longer open to the ideas that competition puts forward in front of them. By providing the best offering that the customer may want, you can change the state of mind of your consumer. It requires a receptive mind to listen to what customers are saying.

The essential steps to ensure customer retention and loyalty have been listed here. These three steps of customer loyalty marketing can ensure that your relationship with the customer becomes so strong and invulnerable that it becomes everlasting.

1. Personalized and customized communication
The Internet allows us to be far more personal than ever before. Avoid techniques that club all the customers into one large group. Segment your customers with demographics, behavior, and opinion data and then target them with the words that they want to hear. The level to which you segment depends on the kind of clientele that you have and the base that you service. If your clientele is extremely up scale and you have a few customers that give the company a large amount of profit and revenue, then individual attention and communication is necessary. In such one-on-one marketing the marketer needs to have specific information about the client’s preferences, so that you can identify the needs, differentiate your services, interact with the customer and then customize all communication accordingly.

2. Real time customer engagement
Time is extremely critical in the whole process of customer loyalty marketing. A slight slip or delay can cause competition to be on your back trying to snatch away all your clients. What marketing people need is a system that can help alert them immediately about specific aspects to look into. One does not have the luxury to wait for the month’s aggregated report to come through in order to take overall decisions. High speed analytics that can offer immediate information that needs action is the essence of the day. Delivering such speed in terms of all offerings requires the entire company to be in tune with the culture of the company so that there are no delays ever – even of a split second.

3. Customer retention and satisfaction
Customer retention is one of the aims of customer loyalty marketing and customer satisfaction is one of the various metrics that leads to a better understanding of retention. While satisfaction is a measure, retention is the goal that needs to be achieved. When you indulge in customer loyalty marketing, you focus your energies and marketing budgets towards the customers that you have. With increasing competition, stagnant or mature markets and the rising cost of reaching out to new customers, customer retention and loyalty have become extremely important. It is not right to assume that customer satisfaction is enough to achieve customer retention. It is possible to have high customer satisfaction and yet lose a customer. This is something that can happen if the product category is a low involvement product or there are various substitutes that are possible or even when the cost of switching is low.

Mineful, an analytical application focused on customer retention, today announced that Chief Executive Officer Jaime Brugueras will present at the 2011 O’Reilly Strata “The Business of Data” Summit, to be held September 20-21 at The New York Marriot Marquis. Brugueras’ presentation is part of Strata Launch Pad where 5 companies got selected to get on stage and tell the world what they’re up to.

Brugueras will discuss the big gap that exists today with analytics and benefits and how Mineful is bridging this gap by using predictive alerts and actions to retain customers. Viewers will also get an ‘under the hood’ look at Mineful’s algorithms and how they are giving e-commerce websites a competitive advantage and higher customer lifetime values.
For more information on the 2011 O’Reilly Strata ‘The Business of Data’ Summit, please visit http://strataconf.com/summit2011/.

About Mineful
Mineful helps companies use data to retain customers. No reports! An analytical application that takes action when it identifies patterns of disloyalty and dissatisfaction. Mineful integrates with major CRM and e-commerce platforms, uses its algorithms to detect customers at risk, and then provides the communication tools needed to entice customers to buy back from you. For additional information, go to http://www.mineful.com/.

UPDATE: Here is the presentation

Even when email marketing that is done using an opt-in list there are some effectiveness concerns that need to be addressed. We have heard a zillion times about the right communication at the right time. And when we use mass email marketing we are basically trying to use the same strategy on all the customers irrespective of their purchase frequency, online behavior, loyalty, satisfaction or engagement. In addition, mass email marketing does not even customize the content of the emails based on the basic segmenting parameters such as gender, age or income.

Creating emails based on customer segmentation is far more effective. This is something that can be done by using smart consumer analytics options. Consumer analytics can help you slice the data in various ways. You can look at gender specific behavior, age related purchase patterns, purchase frequencies of heavy, medium and light users, product purchase mix differences and the manner in which the products are upgraded.

When you use consumer analytics data judiciously you shall be able to ensure that your customers are happy and satisfied; something that is a step towards increasing the customer lifetime revenue. In addition to looking at various segments of people, predictive analytics can also ensure that you are able to take corrective measures to retain customers that may be on their way out. Look at the historical data of defectors, analyze the reasons why they have defected and then study the patterns of behavior that have led to the defection. Once this is analyzed, you shall be able to identify similar patterns in the current customers that you have. Being able to change the course of customers that are likely to defect can be one of the largest savings that you provide the company.

Some of the steps that marketers have been able to take by using such consumer analytics and predictive analytics include:
- Sending smart and timely emails to customers for the next product that they could purchase.
- Emails about discount offers that are relevant and usable.
- Updates about the various innovative products that the company is engaging in
- Invites to special events
- Detecting fraud loan or mortgage customers can help reduce the level of loan defection and therefore losses.

Modeling can be done to ensure that you contact those people who are likely to respond. This can ensure that you do not waste time trying to contact people who are not likely o respond anyways or those that are likely to take action irrespective of your email.

While these are marketing tactics that most people use, the timeliness of the emails and the manner in which they are created for the right audience is what can make a difference in the level of conversion that you get.

After being a marketing consultant for more than 5 years, I have come to the conclusion that reports are useless. Business intelligence companies are focused on providing “actionable insights” via web-based dashboards and charts, but very few times is this information used strategically.

Businesses spend thousands of dollars a year on solutions that create fancy reports and dashboards. These solutions are mainly queries about the current state of the organization like quarterly sales, the number of repeat customers, and customer satisfaction indices. Since they only provide the current state of affairs rather than predicting and alerting, the damage is already done. By the time you read the report sales are already down, customers that for some reason stopped buying from you are long gone, and dissatisfied customers already reviewed your service badly!

The Why Question
The “why” question is hardly ever answered in reports. Yes, sales are down I know, but why? Is it a service, product, distribution, demographic, economic, or inventory problem? By looking at raw counts the important answer as to why things happen can only be speculated.

Lack of Action
The lack of action in these business intelligence reporting solutions is the main problem. If data analysis can spot business opportunities, then why can’t one easily act on this information? Charts take time to decipher and a marketing strategy needs to be presented to higher executives in the hopes that something is done to improve a process. When businesses do not have an easy or automatic approach to act on the information, it becomes very hard to profitably use data as a competitive advantage.
When important information is aggregated to create KPIs, business opportunities are lost. For example, when one looks at a customer satisfaction index trend, one can easily miss that one of your most important clients was very dissatisfied with your product or service. Dig into the data and you will find your treasure, but don’t spend a lifetime because you might pay more to find it.

Small businesses lack the resources and knowledge to implement these BI tools. Therefore, they only look at accounting reports: income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. Although important, accounting cannot be the resource to find profitable opportunities and ways to generate profits. Larger business are using data to their advantage, but implementation of BI solutions takes months and usage of data to their advantage trails at least 60 days from the collection of the data.

A company who is acting on information in real-time is Harrah’s Casino. According to Thomas Davenport author of “Competing on Analytics”, Harrah’s uses predictive modeling to identify current customers who are most likely to stop being customers. Their customer loyalty management system, among other things, weighs a number of variables (including demographic variables and the amount of business the customer gives Harrah’s) in order to contact and recommend hotel activities to entice these disengaged customers back to their hotels.

Relying on reports to run a business is not a competitive advantage anymore. How a company acts on data is what helps a business make more money. Fancy business intelligence tools can provide pretty charts and entertainment to some, but in the end they are just useless.

About the Author
Jaime Brugueras, CEO and Co-founder at Mineful
Jaime graduated with a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Illinois and worked as a marketing consultant for more than 5 years. As a marketing analyst, Jaime saw a gap between analytics and actual benefits to a company. He co-founded Mineful to bridge that gap and help companies take action based on analytics.

Connect with Jaime
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/marketinganalytics
Twitter: @brugueras

About Mineful
Mineful is helps companies use data to retain customers. No reports! An analytical application that takes action when it identifies patterns of disloyalty and dissatisfaction. Mineful integrates with major CRM and e-commerce platforms, uses its algorithms to detect customers at risk, and then provides the communication tools needed to entice customers to buy back from you. If customer retention is important for your organization, Mineful is right for you.

Mineful
800.848.9317
www.mineful.com
@mineful

Traditional market research has always helped in understanding customers in a manner that has allowed marketers to create specifically targeted initiatives. Typically, customer satisfaction, customer relationship management and customer engagement studies have allowed companies to understand the specific areas that need improvement and the ‘pain points’ of their customers while allowing for benchmarking against key competitors and industry standards.

While these studies are still relevant, they do not provide for immediate action that needs to be taken in the competitive scenario that we operate in. Customer retention and engagement requires far more than a monthly or a quarterly look at traditional market research customer satisfaction and loyalty trends.

Real-Time
With real time data available, online and via other devices, taking immediate action is not only possible but also extremely necessary. Critical data that is right in front of your eyes can be missed in large reports that just provide summarized and analyzed data. Consider the benefits of knowing if a car that has been bought recently has been taken to the service station for repairs. Customer management personnel can call the concerned owner to inquire about the issue and probably prevent a disgruntled customer. Special cases picked up from customer feedback surveys can help identify those customers that need special handling in order to retain.

It is impossible to sit through reports and try and find that the specific cases that need special attention to ensure customer retention. Automated alerts need to be created to be able to identify such occurrences in order to take preemptive or immediate action.

Sales Alerts
Sales alerts or sales sirens are a great new innovative option that marketers have today. This is an additional feature in some customer retention solutions that send automatic alerts to people based on programmed algorithms. Sales sirens are based on the outlier method used in the six sigma protocol for quality measurement. Typically, the modeling method and the counting method are used to estimate the probability of a faulty product in the manufacturing or production system. The same methodology can be used to identify different behavior patterns to alert sales force into immediate corrective action.

Key features and benefits of sales alerts
- Message alerts when data for a specific region, product, sku or brand increases or reduces by a specific percentage. This minimum percentage increase or decrease that is used to trigger off a sales siren is something that is set by the marketer based on past experience with sales trends. Information about such changes that imply unnatural or unprecedented behavior can alert sales people so that they can take action before it is too late.

- A dramatic change in a specific preferred customer purchasing extremely low levels of goods can help you save a client who may have been lost otherwise. Corrective action can be taken in case the lower order of goods is due to a bad experience or a grouse that the client has.

- Mass email campaigns are a thing of the past. Sales sirens can be used to segment customers into various categories like new buyers, frequent shoppers and customers with declining sales. Special alerts can also be created for groups that seem at a risk of dropping off.

- Sales alerts can also be set for predictive alerts. If a customer’s behavior starts looking like that of one that was lost, an alert is sent to prevent that customer to go down the path of attrition. Predictive analytics helps companies act before it is too late and prevent the worst from happening.

Regular updates for customers can also be set as sales alerts so that they work as reminders for the marketers. While some alerts may require a personal visit to a large customer, other data may just require a call to the client or a special email. Sudden and unexpected discounts, for example, extended towards a customer who is disgruntled about an issue may also help make her feel more favorable towards the company ensuring retention.

Bloomberg TV is looking for the next big thing in tech. Mineful is one of the 5 finalists this week. Vote for us. The winner will get a live a live interview on Bloomberg Television.

Vote on your favorite idea each week to help one budding entrepreneur turn their idea into a reality. Each week, the top five submissions will be posted for YOU to decide on the best of the best. The finalists from each of the 10 weeks will move on to the final round of voting. The grand prize winner will be announced LIVE on the season finale on 10/18.

http://www.facebook.com/Bloombergtelevision

We’ve never written an article that can describe what Mineful does better than Tech.li’s Olena Javorska’s article. She does a great job at describing the problem, the solution, and the benefits. She then goes into giving some inside scoop on the team. The article includes our homepage video, photos, and exclusive content.

Tech.li is a great organization that educates and promotes startups in the Midwest. This week they are inaugurating a new event to discuss the current state of Chicago tech, connect entrepreneurs, and educate. Our CEO will be there sharing what Mineful is up to. Join us and Chicago Alderman Danny Solis this Thursday at ifbyPhone’s HQ – 300 W Adams, Chicago. See you there!

Yesterday at TechCocktail’s excellent event someone asked me why such a early stage startup like Mineful was a sponsor at TechWeek. I pondered the question for a while and came up with two conclusions.

1. The Obvious
To get noticed. Anyone in Tech in Chicago is going to be at this conference. With hopes that MidVentures talks up its sponsors through email and social media, our brand awareness as a Chicago startup would rocket launch. By having a booth, we hope to have the opportunity to talk to as many entrepreneurs, angels, investors, developers, engineers, journalists, and maybe even prospects and get valuable feedback.

2. Chicago
The most important reason is because I believe in Chicago. I want Chicago to be a successful place for technology entrepreneurs. This event promotes just that, what I truly believe in. So even if it’s a total strategic failure to be a sponsor of TechWeek, I sponsored the Chicago entrepreneurial scene. Yesterday, I sat down with someone from Austin Ventures. At first, we just talked about the Tech community here, how it’s changing for the better, but how it still needs improvement. We need more talent (see ITA’s story), we need more capital, but he did say that 5 years ago things were a lot different. Now there’s a lot more people looking at Chicago for innovation. There are many signs that Chicago is increasingly growing as a techhub like today’s article on Crain’s. He credits a lot to LightBank for changing the scene and bringing not just cash, but an new point of view in investing.

TechWeek is going to be a great event for learning, networking, innovation, and bringing the Chicago tech community closer together. Looking forward to it. Oh, and by the way, come see our presentation on Monday at 12:30pm, looking forward to your feedback. Thanks Chicago and thanks MidVentures!

On July 14, the Mineful website and its analytical platform will have a major overhaul. Our new tool focuses on helping businesses retain customers. In short, Mineful can now be described as an analytical application that takes action when it identifies patterns of disloyalty and dissatisfaction.

Inspired by our clients’ needs, we’ve added a way to easily integrate and analyze transactional data from CRMs and e-commerce platforms. We’ve pre-built a set of customer retention metrics to track in real-time. Mineful provides a way to quickly act on the information by displaying a list of customers that should be contacted along with tools to make this communication easy.

You might call it marketing automation or business intelligence, we just think it is an easy way for businesses of all sizes to increase customer retention. You know that just a 5% increase in retention can increase profitability by more than 75%, right? So what are you waiting for? You can watch our new video, take a tour, see our new pricing, or simply start using it for FREE.

Enhancements:

• Salesforce.com Integration – A way to easily integrate data from Salesforce.com.
• Interaction Table – This table displays customers at risk of leaving and gives you an easy way to communicate with them via email. In this release, only alerts based on transaction/sales data are displayed.
• Customer Retention Analysis – An analysis that predicts when a customer’s purchasing pattern has gone cold. It uses the customers’ transactions, segment, and seasonality to provide an accurate determination of attrition likelihood.
• Measure Page – This new measure page has various customer retention metrics pre-installed including: customer lifetime revenue, average purchase size, average frequencies, and customer retention rates.
• New Results Page – A quick way to view your survey results in real-time. You can dive into individual responses and read comments or view text results with the keyword density analysis.
• Putting comments on dashboards – Allows you to write content inside a dashboard. You can write your own observations about the results you’re getting and customize it with a little knowledge of HTML and CSS.
• Can use the Back button – The Mineful application previously existed all in one page. Now each link has a separate page allowing you to use the back button on your browser! This was major reconstruction, but it will speed up the application.

Software solutions have evolved in such a manner that they have kept pace with the changing marketing world and requirements. While there were options that helped document storage and management in the 1990’s, software options that helped customers track changes and share them across users were more popular in the early 2000’s. Predictive data analysis software options started to become popular in around 2005 and the evolution has brought us to a time where we can get real time data that can be aggregated in seconds. The future holds much more!

At the beginning of the century, marketing software allowed people to track some data and share it with their colleagues and clients. This is something that became possible with the increasing penetration that the internet was witnessing. However, even at this time large file transfers were not easy to do and this required physical transfer of disk drives and CD’s. At this time some sophisticated analysis tools for market research had surfaced like SPSS and SAS. Most of the other tools available in the market for marketers were in house tools developed for specific purposes. Microsoft Office started to become the most commonly accepted norm for datasheets, presentations and documents.

Towards the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, software options that allowed marketers to create marketing plans, annual budgets, tax returns, product costing and more started to surface. At this time there were also integrated software options that helped marketers in conducting email marketing. This software option allowed users to choose options and program the software in such a way as to use various content options and emails from databases for effective email campaigns.

More recently, there are various kinds of marketing software that can help marketers look at the efficiency of their campaigns. These software options have exploded with a higher number of internet marketers. Today there are special software options that help in tracking affiliate programs. There are also various options that can be used to manage multi level membership programs. Automation is now possible to such an extent that once the software is set up, only supervisory level attention is required. Today there are software tools that can help you crunch data in real time and this is true for surveys that are carried out on the internet and other areas as well. There are tools for arriving at the right keywords for search engine optimization, creating Pay Per Click ads, finding profitable niches, link building tools and more.

With so much of the marketer’s tactical work taken care of, the only aspect that seems to be left is the actual decision of what action should be taken. This is also something that we can expect the next generation marketing software to do. Tomorrow there will be software that will predict future scores, suggest future course of action, liaison with another software tool and shoot mails or make changes in the marketing program automatically.