Understanding and transforming Customer journey with ‘Data’

1. Subrata Mukherjee
Vice President – Product Management
The Economist
@sumutech
www.linkedin.com/in/sm360
Understanding and transforming
Customer journey with ‘Data’
June 3rd 2014, New York City
Integrated Marketing Week 2014

2. Objective of this session
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
Section I
• Who are your customers and what are their motivators?
• See what footprints are left behind by customers
Section II
• Transforming customer’s journey with data
• Discuss what actionable analytics mean
Section III
• Steps digital publishers can take to leverage actionable analytics
• Discuss legality and privacy

3. Section I - Why understand customers?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
Courtesy: Modern Analyst Media LLC

4. Who are your customers?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
External
customers
Internal
customers
1. Paying active subscribers
2. Expired past subscribers
3. Non paying identified prospects
4. Unidentified anonymous readers
5. Social media consumers
6. Display ads viewers
7. Non-digital news stand reader
8. Press, bloggers, influencers
1. employees
2. partners / distributors
3. executive board
4. marketing team
5. agents
6. publicist, ad agency
7. alumni
8. focus group audience

5. What do your customers want?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
Your customer wants an organization who :
• understand their explicit & implicit needs and desires
• will make their lives easier than before
• will solve a problem they are having
• will take them on new scenic journeys
• makes them feel they are in the driver’s seat
• will only approach them with a benefit case
• Is a trustworthy, predictable and reliable partner
• is accepting and non-judgmental
• truthful if an explicit promise is broken
• will not violate privacy expectations

6. Why do we want to know more about customers?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
• We want their money 
• We want to meet their need
• We want their loyalty and for them to become repeat customers
• We want them to be satisfied
• We want them engaged
• We want them to at least try us out
• We want them to become advocates for our product
• We do not want to anger them even if they do not buy now
• We do not want them to go to our competitors
• We do not want them to talk bad about us
• We do not want them to discourage a converted prospect

7. What do we want to understand about our customers?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
• Who are they in terms of demographics?
Gender, sex, age, industry, profession, education, social status, location…
• What are they looking for or NOT looking for?
Product, service, information, lifestyle, behavior…
• What is the comfort level for anonymity?
Silent, vocal, social, talkative, advocates…
• Who is in their circle of trust?
Friends, social networks, associations, employers, alumni…
• What they are telling you and NOT telling you?
Feedback, interests, behavior, spending comfort, reading habits, sharing habits
• How much time they are spending with you?
Engagement, page views, pay wall hits, click through rates, social media…
• Are they responding to your messages?
Email and push notification metrics, when to engage more, when to stop…
• Who should we avoid for a customer pool?
Price sensitive, least profitable, needy, fly by night, bots, hackers

8. Section II – Understood… Now what?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
Courtesy: Darkreading.com

9. What can you do with all that data?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
• Personalize their content consumption
News personalization, article recommendations, Homepage and newsletter customizations
• Personalize their subscription offerings
Acquisition or renewal? Student offer?, gift renewal, various durations, various bundles, cross-sells
• Send targeted emails / messages
Personalized transactional, account update and newsletter emails, event alerts, new product alerts
• Send targeted push notifications on mobile devices
New product alert, new issue alert, articles alerts, breaking news, conference alerts
• Fraud control
Concurrent account access, location tracking, different behavior, too many bad password entries
• Personalize pay wall
Global or regional? Personalized based on segments? What offers in pay wall?
• Personalize payment methods
Regional preferences, past buying habits, amount threshold
• Advertisement targeting
Targeting, off domain re-targeting, sponsorships of specific audiences

10. Ability to define complicated segments
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
Example 1: Active registered users (> 5 page views in last one week, > 15 page views in last one
month, commented > 3 times in last one month, hit pay wall at least 5 times in the last one month), who
are past subscribers (subscription lapsed within the last one year) and are socially active (read at least 3
articles via social networks in last one month), plus those that have opted in to receive marketing
promotional emails
Intention is to hit them with an attractive “Return back subscription renewal offer”
Example 2: Active readers with Healthcare interest (> 10 page views in last one month), who live in a
large US metro (New York. Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston), have an implicit interest in Topics
based on articles browsed (Technology, Healthcare, Bio-technology) and have titles (C-Level, Director or
VP, Owner/Proprietor) and have opted in for push notifications on their mobile devices
Intention is to make them sign up for a Healthcare innovation
seminar in major US cities
Example 3: All registered users who log from Davos,
Switzerland during World Economic Forum from 22-25th
January
Intention is to give them a free trial to a magazine with
unlimited access, personalize homepage with specific
conference coverage and eventually try to get them to become
paid subscribers

11. Ability to define interesting targeting rules
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
Example 1: When registered user opts-in but with no newsletter subscription
The intention is to send them an email showcasing the benefits of newsletters to easily discover content
Example 2: When registered user who has opted-in, is a past subscriber, hits paywall page for the 5th
time in a week
Intention is to show them a renewal offer on the paywall page and not a generic acquisition offer
Example 3: When current ‘Print + Digital subscriber’ gets a “Mail undeliverable” status
Intention is to show an upgrade offer to add digital platform to the current subscription to enable reader
to not miss an issue during a scheduled move

12. Section III – Awesome. But how?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
Courtesy: 99designs.com

13. How does this all work?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
• Invest in a good Data Management Platform (DMP)
• Feed all your First party data – Demographics, CRM, Web analytics
• Negotiation to obtain relevant second party data – someone else’s first party data
• Complement with Third party data when only useful and actionable
• Use Tag Management platform if your pages are flooded with tags
• Build actionable segments within DMP
• Review your data taxonomy and explore segments
• Constantly monitor size of your segments
• Build save and propagate segments to other partners
• Establish good marketing ecosystem and vendors
• Connect DMP with good messaging and personalization vendors
• Ability to receive segment information from DMP
• Ability to build efficient multi platform campaigns
• Ability to feed back campaign metrics to DMP for effectiveness studies
• Test, Target and Market
• Access to good A/B testing tool for trying out campaign and segment ideas
• Learn from successes and mistakes
• Repeat

14. How can you reap better benefits of offline data?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
• Think beyond traditional uses of offline data
• Rethink your direct mail campaigns and review effectiveness
• Review email marketing and see if it delivering desired results
• Find out how many of your registered users have opted out of marketing communications
• On-board your offline data
• Take your offline data to online channels
• Review vendors like LiveRamp, VisualDNA and Epsilon to see which one suits you
• Consider factors like scale, accuracy and coverage
• Chosen vendor can match CRM data to online browser cookie data to establish linkage
• Then, target your offline customers through dynamic video or display ads
• Fine tune your attribution models
• Try to go beyond first / last click attribution and try
and understand the full journey
• Think all channels – direct, CSR, social, email,
search, display ad, on boarding, mobile
• Constantly review results and fine tune
campaigns

15. Is this all legal and ethical ?
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
• Double check your cookie policy
• Enable behavioral targeting on your own domains
• Enable re-targeting on other domains
• Get consent from your current / new customers on new policy
• Get consent from anonymous users when new cookie is created
• Monitor your tracking activity to detect anomalies
• Monitor your web pages as well as advertisement tags
• Identify and analyze tracking activity of all first, second and third party trackers
• Provide risk scores of each tracker
• Monitor performance impact of tracking on your pages
• Implement a Consent Manager solution to advocate privacy
• Provides global privacy transparency and brand protection
• Ensure compliance with EU Cookie directive
• Allows you to track and change both implied and express consent
• Increase customer trust by providing readers way to manage tracking on your site

16. Ask questions or Share your experiences
Understanding your customer through Analytics, Subrata Mukherjee
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www.linkedin.com/in/sm360