Big data! Scary isn’t it?
A lot of people have been talking about “big data” the last couple of years. But not that many companies are using the data they are collecting in a proper way. Since the release of GDPR more and more companies have excluded data in their storage as they had before because they realized that they didn’t need all the data.
So where am I heading? Let me tell you a story in how I use our customer data in the purpose of bringing value to the customer.
In our products (read system) we have a lot of events set up and pulling data to our data warehouse. We are storing how many users our customers have in our system, how much they quoted (time period), response rate on incoming requests and other data. This is really valuable data to our customers and they have the option of pulling their own company data within our system.
What we realized was not that many customers used this data because either they didn’t know what to do with it or they didn’t know where to find the data.
What we started doing was “Value e-mails” and pulled the data from the data warehouse and sent it through MailChimp with a branded e-mail from a specific time frame. We sent data compared to last years month and with three different e-mails depending on how good the companies performed.
Green e-mail: Quoted more for February 2019 compared to February 2018
Neutral e-mail: Quoted the same amount for February 2019 compared to February 2018
Red e-mail: Quoted less for February 2019 compared to February 2018
Green e-mail
Customers receiving the green e-mail are having fantastic numbers and in combination with telling them this in the e-mail “Keep up the good work!” we also added a “happy face” of the responsible sales manager.
Also in the green e-mail, we added some more CTA’s regarding our Web app as an up-selling opportunity.
Red e-mail
Those receiving the red e-mail are the once who’s not doing that great. Which means they are not quoting as much as they did the month last year. As we want to help business grow in this e-mail we are reaching out to see if there are something we can help them with. This is the most crucial e-mail and the process from the responsible sales manager and the product specialist need to have good routine for this kind of customer in order to avoid churn.
In this e-mail we added a “sad face” picture of the responsible sales manager.
Neutral e-mail
The third e-mail are for those customers nor doing good or bad. The sales manager’s picture will be “neutral” and with contact information if they want to talk to us. We are always close by.
The process of creating these e-mails when we now have a structure for it goes in no time. Even though we need to create three different templates in MailChimp, import the data from our data warehouse to merge fields in the lists and test it before sending it out. Putting the templates, define what data you want to send out, to whom and on what time takes a lot of time for prepping, but when you have everything set up you will do the send out in no time.
We are comparing those customers reading our value e-mails with those who are not in order to see if we can learn something from it. Are the customers opening the green e-mail at a lower risk of leaving us? Are the customers in the list for the red e-mail at a risk at leaving us, what should we do then?
And is the data relevant for the customers businesses? After a few months talking to customers and taking look at our data we have the simple answer: Yes, the customers are receiving value from all of the three e-mails.