The Transactional Co-Op: Targeting Valuable Customers at the Right Time

Modern marketers face many challenges, and one of the biggest right now is finding a way to best target high-value prospects at the right time. Cross-channel integration between traditional and digital marketing is a must to optimize spend and maximize communications with current and future customers alike. It's finding the best prospects from all channels and speaking to them with relevant marketing communications when they're ready to purchase that really impacts revenue.

Direct mail costs are rising. Postage costs, paper costs and printing prices are all going up, and prospecting databases aren't getting any cheaper either. Meanwhile, the focus is being turned toward online marketing. Online sales create more data from each digital channel than ever before — data that's constantly increasing. How can marketers make sense of it all to focus marketing initiatives on what's working best for the prospects that have the most effect on the bottom line?

The goal is to focus all marketing efforts so that they complement each other and drive action from high-value customers, integrating every marketing channel to target the right prospects while minimizing wasteful spend. This takes an efficient method for collecting data and measuring marketing's worth for key demographics. A transactional co-op environment is a great way to improve targeting and narrow focus to the best prospects, maximizing spend and increasing return on investment.

Closing the Gaps
The ability to measure marketing efforts has never been more important. Every organization is feeling the pressure to find hard numbers in marketing initiatives, from the top on down. At the same time, there's more data available than ever, creating data overload for many marketers.

However, a data surplus is also an incredible opportunity to find the right customer at the right time. Being able to make use of the numbers to boost ROI and increase conversions is a major factor for success in 2012. An unprecedented explosion of data drives responsibility on marketers to close the gap between sales and marketing, which means marketers must make data-driven decisions to increase the value of every marketing spend. Marketing departments simply can't be viewed as separate from sales departments to be successful. The two are intertwined, working toward the same goal of a higher conversion rate.

To effectively drive sales, marketers must keep their focus on revenue-driving prospects, which means letting data lead the way. Data is being collected more efficiently from more sources than ever before. A recent study by data management firm Krux Digital found the average website visit in December 2011 triggered 56 instances of data collection, up from only 10 in November 2010. Personalized URLs and cookies in emails also help track online behavior, aiding in retargeting — i.e., creating the opportunity to market to the right consumer with relevant information at the right time when that customer is interested in making a purchase.