Read about current marketing issues in the industry today

Do you regularly receive feedback from your marketing activities? Are you aware of what improvements can be made for your future campaigns?
 
Response analysis is required to measure the campaign effectiveness and KPI’s of the marketing process, and also to allow refining for your future campaigns.

This could indicate areas of database development that may be required in the future to improve your conversion ratios.

Measuring and evaluating everything we do is critical to the justification of marketing spend together
with ‘train of thought’ fine tuning, as this is important in achieving the high impact campaign results we all desire.

Response reporting is channel critical; therefore you need to gain an in-depth understanding of who is responding, when they are responding, and by which method. For email campaigns, Blue Sheep is able to provide a range of reporting data that include the number of emails sent, those opened, click through rates, bounce backs, transactions and much more. Armed with this information a cost per sales value can be easily calculated.

Do you know who is most likely to buy or respond from your business?

It is important to look at patterns and trends in your current customer behaviour, the validity of available data and the correlation of current marketing efforts to results – in order to identify ways of improving that correlation.

At Blue Sheep we offer a business analysis report that matches your customer data against The UK Business Universe.  It's designed to give you an immediate graphical representation of your data profiled by typical marketing demographics, such as:

• Geography
• Business classification
• Employee size
• Turnover
• Growth potential

The report is a high level summary, visually depicting your client distribution and penetration within your target markets; providing a starting point for more detailed analysis and segment prioritisation.
Precise demographics give your data strategic value and make your direct marketing even more targeted and cost effective.  We will cross-match your database to The UK Business Universe and analyse your current response rates.

Do you have one true view of your customers?

As the process describes, you should have an accurate understanding of your customer’s profile, in
a defined and logical format, and know what value can ultimately be attributed to that customer.

Your databases may be held in different formats and on multiple systems, with customer records created under various names. This is often made worse by storing old and inaccurate details. Working with conflicting data creates an inconsistent view of your customers which leads to poor management and communication.

By creating a single customer view you can ensure that the view of the customer is correct and reflects the view of the potential business target audience accurately.

Blue Sheep can aggregate disparate data sources and will clean your customer data so that you have confidence that it is relevant, accurate and fit for purpose.

Blue Sheep accomplish this by taking the hosted database, onto which we run data cleaning, address validation, data suppression and de-duplication programs to ensure that we have a consistent set of information from which to build and develop.

The benefit of creating a single customer view is to ensure that your customers are represented in the same format, and that obsolete and inaccurate information is removed or updated.

Have you got a single information repository which contains all of your customers and prospects?

A Hosted Customer Platform is a single database, free from your operational systems or B2C databases. It’s a
one time build which is usually in SQL.
It is vital that your database holds only the appropriate business data so that accurate targeting and analysis can be undertaken later in the process.

A hosted database will enable you to design, manage and execute effective multi-dimensional marketing campaigns (or we can do it for you). Once the hosted customer platform is in place, it is ready to be analysed to determine how the data is represented and to understand what quality issues it presents. From here, the next stage looks at how to prepare and improve the quality of the customer information so as to maximise its effectiveness.

By hosting a database with Blue Sheep, you can be assured that your valuable information is in the best possible hands. Highly skilled technical experts work on the data to assess its format, its suitability for further development and to determine its completeness. They will also assess any further actions which need to be taken in order to improve the quality and to maximise its potential usefulness.

Hosting the database is straightforward and can also take away your responsibility for managing change on site, and ultimately provides the option to outsource essential database management.

With over 42% of direct marketing customer complaints attributed to inaccurate customer data, are you missing out on the opportunity to reduce churn and extend customer life time value through maintaining accurate records?

Invariably, customer data may only include limited details such as company name, address and telephone number, etc. Low level information is of limited use for communication and business development.

Enhanced and enriched data can create a powerful and efficient fit-for-purpose communications tool.

To enrich the existing data, Blue Sheep can cross reference your customer details held in your database against our leading aggregated database, The UK Business Universe. By undertaking this exercise, we are able to not only add essential details, but also increase its value as a marketing tool.

Following the enhancement process, you will then be able to conduct further detailed analysis on your customer data through the creation of customer profiles.

The UK Business Universe holds details on over 4.5 million UK business workplace locations and provides a single reference source for customer database updates, allowing customer information to be enriched through the inclusion of additional and missing data fields such as SIC, turnover and number of employees, etc. This broadens the view of your customers and allows more detailed profiles to be created.

Do you optimise the intrinsic value of your database in order to improve communication, develop business opportunities and aid customer retention?

Analysis and profiling is a key part in making sense of the newly cleaned and enhanced customer data, in order to help create a true holistic picture of your customers and their potential value.

A profile is a characterisation or ‘picture’ of your customer base - or any subset of your customer base. It can be built on your own data, for example, transactional data, or any demographic data you hold. Alternatively, it can be built by matching your file to external data files such as Blue Sheep’s, The UK Business Universe.

Using profiles based on current profitable customers and their future potential you can define new market opportunities, prioritise them and build strategies to reach those markets. Profiles also provide you with more detailed information regarding the current and future health of your business and a customer’s propensity to buy. These can also incorporate ‘success and decline’ forecast data which identifies tomorrow’s business failures and successes.

Blue Sheep uses state of the art software to undertake detailed analysis of the customer database.
A customised reporting dashboard is available which displays who your most valuable customers are, how long they have been with you and how they transact with you. This can be updated as frequently as you require.

Analysis can be undertaken on lifetime value, recency, frequency value and customer churn. These reports can then be used to derive intelligence for prospecting

Do you need more prospect data? Do you need more customers that look like your current ones? Where do you find them?

We all know that poor quality prospect data hurts business performance, so therefore to increase your return on investment, you need quality data. 60% of any increase will be derived from data, 20% derived from better analysis and the rest from creative.
 
The UK Business Universe is the largest and most comprehensive B2B aggregated database in the industry holding over 5.3 million business contact names. From many separate data sources, including its own UK business tracker, Blue Sheep can utilise information from over 4.5 million workplace locations across the UK to produce comprehensive market intelligence.

Significantly, Blue Sheep’s top five database contributors share less than 0.6% overlap of information between them indicating the importance of data aggregation and associated techniques in data assimilation. Blue Sheep conducts 1.8 billion matches on each file every month as well as 450,000 amendments.

The UK Business Universe is central to the provision of valued-added services. For example, Blue Sheep is able to create accurate company trees which identify key players and decision makers. In addition it allows market penetration, buying propensity and segmentation studies to be undertaken.

How can you be sure that you’re spending the right amount of money on the right kind of marketing?  The challenge of ROI marketing!

ROI marketing can help businesses attain the highest possible return on their marketing investments and activity.

Targeting and segmenting effectively can significantly increase Return on Investment. Ensuring that you are targeting the most profitable customers can maximise the growth potential from your customer base.

The Recency Frequency Lifetime model allows you to identify the potential of each customer and enables you to devise marketing campaigns to increase revenues from your customers.

By identifying the most profitable customers, your ROI is more likely be high.

Do you know which key factors are affecting your customer churn and to what degree?

Measuring churn rate and the factors that lead to customer churn can be critical to the health of a company.

Targeting and segmenting effectively can significantly reduce your customer churn levels.

You need to ensure that you:

• Are proactive with retention activities rather than reactive
• Communicate new opportunities or product offers to customers in a timely manner
• Continuously provide customers with product & service information
• Consistently provide high quality service across all channels.

Do you know which customers are likely to be the most profitable?  Do you know who fits your target profile?

Acquiring new customers is vital for the growth of your business, and prospects within your acquisition campaign should closely match your ‘ideal prospect’ profile. Getting this area right would increase your Return on Investment (ROI).

Acquisition marketing involves finding customers who previously were not aware of your product, were not candidates for purchasing your product, or customers who in the past have bought from your competitors. Matching and profiling your data can help segment these prospective customers and increase the response rates within your acquisition marketing campaigns.

Most acquisition marketing campaigns begin with the prospect pool. A prospect pool is your list of customers that have been selected because they are likely to be interested in your products or services, but the data might be limited. It is therefore necessary to add additional information to a prospect list by overlaying data and then the customer information can be matched against other data.

Do you establish loyalty and build relationships with your existing customers?

Customer retention marketing is often the difference between loyalty and defection. Holding the most recent and useful data in your customer retention marketing strategy is a necessity. Reviewing and analyzing your data will identify opportunities where up-selling and cross-selling can be increased.

It is necessary to look for trends in the length of your customer relationships and determine what steps can be taken to prevent the loss of customers. A small improvement in retention can result in a significant rise in profitability and your overall ROI.

Your data strategy should consider what keeps your customers loyal, what changes you need to make as the relationship progresses, and what  the potential is for developing other customers like these.

Are your marketing campaigns planned and implemented in a measured and effective way?

Have you got a sophisticated platform to undertake your integrated marketing campaigns using both traditional and electronic media?

Blue Sheep applies sophisticated tools to carry out multivariate analysis of on and off-line marketing to identify what components are working most effectively. We can also work directly with your marketing agencies and fulfilment houses for off-line campaign management.

As the only specialist B2B Alterian partner in the UK, Blue Sheep leverages the power of the Alterian software to visualise and mine data, create campaign selections and conduct online campaigns using Dynamic Messenger.

We use client’s email addresses, which can be supplemented by data supplied by Blue Sheep, to initially carry out research samples. These can be produced with multiple test creative that can be delivered simultaneously.

Results from the sample emails are forwarded to Blue Sheep for analysis to determine the most effective approach for the client. To increase delivery success rates, Blue Sheep can also upload a suppression list and undertake spam scoring to prevent wasted mailings.

Dynamic Messenger incorporates email delivery, content and campaign management with real time analysis and reporting functions. It offers a centralised platform for managing any effective email campaign activity. Clients have the choice of managing their own email campaigns and reports via the permission based software, or engaging Blue Sheep to provide email research, data provision, delivery and analysis services. This can include editing content of HTML and plain email text.

Are you seeking ways to increase your profits? Do you need new customers?

Email marketing can help you to improve the quality of your business & marketing activity. Targeted email marketing can help to make your business grow and if used correctly can complement your existing activities.

Email marketing is an extremely cost-effective marketing tool and when used properly, can increase your sales. Email can be used to turn those with no interest in your product into prospects, and prospects into customers.

Email marketing is much cheaper than most other forms of communication, allows you to deliver your message direct to the contact and has proven to be a very successful communication tool.