Combating Customer Churn Using Data

Dec 3, 2024 | Data Cleansing, Goneaway Identification, Home Movers, National Deceased Register, Net Zero, UK Household File

Retaining customers is more crucial than ever. A recent report highlights key strategies for reducing customer churn, emphasising the importance of leveraging appended data to enhance customer records. This article will summarise the report’s findings and explore how appending data and enhancing it can help businesses maintain a loyal customer base.

The Report’s Findings

Summary of the Report’s Findings

Data-driven marketing strategies are a top priority for UK professionals in the coming year, with nearly two-thirds identifying first-party datasets as a key goal for 2025. The focus is primarily on using customer data for retention rather than acquisition, with reducing churn being the most pressing issue. This is one of the key findings from the fifth iteration of AudienceXpress’ Streaming TV Uncovered study, conducted by CoLab Media Consulting.

The report reveals a positive outlook for marketing budgets, with optimism increasing for the second consecutive year. UK companies are leading their European counterparts in gathering customer data, driven by the uncertainty around things like third-party cookies and the fragmented audience identity ecosystem. This push aims to increase loyalty through more targeted and informed advertising.

Key insights include:

Increased Use of Data Clean Rooms: About 30% of UK marketers plan to use data clean rooms, like The Ark’s JetStream, to share and append aggregated first-party data in 2025
Focus on Campaign Effectiveness: Investing in campaign effectiveness measurement is a priority for a third of marketers
Streaming and Connected TV Investment: Nearly half of UK marketers want to increase spending on streaming and connected TV, with significant interest in free, ad-supported TV channels

The Power of Enhanced First-Party Data for Reducing Customer Churn

Appending data to existing customer records can provide businesses with a wealth of information that helps in understanding and anticipating customer, and ultimately the power to keep them as customers.

Here are some ways in which appended data can be beneficial:

Understand when your customer is moving home: The Ark’s Mover Alerts notify companies when a customer has put their house up for sale or rent. This information is crucial as it allows businesses to proactively reach out to customers offering relevant products or services that cater to their new circumstances and retain their business
Understand where and how your customer lives: The Ark’s UK Household File includes over 100 variables about a customer’s property, such as house type, total income, and propensity to adopt Net Zero products. This detailed information helps businesses tailor their marketing strategies and product offerings to better match customer profiles, increasing engagement and satisfaction
Data Hygiene: Keeping first-party data clean is essential for effective customer relationship management. Removing deceased customers and those who have moved away ensures that communications are directed to the right individuals, reducing wasted resources and improving the accuracy of customer insights and retention statistics.

Be Proactive

By appending data such as Mover Alerts and the UK Household File to existing customer records, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and respond more effectively to their needs. This proactive approach not only helps in reducing customer churn but also enhances overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

By Steve Clarke – Commercial Director at The Ark

Get in touch to speak to us about reducing your customer churn today

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Breaking Down Data Silos: Achieving a Single Customer View with JetStream

Nov 27, 2024 | Data Cleansing, GDPR, JetStream, SCV

Organisational constraints such as siloed data and technology continue to hinder senior marketers.

This is according to a recent report by Merkle (part of Dentsu’s annual CMO Navigator Report), which found that two-thirds of CMOs admit their companies still struggle with orchestration across marketing, media, and customer experience. This challenge persists despite the vast opportunities presented by new technologies like artificial intelligence.

The report, which surveyed over 1,900 CMOs across 13 countries, highlights a critical issue: while CMOs are eager to leverage new digital capabilities and emerging customer behaviours, they often feel unsteady about their organisation’s digital maturity. Instead of overhauling their tech stacks, many CMOs are focusing on extracting more value from existing capabilities and making highly targeted investments in technology, partners, and growth strategies.

“More than half of the CMOs are looking to new strategies to navigate forward, with a growing trend of prioritising customer experience (CX)”

Only a quarter of CMOs are heavily investing in digital transformation efforts, indicating a significant need for technologies that maximise data utilisation. More than half of the CMOs are looking to new strategies to navigate forward, with a growing trend of prioritising customer experience (CX). As they transform existing processes and data, CMOs remain optimistic about the future, with an overwhelming majority expecting marketing budget increases to support further AI adoption and more impactful customer experiences.

This is where JetStream, a revolutionary solution from The Ark, comes into play. JetStream is a cloud-based data matching platform designed to break down these silos and enhance customer experience by creating a Single Customer View (SCV).

Here’s how JetStream addresses the key challenges faced by CMOs:

Single Customer View

JetStream standardises and anonymises different customer data sets within the same organisation’s ecosystem. By consolidating disparate data sources into a unified view, JetStream ensures that all customer interactions and data points are accurately matched and integrated. This comprehensive view allows CMOs to understand their customers better and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.

GDPR Compliance

JetStream operates within a ‘Data Clean Rooms’ environment, where sensitive data derived from unique identifiers, such as emails and names, can be leveraged while preserving privacy. This allows customer data to be matched without exposing any personally identifiable information (PII), ensuring compliance with GDPR and other data protection regulations. This secure approach builds customer trust and maintains data integrity.

Highly Accurate Data Matching

JetStream simplifies the complexities of matching customer names and addresses to third-party data sets. It deals with poorly formatted data and varying levels of data accuracy and completeness, providing a consistent and highly accurate match every time. This ensures that CMOs can trust the data they are working with, leading to more effective marketing strategies and customer interactions.

Proactive Alerts

JetStream provides near real-time alerts as changes occur within your customer data. This proactive approach allows CMOs to act fast and anticipate customer needs, enhancing the overall customer experience and enabling more timely and relevant marketing efforts.

Super-Fast Processing

With JetStream, there’s no need for monthly batch processing. The platform offers near real-time processing and matching, eliminating the need to export and transfer customer data every month. This speed and efficiency enable CMOs to stay agile and responsive in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

By leveraging JetStream, organisations can overcome the barriers of siloed data and technology, enabling a more cohesive and effective customer experience strategy. As CMOs continue to navigate the complexities of digital transformation, tools like JetStream provide the necessary insights and capabilities to drive meaningful engagement and growth.

by Steve Clarke – Commercial Director at The Ark

Want to know more about breaking down data silos?

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The Power of Identity Resolution

Oct 29, 2024 | Data Cleansing, GDPR

The Power of Identity Resolution: Ensuring Accurate Customer Data Matching

In the day in age where organisations are striving to be as data-driven as possible, businesses are constantly seeking ways to better understand and engage with their customers. One of the most effective tools in achieving this is identity resolution. This process not only helps in creating accurate customer profiles but also enhances marketing strategies, customer experiences, and regulatory compliance. Let’s dive into why identity resolution is crucial and how it works.

What is Identity Resolution?

Identity resolution is the process of creating a unified and accurate customer profile by linking data from various touchpoints and systems. This involves integrating information from emails, social media, offline interactions, and more to form a comprehensive view of each customer.

Why is Identity Resolution Important?

Accurate Customer Profiles

360-Degree View: Identity resolution helps businesses create a 360-degree view of their customers. By integrating data from multiple sources, companies can gain a holistic understanding of customer behaviours and preferences.
Personalisation: With accurate profiles, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to individual customers, leading to improved engagement and satisfaction.

Improved Marketing Strategies

Targeting and Segmentation: Identity resolution allows for better audience segmentation and more precise targeting. This means marketing campaigns can be more effective and yield higher returns.
Cross-Channel Consistency: Maintaining a consistent message across various channels is crucial. Identity resolution ensures that customers receive a seamless and coherent experience, regardless of the platform.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Seamless Interactions: Customers expect a seamless experience across different touchpoints. Identity resolution ensures that interactions are smooth and consistent, enhancing the overall customer journey.
Predictive Analytics: By leveraging accurate customer data, businesses can use predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and behaviours, further improving the customer experience.

Regulatory Compliance and Security

Data Privacy: With increasing data protection regulations, relying on first-party data through identity resolution helps ensure compliance and protects customer privacy.
Security Measures: A centralised and accurate customer data system enhances security, reducing the risk of data breaches and ensuring that customer information is safeguarded.

How Does Identity Resolution Work?

Deterministic vs. Probabilistic Matching

Deterministic Matching: This method uses exact data points, such as email addresses or phone numbers, to link customer data. It is highly accurate but requires precise and consistent information, which is often not available.
Probabilistic Matching: This approach uses statistical algorithms to link data based on probabilities. It can connect data points even when exact matches are not available, which is more often the case. A good algorithm will recognise different ways the same name or address can be presented enabling matches to be established, even when there are significant differences in the input data for the same individual.

Identity Resolution and Matching within Data Cleanrooms: A New Era of Privacy and Precision

In today’s data-driven world, businesses are constantly seeking ways to leverage customer data to enhance their marketing strategies and improve customer experiences. However, with increasing concerns about privacy and data security, traditional methods of data sharing and analysis are becoming less viable. This is where data cleanrooms come into play.

What are Data Cleanrooms?

Data cleanrooms are secure environments where data can be matched and analysed without exposing the underlying raw PII. These environments ensure that sensitive information remains protected while still allowing for secure matching. Data cleanrooms use advanced encryption and privacy-preserving technologies to maintain data confidentiality.

Benefits of Identity Matching within Data Cleanrooms

Enhanced Privacy: By anonymising data and using secure environments, data cleanrooms ensure that privacy is maintained throughout the analysis process.

Better and More Precise Matching: Many organisations face challenges when matching their customer data to other datasets (whether that be other customer data or external third-party sources). Inconsistently formatted data, missing data and other data related issues can be overcome through employing identity matching solutions, enabling an organisation to match their customer data with confidence, leading to better data-driven outcomes.

Compliance: Data cleanrooms help businesses comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 by ensuring that data minimisation is built into their data matching solutions and sensitive information is handled securely.

Conclusion

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the importance of identity resolution will only grow and as privacy concerns continue to increase, data cleanrooms and identity matching offer a robust solution for businesses looking to leverage customer data responsibly.

By combining advanced privacy-preserving technologies with sophisticated matching algorithms (such as our own JetStream solution), businesses can ensure accurate customer data matching, leading to better marketing strategies, enhanced customer experiences, and robust regulatory compliance, while maintaining the highest standards of data security.

By Martin Jaggard – Director at The Ark

Talk to us today about how identity resolution can help your business

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The Effectiveness of Direct Mail

Oct 18, 2024 | Data Cleansing, Direct Mail

Direct mail remains a powerful tool in the marketing arsenal, especially in the UK where it continues to deliver impressive results. Unlike digital channels, direct mail offers a tangible, personal touch that can significantly enhance engagement and response rates, but careful planning is essential to increase the chances of a successful campaign – “Right Person, Right Time, Right Message”.

Right Person

Targeting the right audience is crucial for the success of any direct mail campaign. Direct mail allows for precise targeting based on demographics, purchasing history, and other relevant data, including triggers such as moving home and having a baby.

Personalisation: Direct mail can be highly personalised, increasing the likelihood of engagement. According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), personalised direct mail has a response rate of 4.9%, compared to 1% for email – that’s a significant difference!

Targeted Reach: With accurate data, direct mail can reach the exact audience you want. For instance, 79% of consumers act on direct mail immediately, and 56% of consumers find printed marketing to be the most trustworthy (Source: bakergoodchild).

Right Time

Timing is everything in marketing, and direct mail is no exception. Sending your mail at the right time can significantly boost response rates.

Seasonal Campaigns: Aligning your direct mail campaigns with seasonal events or holidays can increase relevance and engagement. For example, holiday-themed mailings often see higher response rates.

Customer Journey: Direct mail can be timed to coincide with key moments in the customer journey, such as post-purchase follow-ups or reminders for upcoming renewals. This ensures your message is received when it is most relevant.

Right Message

Crafting the right message is essential to capture attention and drive action. Direct mail offers the flexibility to create visually appealing and compelling content.

High Engagement: Direct mail has a 35% higher brand recall than social media, making it a powerful tool for brand awareness (see “Direct Mail Effectiveness Statistics” below).

Tangible Impact: Unlike digital ads that can be easily ignored, direct mail is a physical item that recipients can hold, making it more memorable. According to JICMAIL, 95% of direct mail is engaged with and has some form of physical interaction.

Data Cleansing

Ensuring your data is clean and up-to-date is critical for the success of your direct mail campaigns. This involves removing duplicates, updating addresses, and screening against suppression lists, including:

Mailing Preference Service (MPS): The MPS allows individuals to opt out of unsolicited advertising mail. Screening your data against the MPS ensures you respect consumer preferences and avoid sending mail to those who have opted out, as well as complying with best practice.

Gone Aways: Approximately 1.5 million UK households move each year and screening your data against gone away suppression files, such as Re-mover, helps you avoid sending mail to outdated addresses, avoiding wastage, saving money and preventing fraud.

Deceased Records: Screening your data against deceased registers, such as the National Deceased Register, prevents the distress of sending mail to deceased individuals and helps to prevent fraud.

In-house Stop Lists: Many businesses have a list of individuals who have asked not to be contacted and it is essential that organisations apply these correctly to avoid unnecessary annoyance and inconvenience.

Duplicates: Removing duplicate records ensures each recipient only receives one piece of mail, reducing waste and improving the efficiency of your campaign.

Direct Mail Effectiveness Statistics

Direct mail response rates are 5 to 9 times higher than any other advertising channel (Source Uprinting.com)

The facts speak for themselves; Direct Mail outperforms almost all other forms of marketing:

Response Rates and Engagement

High Engagement: Direct mail boasts an average engagement rate of 95% (Source: Uprinting.com).

Higher Response Rates: Direct mail response rates are 5 to 9 times higher than any other advertising channel (Source: Uprinting.com).

Open Rates: Direct mail has an open rate of 80-90%, compared to email’s 20-30% (Source MarketReach).

Immediate Action: 71% of people read direct mail the day it is delivered (Source: MarketReach).

Longevity: Direct mail is kept in a recipient’s home for an average of 17 days (Source: MarketReach).

Return on Investment (ROI)

High ROI: Direct mail receives the highest ROI of 112% across all mediums, followed by SMS (102%), email (93%), and paid search (88%) (Source: Uprinting.com).

Cost-Effective: For every £1 spent on direct mail, businesses can expect an average return of £14 (Source: Sappipapers.com).

Consumer Preferences

Preferred Channel: 73% of UK consumers say they prefer being contacted by brands via direct mail (Source: MarketReach).

Memorability: Direct mail is 49% more memorable and 33% more engaging than email marketing (Source: MarketReach).

Personal Touch: 70% of consumers feel direct mail is more personal than online interactions (Source: MarketReach).

Reducing Mailing Costs – Consider Cooperative and Non-Personalised Mailings

Participating in cooperative mailings, where postage costs are shared across multiple brands, can significantly reduce the overall expense of direct mail campaigns. By pooling resources, businesses can take advantage of bulk mailing discounts offered by postal services, which are often much lower than individual rates. This collaborative approach not only lowers the cost per piece but also allows smaller brands to benefit from the economies of scale typically reserved for larger mailers.

Additionally, cooperative mailings can increase the reach and impact of each campaign, as the combined effort can attract more attention and engagement from recipients. This strategy ensures that direct mail remains a cost-effective and efficient marketing channel for businesses of all sizes.

Royal Mail offers significant postage discounts for non-personalised mailings, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to maximize their marketing budget. By leveraging these discounts, companies can reduce their postage costs while still achieving wide coverage and high visibility.

Conclusion

Direct mail continues to be a valuable marketing channel in the UK, offering measurable and impactful results. By focusing on the right person, right time, and right message, and ensuring your data is clean and accurate, businesses can maximise their return on investment and build stronger connections with their audience.

by Martin Jaggard – Director at The Ark

Want to know more about how Direct Mail can help your business?

Get in touch today

The Importance of Clean and Uniform Data when Leveraging AI

Oct 9, 2024 | Data Cleansing

After spending the day at Big Data LDN a few weeks back, I put together a blog article about my three big takeaways for the show.

One of the biggest focal points for me was the importance of making sure your data is fit-for-purpose when considering utilising AI within your business… so I decided to elaborate on that point.

In short, the quality of your data is THE most important consideration for AI.

Whether you’re working with large language models (LLMs) or generative AI, clean and uniform data is the foundation upon which successful AI applications are built.

Why is it that important?

Accuracy and Reliability

Clean data ensures that the AI models you develop are accurate and reliable. When data is free from errors, inconsistencies, and duplicates, AI algorithms can learn more effectively. This leads to more precise predictions, better decision-making, and overall improved performance of AI systems.

Efficiency in Training

Uniform data simplifies the training process for AI models. When data is standardised, it reduces the complexity of processing and allows for more efficient training. This not only saves time, but also reduces computational resources, making the development process more cost-effective when considering cost per consumption models like Azure or AWS.

Enhanced Model Performance

AI models, especially LLMs and generative AI, thrive on large volumes of high-quality data. Clean and uniform data helps in minimising noise and irrelevant information, allowing the models to focus on learning meaningful patterns. This results in enhanced model performance and more accurate outputs.

Gartner is predicting nothing other than the contiuned increase of spending on AI projects

Scalability

As AI applications scale, the importance of clean data becomes even more pronounced. Uniform data structures enable seamless integration and scalability of AI systems. This is particularly important for businesses looking to expand their AI capabilities across different departments or regions.

Ethical AI Development

Maintaining clean and uniform data is also a step towards ethical AI development. It helps in reducing biases that can arise from flawed or inconsistent data. By ensuring that the data used to train AI models is representative and unbiased, we can develop AI systems that are fairer and more inclusive.

Decision Making (the big one!)

For me, this is one of the most important aspects of the whole piece. Organisations make huge business critical decisions based on data, and nothing is going to change that any time soon. As much as we’ll come to rely on AI doing the legwork, ultimately it will be someone just like you or I say in a chair making a call based on the output.

So, what happens if your AI model has had bad data to consider?

You guessed it – absolute rubbish.

Sort your data out at the source and you negate this as an issue off the bat.

To close…

The power of AI, particularly LLMs and generative AI, is significantly amplified by the quality of the data they are trained on. Clean and uniform data not only enhances the accuracy and efficiency of AI models but also supports ethical and scalable AI development. As we continue to push the boundaries of what AI can achieve, prioritising data quality will remain a critical factor in unlocking its full potential.

by Steve Clarke – Commercial Director at The Ark

The Ark specilises in data cleansing, single customer view, and identity resolution. If you’d like to speak to us about any of these topics, get in touch today.

Big Data LDN 2024 – The Important Bits

Sep 25, 2024 | Data Cleansing, GDPR

On Wednesday last week I visited Big Data London at London Olympia, and I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some of the important bits that I took away from it.

I ended up getting to five of the talks throughout the day, with some really great speakers and a lot of great insight shared. I really do love an event like this – both to exhibit and attend – and there aren’t too many that top Big Data LDN in our line of work.

Firstly:

Data Governance

This was everywhere throughout the show. Now data governance isn’t new, by any stretch, and getting your ducks in a row when it comes to integrity and compliance has been a focal point for virtually every organisation for a long time, but unless your company truly is a data driven organisation, you did data governance because you had to, not least of all from a regulatory standpoint.

But now that every person and their dog want to be using AI, you must get it right. We all know the old adage “put rubbish in, get rubbish out”, but it’s never been as true as it is today. You simply will not get the best out of any internally deployed LLM if your data governance isn’t up to scratch.

Golden Records

Next it’s golden records – a single source of truth.

We, as a company, work with some of the biggest names in retail, and if you think of a company that has multiple brands under their banner, most of the time there will be disparate customer data sets in various data silos across the place, likely with slightly different formats of home address or phone numbers with international codes or without them, so it can be really tricky to get a view of information like shopping history of a single person, when it’s very hard to match them as records.

The message was, if you want to be getting full value out of your data, and again we’re talking about AI – possibly for analytics – you need a single source of truth to leverage, and when we’re looking at consumer data, golden records are a good place to start.

The final spot on my list is:

Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation

For those that aren’t overly au fair with these terms, anonymisation is the removal of personal identifiers from your customer data, and pseudonymisation is the process of replacing identifying information with random codes of numbers, symbols and codes.

Both of these were cited by the European Privacy Officer of Acxion as key safeguards when making sure compliance is adhered with not only with existing standards like GDPR, but also the New Digital Information and Smart Data Bill which is one of the 40 legislative plans announced by the Labour government in the last few months.

Just as a slight aside, if you’d like to know more about our methods of pseudonymisation, take a look at our JetStream page.

So, to recap: -

Data Governance – if you want to use AI effectively, get it right
Golden records – get your single source of truth sorted, again for AI’s sake
Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation – make sure your consumer data is protected, especially when considering new legislation