The case
If targeting consumers is tricky, spare a thought for those who sell their products to other businesses. B2B marketers are aware that with every passing minute, a company ceases to trade and another changes its chief executive.
There can be other challenges for B2B marketing too. If a company's B2B file originates from sales orders, it can be extremely thin on information.
These were problems encountered by Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel, the agency hired by Marks & Spencers to promote its hampers to companies via direct mail. There was no marketing database, only two years-worth of ageing order information.
The dataset needed cleaning and augmenting. "We had only four or five dynamic variables on each customer, and this limits the depth of profiling you can do," says John Wallinger, data planning director at Craik Jones.
The agency asked Conduit Business Information to clean, profile and enhance the existing data and use it to build a mailing database.
The solution
Conduit began by cleaning the M&S order data, a total of 5,500 orders from 4,200 firms. More than a quarter of the file needed some kind of field realignment. Duplication was an issue too. Before this project M&S had stored its B2B data at an individual level - not knowing if different people from the same company were buying hampers. Deduplication (22 per cent of the data) allowed these people to be grouped at a company level.
The addresses then had to be PAF-validated before they could be run against Companies House data and the Thomson Directories Database. Those records that did not match these business datasets were matched against a business changes file (see Cleaning Kit) to determine if the business had moved.
Once cleaned, the pool of M&S data was established into three customer groups: lapsed, new and repeat. This data was enhanced with demographic data such as industry sector, turnover and employee size. "We then compared the three groups against the existing transactional data and profiled M&S's best customers," says Mike Gray, a Conduit board director. Matching this information with Conduit's business files allowed the company to add prospect data.
Results
A final file size of 37,000 customers and prospects was handed back to Craik Jones. A mailing to the entire database resulted in a response of 2.2 per cent, the past customer data producing the most return. Yet the cold data proved its worth too - the profiled cold data producing a better response (0.34 per cent) than non-profiled cold data (0.22 per cent).
"There are still some B2B clients whose mailing strategy is to take as many names as possible and mail them," says Gray. "But unless you've profiled them, you'll only get a response from a finite number." P
CLEANING KIT: BUSINESS CHANGE OF ADDRESS FILES
Q: What is a business change of address file?
These files hold data on companies that start, finish, grow or move.
They enable companies to track and monitor information on company status changes and geographic locations on a regular basis, providing valuable business updates and new opportunities.
Q: How does it work?
Information is obtained from a number of sources including business re-directions, postcode changes and business goneaways. This is further enhanced from data sources such as receiverships and bankruptcies, news and media events and third-party customer data, that may include new telephone line installations, change of ownership and new branch openings. The files may also track business start-ups, new office locations or list companies that are no longer trading.
Q: Where can I obtain one?
Such files are available from data providers including B2B data firms, business intelligence companies and UK mail services organisations.
- Iain Lovatt is joint managing director of Blue Sheep.