Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

Exploring How Customers Interact With Advertising, Products, Brands, and Channels, using Multichannel Forensics.

October 30, 2007

Database Marketing Consultant

Many of you contact yours truly (Kevin Hillstrom), your humble database marketing consultant, asking for a cheat-sheet that outlines the most popular projects clients ask me to work on. Here is a list of the four projects I am most commonly asked to complete for clients.


Most Popular = Multichannel Forensics Project
  • Explain how customers interact with advertising, products, brands or channels.
  • Illustrate the long-term impact of a catalog marketing program on online and retail sales.
  • Describe how product classifications interact with each other in an e-commerce environment.
  • Outline the ways that online advertising channels interact with each other to grow customer value.
  • Develop a segmentation strategy or mathematical algorithm that forecasts customer segments unlikely to respond to print advertising.
  • A typical project takes thirty days, and often includes a one day on-site to present results and discuss additional analytical requirements.

Second-Most Popular = Catalog Marketing Strategy Evaluation
  • Evaluate contact strategy.
  • Illustrate interaction between catalog marketing and sales in other channels.
  • Develop a contact strategy that maximizes ROI, while growing the customer file.
  • Suggest what might happen if a catalog strategy is discontinued.

Third-Most Popular = Hillstrom's Zip Code Forensics
  • Incorporate your data into the overall algorithm.
  • Provide descriptions of direct marketing responsiveness by zip code.
  • Provide you with a zip code model personalized to your data.

Fourth-Most Popular = Database Marketing Audit
  • A two-day on-site project.
  • A full audit of catalog marketing and e-mail marketing strategies.
  • Grades (A,B,C,D,F ... C = Average) are given for the following combinations:
    • Customer Retention, Customer Acquisition, Data Mining/Analytics and E-Mail/Online Strategy.
    • People, Techniques, Tools.
  • An outline is created for improvement in the areas outlined above, coupled with the expected financial impact of recommended strategies.

Fifth-Most Popular = E-Mail Targeting Algorithm
  • Use past customer purchase behavior, past clickstream behavior, and past user preference information.
  • Develop a scoring algorithm to assign customers to multiple versions of an e-mail campaign.
  • Anticipate a 20% to 25% increase in sales/e-mail for customers eligible for multiple versions of an e-mail campaign.

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