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.