White Papers
We're dedicated to marketing performance. Our library of white papers addresses today's challenges, compiles best practices and approaches strategic new ideas so you can improve marketing success for direct impact to your business.
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2013
Data Onboarding: The Key to a Successful Marketing Kingdom
Epsilon, the industry’s leading marketing services firm, and LiveRamp, the leading data onboarding company, have authored the “Data Onboarding: The Key to a Successful Marketing Kingdom” to help marketers understand the need to bridge the gap between online and offline marketing strategies and adopt a more integrated view of online and offline data. This whitepaper examines how to leverage what you already know – your CRM consumer data – online, and how vital a privacy-complaint matching partner is to successfully bring your offline data online. See how industry leaders view and address the security issues of matching and how marketers are meeting the challenge of onboarding and leveraging offline data.
2012
The Data Management Platform: Foundation for Right-Time Customer Engagement
Epsilon understands the evolving data management challenges that marketers face, and is proud to be a supporting sponsor of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Winterberry Group Data Management Platform (DMP) white paper.
Over the last decade, the worlds of digital advertising, marketing, commerce and media have nearly drowned in data. The data management platform (DMP) emerged just a few years ago as an ad hoc response to the growing, basic need created by continuous data aggregation from numerous sources. The DMP acts as a central hub that seamlessly (and rapidly) collects, integrates, manages and activates those large volumes of data.
This white paper, produced by Winterberry Group in partnership with IAB, explores the mission and likely evolution of DMP technology, as well as the broad landscape of users and third-party developers that have propelled its growth. It identifies a series of six use cases that may be supported by DMPs, and describes another half-dozen major dynamics that are expected to define the evolution of such solutions over the next 12 to 18 months.
If you have additional questions about DMP solutions, please email AgilityAudience@epsilon.com.
Improving Mail Prospecting Efficiency
It was only five years ago that acquiring new customers was a formula-based exercise with predictability in several important stages. While this isn't to say prospecting was neither simple nor guaranteed, the dynamics were extremely different. And then in May 2007, with a perfect storm on the horizon, marketers changed the way they found customers as paper, production and postage costs increased. Direct mail went from being a darling to an albatross around the neck of response-driven marketers – it was perceived as a less efficient means to grow.
Direct mail's use was changed significantly. Programs were scaled back and mail focus shifted away from acquisition to existing customers but at the expense of replacing in-active buyers. But at the same time, consumers had become promotionally focused which, impacted by a waning economy, led to a decline in direct mail response and overall campaign performance.
2012
Why it's Time to Rethink the Quality of Your Marketing Data
In today’s increasingly omnichannel world, smart companies are leveraging consumer data from multiple channels to not only improve the customer experience, but to enhance their marketing Return on Investment (ROI).
CIOs and CMOs increasingly are focused on building businesses by making optimal use of reliable, relevant, and accurate data. Campaign performance, testing, rollout, and improvements to business results are fueled by mining Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data, fleeting Internet clicks, and search data, as well as third-party data across market behaviors, market channels, and market segments. This enormous set of structured and unstructured data from customers is often referred to as “Big Data.”
2012
Acquisition Email Strategies - Life Beyond Housefile Marketing
Information in the marketplace about acquisition email programs is sparse, with most of the email advice, information, and statistics referring to retention programs (a.k.a. house file email). This creates a problem; many marketers grasp onto this information and assume it is also applicable to acquisition email programs. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and it often leads to mis-set expectations and frustrated marketers.
Logic (and experience) tell us that it is always harder (and more expensive) to acquire new customers than to maintain the ones we have, but many marketers forget this when it comes to email. To be successful, it’s important to consider and understand the key steps involved in creating a robust acquisition email program.
2012
Modeling Pitfalls
The role of analytics, specifically modeling, in the marketing operation is growing at rapid pace as managers seek to understand what variables are driving performance in campaigns, including who should be targeted. While modeling has been used for quite some time in specialized roles, modern modeling software is now enabling marketers to easily and efficiently generate their own algorithms improve segmentation and guide budgetary spend more wisely.
Epsilon Targeting's modeling teams, with hundreds of thousands of models performed, have suggested a few critical considerations to help your business benefit when working on models. The following modeling primer has been developed to help marketers get the most from their efforts by pointing out the most common model development pitfalls in each of five critical phases: Goal Setting, Data Preparation, Model Development, Testing and Roll-out.
2012
Re-activating Your Customer Base
Marketers searching for more efficient ways to prospect should consider an important source of names that is often overlooked: inactive buyers. This group has often been dismissed as not meeting "good housefile" criteria, but research shows this group oftentimes performs at levels above many prospect lists. However, a finely tuned selection methodology and a holistic approach can transform former customers into high valued repeat buyers once again.
2012
Five Keys to Building the Right DMP Solution
In a 2011 IBM study, 71% of CMOs said that the ‘explosion of data’ was their area of greatest concern, while 65% said ‘growth of channel and device choices.’ Marketing seems to become more complicated every day — more media channels, more data, more service providers, more parts of the organization getting involved. But, at its core, marketing is still all about communicating with people. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that, on the other side of the reports and the analytics and the technology, there is a real person having a conversation with your brand.
2011
Testing to Find the Optimal Multichanel Contact Strategy
A guide for understanding and simplifying the test and measurement complexities associated with building your optimal multichannel contact strategy.
2011
The Rise of Email Retargeting
In the age of instant communication, marketers understand the importance of email marketing. Email plays an increasingly important role in the online media mix. However email does not have to exist within a silo. It can be a critical link that bridges the gap between offline and online communications. That “bridge” helps reinforce triggers from other channels and lets consumers become more deeply engaged in a brand’s message.