Who’s who?

It sounds like such a simple and logical thing to do – to keep everything an organisation knows about its customers and prospects in one place, where all the snippets of information combine to form a complete picture of who it is you’re dealing with. The single customer view, as it’s known, is for some the holy grail of database marketing, and logical it most certainly is, but it’s not necessarily simple.

For consumer magazine publishers, the single customer view is only now becoming a reality, driven partly by the need to make marketing more effective and boost sales, and in large part by the need to stay ahead of UK privacy laws.

"They’ve always had lots of data and been quite good at recognising there’s a value in that data, but invariably those pots of data have sat in different places," says Jonathan Burston, director, customer solutions group, at marketing and database consultancy CACI. "What we’re seeing now is business wanting to collate all this information for marketing purposes. The single customer view is a reality, though not all (publishers) are in the same place."

The single view combines information that various departments and various titles within a group might hold about a customer – things like whether they’ve ever bought a subscription as a gift (they might, after all, be tempted to do it again), interest they’ve shown in titles beyond those they’ve subscribed to, right down to the price and the offer of the sub they have taken out, how they’ve paid, where they go on the websites and which competitions they’ve entered. This level of information can be a goldmine for marketing departments, who can tailor communications accordingly, reduce wastage and the annoyance factor of hitting consumers with irrelevant messages, and can retain, up-sell and cross-sell more effectively.

"Everybody gains," says Jenny Moseley, chairman of Jenny Moseley Marketing. "The consumer’s not pissed off, the retention strategy starts working better, there’s a big opportunity for affiliate partnerships, and just making the marketing spend work as well as you can by using the data you already have. It’s all about getting smarter."

The cost of consolidating all this data in a way that allows it to be updated and interrogated quickly has been coming down in recent years, making it increasingly accessible. The flurry of interest in this area recently has also been fuelled by the new data protection act, which was fully enacted in 2007; compliance requires publishers to stay on top of individuals’ most recent requests to opt in or out of communications, and demands publishers separate permission to send messages from the company and from third parties.

Coming into view

A Periodical Publishers Association (PPA) study of 15 publishing companies with Wessenden Marketing has identified four stages in the database development journey. The full single customer view is the end of the road, and three publishers were assessed as being already there. Most were found to be at stages two and three. Step two involves holding data from multiple sources on separate databases, with ad hoc consolidation and de-dupes, and at step three, consolidating the data into a single live database which is constantly updated and refreshed, but without customer service contact data. (And, in case you were wondering, the first stage is a transaction-based subs management system, sometimes with additional data appended to the records.)

"Most of the publishers are getting pretty clever at it," says Moseley. "They’re aware that there are restrictions to what they can and can’t do, and they can see the benefit of treating somebody as an individual rather than as one in 1,000."

At Future Publishing, the single customer view has been a work in progress for the past three to four years. "I do believe there’s a value in it," says subs and database marketing director Richard Walker. "It sounds very corny, but it’s not a destination; it’s a journey." The push towards a single view has so far paid for itself, he says. "It’s obvious, but it’s all about what you do with it. We’re comfortable that what we’ve done so far is supporting marketing, subs and our events business, and all those areas are seeing the benefit of what we’ve done. The ultimate for us might be to have our web analytics, email data and user history and prospect data there too … to some extent we’ve done that."

At BBC Magazines, single customer view project ‘Arrow’ also began about four years ago. "We needed to make sure we complied from a legal point of view with data protection and permission, reflecting latest preferences, and doing that without the single customer view was pretty much impossible to do," says channel marketing director at BBC Magazines, Chris Gadsby. "So, there was a drive to do it from a legal point of view but more importantly we saw the opportunity to use the database, primarily to cross-sell across the portfolio. We had the capability to identify when our consumers were interacting with us, what they bought and what they didn’t, how they preferred to pay, how often they bought, how much they spent. Profiles are then used for various marketing activities, primarily cross-selling or up-selling within a particular brand."

Data for Arrow comes from multiple feeds: offline data sets, subscription bureaux, promotion fulfilment companies and some online information, all of which helps paint a picture of how the customer relationship develops. Gadsby says once you can understand that, you start to be able to anticipate how individuals might be encouraged to develop stronger relationships. "It’s quite a sophisticated piece of kit," he says. "The next stage for us is to use it to harness the online data, link that back to the off-line data, then target customers with the most relevant content online and get them to go deeper into it."

Fatal errors

The cost of not having a single customer view can be dear. Moseley, who in the course of her work has subscribed to a plethora of magazines and signed up to receive everything associated with them, says publishers would be in for a shock if they could see what individual customers actually end up with.

A shotgun approach to one-to-one marketing – basically fire everything at everyone and you’re sure to hit something – has the appearance of working, and if done by email with a production cost of next to nothing, also appears to bring a return on investment, but is still hugely inefficient.

In the past, publishers’ different titles and even different parts of the same title have sent out completely uncoordinated material with no common thread or goal, missing not just opportunities to build a relationship further but also creating confusion and annoyance among the recipients. Some have also committed the greatest sin of one-to-one marketing, adding what’s called a global opt-out (allowing consumers to tell a publisher that – legally – they must never contact the person again) on a near-insignificant bit of comms from a single department in a single magazine.

Ensuring the highest possible number of opt-ins for further communications comes down to being transparent about exactly what permission is being sought for, Moseley says. "How not to do it is to make it so complicated that people can’t work out what you’re saying. If that’s the case, they’ll just say ‘I don’t want anything’ and opt out."

Transparency is also the way to overcome consumer concerns about the volume of information publishers hold about them, and about the very fact it’s all being held in one place and being used as a marketing tool.

"Where companies are transparent about why they’re collecting data, what it’s going to be used for and, equally, what it’s not going to be used for, and consumers recognise that it’s a value exchange and they benefit from it, I think consumers are OK with that," says Gadsby, of BBC Magazines. "There’s no doubt that there’s a growing group of consumers who are very reluctant about giving any data online. The marketing challenge is how we can make them feel comfortable and give them an incentive to do it."

A problem shared

Might publishers be willing to put aside their rivalries for the common good, working together on customer databases that are, after all, not just set-and-forget devices but jobs that are never finished, requiring constant upgrading and investment.

Future’s Walker sees that this makes sense. "Ultimately, all publishers are in this to drive up frequency of purchase, and I think there’s a role to be played in the data management. It’s a long and probably tortuous road because there are so many sensitivities, but in an unusual environment where it’s got tougher and tougher … I think there’s room for cooperation."

CACI’s Burston says combining resources would echo what’s done in other sectors to great effect. "Publishers have always worked in isolation from their competitors, unlike charities, who have pooled data," he says. "I think you’ll see publishers working more closely on this in future. There’ll be initial reluctance, but the benefits of doing it could outweigh the downsides." The obvious early partners would be publishing houses covering different segments of a market but that might have an overlap in readership. By combining their energies, there could be a significant cost saving.

To some extent, Gadsby says, data is – where the appropriate consumer permissions are in place – swapped between publishers. "We’re open to these sorts of conversations, but whatever’s being communicated to our particular audience needs to be relevant to them. As long as we do that and your consumers can see where you’ve done that, then I think it’s OK."

Nicola Rowe, director of circulation at the PPA, is more sceptical about the prospect of large-scale co-operation between rivals. "My instant reaction is that it would be way, way off – if it happened at all. One of the problems is, they’re all at different stages with what they’re doing with their databases."

What’s the difference?

Beyond not making howlers, the benefits of investing in pursuit of the single customer view are, the publishers say, crystal clear.

"It used to be that you ran your Christmas campaigns and waited til January to toss up how it had gone," says Walker. "Our retention activities are much more sophisticated now, we go well beyond basic segmentation and personalise offers. We’re already seeing a significant improvement in the results. The database is updated every 24 hours, and we can be much more reactive and flexible to what’s going on and we’ve seen email penetration rise to over 70% of our consumer base."

Gadsby tells a similar story. "Previously, what we would have done – and we’d have been very proud of ourselves for doing – would be segment subscribers purely based on how long they’d been with us, and this was pretty much standard practice for the industry," he says. "What we’ve done in more recent times is taken our understanding of people’s interests and attributes to how they pay … and used that to create more sophisticated segmentation of the renewal file. It’s fairly basic in concept but it allows multiple segmentation, and off the back of that, we’ve driven quite impressive rises in renewal rates."

The next step in making use of the single customer view seems to be in using it for editorial purposes, and then for third parties. "I think they’ll look at greater commercialisation of their data assets," says Burston, of CACI. Customer surveys used to help shape editorial could include questions of value to advertising clients, for instance. Dennis Publishing (see below) is using its customer database as a generator of sales leads for advertising partners.

Gadsby sees it tying in with e-commerce, integrating, in the case of BBC Magazines, data from BBCshop.com. At the BBC, where discussion of what might be appropriate to sell is highly sensitive, Gadsby also sees sharing data with advertisers as the way forward. "I think in order for us to survive … we’ve got to be able to work with advertisers to make sure their click-through rates are going in the right direction, and the consumer data is a really useful tool for that. That doesn’t mean I would give them the data, but I would use it. The important thing for us is to protect the data and the brand."

Gadsby says: "Publishers are increasingly looking at how they can develop additional revenue streams. The consumer data business is what ties it all together."