Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Ten tips: Getting the most from your Unique Telephone Number

Marketing MI system

Martin Wright

Martin Wright Associates

The Studio

15 Bloomfield Grove

Bath BA2 2BZ

Tel: (01225) 336977

martin@martinwrightassociates.co.uk

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Most companies struggle with measuring marketing effectiveness

• Growing channel diversity and increasingly complex customer behaviour has made marketing measurement a lot messier.

• UTNs (unique telephone numbers) have become the method of choice for most large direct marketers

• Different telephone numbers used on each test cell can work across all media and is more accurate than source codes: – Customers don’t have to look up codes, nor Agents ask for them

allowing both to focus on the customers’ needs.

• Here you’ll find 10 practical tips to help you get the most from your UTN measurement process. If you want more, or just to pick my brains you can contact me on +44 (0) 1225 336977 or martin@martinwrightassociates.co.uk

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 1 – Reduce admin: Manage your UTNs efficiently

• Companies with a large Direct Marketing spend will need a bank of 300 – 400 UTNs.

• A simple database is needed to record:– What campaigns each UTN has been used for

– A start date and end date

– A detailed description of the campaign (see 4).

– And it should show, at-a-glance, what UTNs are available for any future start date.

• Best practice is to ring-fence subsets of numbers for use against a specific product and media:– This minimises the impact of long-tail response and can reduce

production costs.

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 2 – Speed up reporting: Use response curves to shorten measurement windows

• Accuracy and reporting speed need to be balanced :

– How quickly do you want your marketing campaigns to evolve?

– Will results released 3-months after a campaign create impact?

– Do campaign managers have to analyse twice?

– Do you have enough UTNs to allow a long maturity cycle?

• Across a basket of offline media it will take 12 weeks on average for results to fully mature– Cutting off and analysing at 95% maturity reduces that to 8 weeks

– And at 90% maturity to 6 weeks.

• Run a few campaigns to completion to build response curves: • Call time at 98% for press and email and 95% for other media.

• ‘Immature’ results can then be weighted to allow for full maturity.

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 3 – Avoid errors: Test every UTN before every campaign

• This sounds basic but, before you go to production check every number:– Proof read against the database

– Check the campaign description on the database

– Ensure the number is live

– And that it is routed to the right team

• Otherwise mistakes will happen that may invalidate expensive test programmes, create customer irritation and undermine marketing credibility.

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 4 – Make analysis intuitive: Use a strict campaign description

• Good naming can give transparency when looking at reports.

• Consistency ensures like-for-like comparisons are made over time and trends to be seen.

• A naming convention must cover all eventualities but not create too much complexity obscuring the big picture.

An example of a naming convention

Category Data Category Data UTN 0800 123 4567 Contact type

Follow-up

Drop date dd/mm/yyyy Size/Format DL

Stop date dd/mm/yyyy Creative Control

UTN Code abc 012 Offer None

Product A Test Timing + 5 days

Medium Direct Mail Description Long-hand description

Title/list Database A Contact volume 11,000

Segment Risk adverse Cell Cost £x

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 5 – Analyse call handling efficiency: Measure repeat callers

• UTN analysis can give marketers sight of quality issues like out-of-hours, abandoned and engaged calls. Just as important are repeat calls

• These often indicate poor sales processes or call answering and vary by medium and time of day– For one Client the most efficient medium generated half the number

of repeat calls (1 in 6) than the least efficient (1 in 3)

• Avoid being mislead and investing in inefficient campaigns by de-duplicating using the CLI (callers telephone number)– Repeat calls also provide a good measure of call answering

effectiveness and can be used to analyse the opportunity cost of lost callers.

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 6 – Understand call quality: Measure call duration

• If UTN data cannot be appended to customer sales records (see tip 8) then a sales proxy is needed

• The most successful approach, pioneered by UTN outsource provider Rapport, is call duration

• By timing how long it takes to get through the IVR and the minimum time it takes to make a sale, an indication of call quality can be produced:– Any call less than the IVR time + minimum sale time is very unlikely to

have resulted in a sale.

• Whilst not perfect it gives a ready proxy for call quality allowing a comparison of the number of high value calls test A generated compared to test B

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 7 – Track callers’ IVR behaviour: Apparent ROI can be wrong• How callers use the IVR can skew results:

– Some people use the first number they find to contact a company

– Others seek 0800 numbers to talk to customer services for free

• A FS client saw very different behaviour for different products:– Product A had a large, long-standing base. B had a smaller, newer base

– The estimated response value for each product was wrong. Analysing call flows through the IVR is simple but important if response values are to be estimated accurately

Product A Product B

Calls to sales UTNs 100 100

Estimated value £9,000 £6,000

Calls transferred to Customer service

37 11

Calls transferred to other product sales team

12 3

Actual same product sales calls

51 94

Actual value £5,310 £5,430

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 8 – Create a joined up picture: Add UTN Code to the customer record

• ROI is best measured by appending a UTN Code to the customer record– This can be automated or done manually by Agents inputting a code

presented to their screen or whispered into their headset.

– Because UTNs are recycled a unique ‘UTN Code’ for each UTN/date range combination is required.

• Call data remains useful to monitor

call quality and handling efficiency.

Ultimately three data sets can be

combined using UTN Code as the

common key:

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 9 – Empower marketers: Build an automated reporting system

• With data processes and appending routines in place campaign evaluation can begin with confidence!

• Standard reports need to be designed providing all the standard answers needed by marketing every month. Many companies need two sets of reports:– Those for business usage - ‘In January we spent £x and generated £y’

– Plus those for marketing evaluation purposes - ‘We spent £x on campaigns in January that generated £y in the subsequent x months’

• A reporting system that allows non-technical people to interrogate results is very powerful– Whilst some central reports are vital, IT support is normally too scarce

to support every required campaign deep-dive

Direct Marketing

Consultancy

Tip 10 – Do it right: Get experienced help

• Marketing MI can be complex but don’t be put off, it’s simply too important.

• Spending the time and money required to get it right will pay handsomely by avoiding inefficiency, inaccuracy and ill informed marketing decision making

• In high pressure marketing environments direct marketing consultancy support ensures all the detailed planning is done and the right systems created and embedded.

• If you would like more information, or a free impartial view of your marketing analytics challenges then contact me on +44 (0)1225 336977 or martin@martinwrightassociates.co.uk