Retention is like the middle child of a marketing family. Perennially dwarfed by its siblings, Acquisition and Churn, you don’t pay much attention to it. Until things go belly up of course and then you’re left scrambling to salvage customer relationships beyond repair.

Customer behavioral data is the holy grail of online commerce and every eCommerce marketer is aware of the inherent benefits of driving behavior based customer campaigns. But ever wonder how this works in practice? How can a marketer use customers’ purchase and email engagement behavior to create and drive customer relevant marketing programs?

In our last post I introduced to you the SPIRAL Framework that can help marketers plan their technology roadmap. But a framework is directional in nature and the nitty-gritties of the individual phases are critical for ensuring outcomes.

If you run an ecommerce store or connected to its money making even in the remotest way, then you know that your customers are your lifeblood. Now keeping your customers engaged and happy with your site are never-ending challenges.

The goal of classification is to build rules or models and represent them in a simple readable form using past decisions. There are multiple techniques that can accomplish this task of gleaning intelligence from existing data – Neural Networks, SVMs, Decision Trees and so on.

Clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects so that objects in the same group are more similar to each other than objects in another group.  Well, now that the formal definition is through, we can get down to brass tacks – just replace the term objects in the definition with “customers “ and we’ll be on our way.

Before getting onboard a PhD in Data Mining or acquiring one, there is some level of magic a marketer can do with the behavioral database he has set up, without the need for advanced analytical Tools.

There are three internal sources of behavioral data that marketers can use to drive engagement. The interplay between these varied sources and a combinatorial approach can drive interesting and highly practical engagement strategies. Most marketers have ready access to the following sources of transactional information.

Having got through the data wiring aspects of connecting real time transactions into the repository, it is tempting for Marketers to put in a Customer Value indicator in place – something like the RFM model.   This can give tangible quick wins like

We all Know Why: Given the need to focus on relevant, timely messaging to customers, it has become imperative for marketers to have access to real time customer data.