BIG DATA AND CRM: A BIG OPPORTUNITY

In the last month, I had the pleasure of spending some time with Tail Target’s Data scientists. Tail Target is Latin America’s leading DMP, and today has over 200 million users in its database. DMP is short for Data Management Platform. These companies, through agreements with publishers, are tracking user’s online behavior (always respecting users privacy and anonymity). Based on user’s online behavior and statistical analysis they create algorithms that make inferences about user’s demographic profile, socio-economic status, and likely interests. DMP’s make this data available to publishers to better understand their audience, and they also enable advertisers to use this data to purchase media targeting a specific group of users (e.g. women 18-34 interested in cooking).

What blew my mind, was how some innovative companies are using this data to improve their CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Take for example, a commercial bank. They have millions of customers who log-in into their bank accounts daily and they know quite a bit about them:  their name, age, sex, and banking profiles. But they do not know anything else:  do they like sports, do they read international news, do they have children, are they frequent travelers? If they use Tail Target and put a tag on their site, in about 30 days the bank can match their own data with Tail Target’s customer behavior data and so know that, for example, Carlos Garcia who is a heavy user of their checking account, is 40 years old, loves motorcycle riding and has a university degree..  In this manner, the bank can create customer profiles and understand the psychographics of their best customers.   Using Tail Target, they can then advertise special checking account products to users who are not customers but who share Carlos’ psychographics. This is called “look-alike” segments.

This is only one application of how they can use Data more intelligently. With more users going online and expressing their interests and their personality through their click-through streams, businesses can today access a wealth of information about their customers which was extremely difficult and expensive to do in the past. I believe the use of Data for all types of marketing activities will explode in the next years and I hope that most marketing professionals start using a DMP to strengthen their media buying but also work with their CRM’s managers to complement their offline customer data with online user demographics and psychographics.