By Ajay Verma
As we enter the festive season, brands are upping their game, using customer data to deliver a more personal, intuitive, and timely shopping experience to improve conversions. Diwali witnesses huge spurts in spends across categories as the volume of ‘In-Market’ audiences across categories is the highest. But all leads do not result in sales. Chasing leads through both AdTech strategies like remarketing, retargeting, programmatic, lookalike audiences, and behavioral targeting is not cheap this season. We know the lead-to-conversion ratio is abysmal, making the cost of acquisition prohibitive, especially in the premium segments.
The challenges marketers and agencies face are low-quality leads, which many attribute to bad targeting. However, it’s often a result of customers merely browsing products or services they wish to buy without the willingness or ability to pay immediately.
Interestingly, 98% of people who watch recipes or food-making content on YouTube don’t end up making the recipe. Upon further investigation, we realized that simply browsing or watching satisfies their desire to enjoy the recipe. This behavior makes it difficult for marketers and agencies to identify potential buyers. The increasing opacity of ad management platforms certainly doesn’t help the cause.
Improper lead qualification is the first and biggest hurdle. Proper data enrichment, along with an ML-based lead scoring mechanism, can prove to be a winning strategy to reduce resource wastage and alleviate the frustrations of marketers and agency representatives.
The challenge lies in identifying genuine potential customers and increasing the probability of sales funnel conversion from an inverted pyramid to a more parallel shape, with minimal wastage as customers move from top to bottom of the funnel.
Imagine having the power of personalization and precision at your fingertips. Imagine knowing each lead’s pin code, the exact building they reside in, their average household income, monthly savings, education, lifestyle affinity, real estate prices, their behavior on financial products, and even where they shop, work, and visit events or stores within the last 30-180 days. With this kind of information, wouldn’t you be able to make better decisions about who to invest in or divest from and achieve higher conversions?
This empowers marketers to personalize messages by adding enriched context, demographics, psychographics, or behavioral insights, instead of relying solely on names, mobile numbers, and the unreliable “In-Market” definitions provided by social media platforms. Data enrichment also aids in improving segmentation at a hyperlocal level, such as the pin code level, which significantly increases the probability of conversion.
We layered lead data with information on people who regularly attended Falguni Pathak’s Navratri Utsav at the Late Shri Pramod Mahajan Sports Complex, Borivali (W), in 2023 to sell traditional outfits, other Navratri show passes, and even driver services for safe transportation home at late hours.
For a leading IPL merchandise brand, we layered lead data with information on people who had attended KKR matches more than once last year to sell KKR jerseys and other merchandise.
We have successfully improved conversion by over 30% while reducing investment in highly competitive categories like e-commerce, life insurance, fashion, and retail stores. Data enrichment helps us segment our leads more effectively, personalize messages, and offer precisely what each lead is looking for during the Diwali shopping rush.
Beyond data enrichment, we also recommend adding an additional layer of an ML-based lead scoring system created based on first-party data. This adds nuances specific to your category and brand. By adjusting and refining this ML-based model, you can layer the data with conversion-based aspects like frequency of purchase, festival behavior, average order value, transaction recency, and preferred platforms.
In the midst of the Diwali frenzy, standing out in a crowded marketplace requires more than just flashy offers or blanket campaigns. Try leveraging data enrichment and a machine learning-based lead scoring system to improve your conversion and ROI.
The author is a managing partner at 0101. Views expressed are personal and not necessarily those of financialexpress.com