Focus on the 'Persuadables'
Our Client, an analytics-based marketing and business solutions provider, wanted to do a better job of communicating to bank marketers how to use incremental modeling in direct mail. Incremental modeling, also known as uplift modeling, is a technique that goes beyond traditional modeling to enable an organization to focus its marketing exclusively on "persuadables" — those customers who will react positively to a direct-mail message. Using The Message Track process, we worked with our Client on how to best tell this story and where to tell it.
- The process took several meetings of back-and-forth discussions with our Client to determine which messages were most relevant to this specific concept. As is often the case in these situations, there were a lot of people sitting around the table, all with their own ideas of what did and did not matter in telling the story. The challenge was to keep the meetings focused and on track, a task we were able to manage successfully.
- Over time, the story took form. We set up a scenario that identified a problem for bank marketers and provided our Client's solution. The solution portion of the story explained how incremental modeling works (the testing, development and application phases), and compared standard vs. incremental modeling results using a hypothetical example of a direct-mail campaign.
- Quite literally, a Message Track document was created that everyone endorsed as the essence of our Client's story. The information contained in this document was used in discussions with editors of influential banking trade magazines to pique their interest in the subject.