Data and Analytics

Fix Lagging Marketing Campaigns Before You Drain Your Budget

January 18, 2024 | Chris Brown

Crush your marketing ROI—and your revenue goals—with a next-level approach. 

If you’re like a lot of other marketers, you’re feeling the pinch of budget cuts this year. During periods of economic volatility and uncertainty like today, it’s often the first area of business affected. 

But this isn’t an article about what’s happening, it’s about what happens next. 

How are you, as a marketer, going to do more with less moving forward? What can you do differently? How can you become more strategic in order to get better results? 

Here, we’re sharing how to ratchet up your marketing intelligence. Make no mistake: this isn’t a “nice to have” strategy; it’s a table-stakes approach for competitive marketers who want to work smarter and more efficiently and add real dollars to the bottom line. 

Get ready to flex your marketing muscle. 

Given today’s uncertain and expensive market, you need a more agile approach to prospecting that’s based on what your target audience is doing right now, so you can pivot accordingly. Who is accepting your campaign offers? What do they look like on a granular level (their creditworthiness, financial durability, economic cohorts, age segments, etc.)? How has it changed since they accepted your offer? How are they performing? 

Just as important, you need to know where you’re missing the mark. Which prospects did NOT respond to your offers? What offers are they accepting instead of yours (if any), and how are they performing? What types of products and lenders are getting the biggest response? 

When you can adjust your in-play campaigns based on right-now performance data to exclude (or, in some cases, re-target) prospects in the next phase of your campaign, you graduate to next-level marketing. 

This is how you leave competitors in the dust and grow your market share. It’s how you flex your marketing muscle to become more strategic and cost-effective. It’s savvy, head-turning marketing that wins the attention of consumers and internal audiences within your company. 

The alternative? Doing nothing like everybody else. Letting your campaigns play out, no matter how they’re performing. And, potentially wasting away your precious marketing dollars…and your competitive muscle.

A closer look at “wasted” marketing dollars.

Let’s say “Jane” is buying a house. She’s knee-deep in the mortgage origination process, and on the advice of her mortgage lender, she’s avoiding anything that might impact her credit standing. However, you don’t know this, so you include Jane in your credit card direct mail campaign. 

Jane gets your first mailer and tosses it. Soon, she gets a second mailer, and then a third. All three, she tosses. She’s slightly miffed at this point since you clearly don’t get it (meaning, you don’t understand where she is in life). As for you, you’ve spent precious marketing dollars on expensive printing, fulfillment, and postage costs three different times for a prospect who can’t accept your offer for good reasons. Reasons that you should’ve known if you had access to the right campaign data. 

Multiply that scenario by thousands, or even tens of thousands of prospects, or more. Now multiply that by the number of campaigns you launch each year. The waste adds up fast. 

But what if you could’ve known after your first mailer that Jane had accepted an offer with a mortgage lender? The same goes for the thousands of other consumers who recently accepted an offer for a different credit card or auto loan. What if you could better understand these behaviors by generational age groups, credit bands, and other characteristics that factor into your marketing strategy? 

And here’s the kicker. What if it was super easy to access and understand this data? I’m talking illustrated charts and graphs, all grouped in dashboard views that clearly show you what’s going right in your campaigns, what’s going wrong, and most importantly, the “why” behind it all. 

Now, you’re cooking with gas. 

Get more strategic and targeted offers to market, faster. 

The Campaign Insights Dashboard powered by Equifax IgniteⓇ solves this burning issue by giving marketers direct, easy access to granular, in-play campaign insights. You’ll better understand your “on us” prospects, meaning those who accept your offers. Yet you’ll also gain never-before-seen visibility into your “off us” prospects who accept other offers (not yours). 

That means, instead of “doing nothing” and “letting it play out,” you can act fast and make smart adjustments that put a razor-sharp focus on the right audiences moving forward. Put another way, you gain the agility to dial up or dial down different prospect characteristics and intelligently refocus your campaign based on behaviors and outcomes occurring right now in your campaigns. 

So, what does that look like? 

With the Campaign Insights Dashboard, you can use dynamic data about your campaign prospects to: 

  • Evaluate “what-if” scenarios to further optimize your offers. What happens to my acceptance rate (or my delinquency rate) if I reduce my focus on Millennials and target more Gen Z prospects? What if I narrow my target audience based on average income? What if I expand my audience to include near-prime prospects? The possibilities are practically endless. 

  • Boost go-forward campaign performance and ROI by zeroing in on high-potential prospects. See who to target based on fluid insights pertaining to credit, age group, geographic location, payment defaults and delinquencies, financial durability, and more. Know what bank offers they’re accepting and how those accounts are performing to determine if you want to continue to compete for the business. 

  • Speed time-to-market by reducing time from pre-approval to offer delivery by up to 60 percent*. With more precise and practical knowledge of your prospects’ current and evolving creditworthiness, you can shrink prescreen timelines and get to market—and revenue—faster. 

It also preserves your marketing resources since no new expertise is required. Existing business users of all levels, from marketing admin, analysts, and even executives, can easily access and understand the data-powered campaign views, which are usually delivered as illustrated graphs and charts. Also, the graphics are high quality so you can copy and paste them directly into management presentations, when needed, to explain and promote your campaigns to marketing teams and higher-ups within the business. 

You’re in control, in real time. Making better, more nuanced campaign decisions that push your marketing and sales strategies forward in a marketplace that’s never been more complicated or competitive. 

Experience next-level marketing, with a human touch. 

Here’s the best part. The Campaign Insights Dashboard includes direct access to Equifax data marketing experts—real people who treat your business like their own—to help with your analytic questions. 

Experiencing sub-optimal campaign results? We’ll help you troubleshoot. Grappling with an emerging campaign trend? We’ll share our perspective combined with what we’ve recently learned from other marketers like you. It’s next-level marketing, with a human touch. 

If you’re ready to market smarter, cut your campaign costs, increase your conversion rates, and crush your revenue goals amid an increasingly complex economic landscape, you need to level up your marketing intelligence with the Campaign Insights Dashboard. Take a peek at the needle-moving insights available to you today, including:

  • key performance indicator views, 

  • conversion views, converter views, 

  • delinquencies, 

  • score shifts, 

  • and more. 

VIEW NOW. 

 

*Based on an internal Equifax analysis.

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Chris Brown

Chris Brown

SVP, Marketing Solutions Leader

Chris is the GM and Senior Vice President of the Data-driven Marketing business for Equifax. He currently leads a team of ~30 seasoned professionals supporting the sales, product, marketing and execution aspects of the Equifax Analytics, Marketing and Portfolio Management solution suites. Chris has deep expertise acros[...]