How to Increase Product Success Using Data Mining

Gaining brand loyalty, providing positive customer experience, increasing the number of product purchases and service subscriptions are the goals of any business. Data mining helps reach these goals.

When the business begins to grow, it begins to accumulate various kinds of customer data — emails, phone numbers, social network profiles, banking data, purchase history, etc. This data is a goldmine of actionable business insights that can support the decision-making and secure the bottom line by:

• Increasing the customer loyalty
• Reducing the client churn
• Uncovering hidden profit potential, etc.

How to get these insights then? Using the modern Big Data technology and data mining tools the businesses can sort and group this data, create more detailed customer personas, devise the realistic profit predictions, create personalized offers and close more deals. Below we list 7 cases on how to increase product success and provide better customer experience using data mining.

Data mining helps prioritize resource allocation to create personalized offers

Paul Turner from Skyview Consulting has worked for companies like Oracle, NetSuite, CallidusCloud and Adaptive Insights over the course of his 20-year-long career in marketing and corporate performance management. He emphasizes the importance of providing personalized offers using the insights gained from data mining.

For example, your data mining algorithm tells you a certain online store customer bought 3 packs of Pampers Baby Dry Diapers Size 2, infant formula and an ultra large pack of wet wipes. This almost means she needs lots of goods for a toddler or will need them shortly. Add this customer to the corresponding group, offer them additional discounts for the related products or coupons for bulk purchases of childcare goods, do whatever you can imagine — there is profit to be had and you can have it.

Providing personalized offers is easier using the insights gained from data mining

Data mining helps use your existing customer databases to fuel the marketing campaigns

Neil Patel is one of the top-100 influencers in the field of marketing, lead generation consulting and brand promotion, the author and co-founder of Kissmetrics and other marketing tools and resources. He notes that data mining is essential to fuel your marketing campaigns. This can be done using the following tools:

• Issuing VIP-buyers club cards that accumulate the discount points and store the purchase records information for later analysis
• Contests and promotions run regularly to collect additional registration details like the customer’s address or general location
• Email newsletters with announcements on the upcoming events and surveys on the expected new product features or services
• A corporate Twitter account, both acting as the promotion channel and a place to gather positive and negative feedback — and react accordingly

Using such data can help you build the patterns of best practices — like the best days to run a promotion or the most expected feature of your product.

Data mining is essential to fuel your marketing campaigns

Being an attentive and responsive company increases the loyalty of your customers and helps turn them into brand advocates through the word-of-mouth, the best marketing method available.

Data mining helps determine the sweet spots in your customer’s purchase lifecycles

Jim Belosic, the CEO of a lead generation software vendor listed as one of the 500 most dynamically growing companies in the US. He draws attention to the point that choosing the correct time for making an offer is the most important factor in sealing the deal, and data mining is essential for this.

For example, a realtor might identify a prospect as a 30-years-old with a wife, who earns around $150,000 a year. Now let’s assume his/hers browsing history (stored at their ISP’s cash) reveals the wife is pregnant. This means the prospect is very likely to be considering a purchase of a new house or a more spacious apartment within half a year or more.

Choosing the correct time for making an offer is the most important factor in sealing the deal, and data mining is essential for this.

Knowing this, the realtor might begin the drip marketing campaign — slow building trust with the contact through providing some useful real estate evaluation and choosing tips, personal recommendations, or creation of a personalized mortgage estimates. This way, in half a year the prospect will most likely use this realtor as an agent for purchasing his new property.

Quite opposite, if the prospect’s browsing history reveals the urgent search for any flat and moves from top-notch to subpar property in the last week or two, this means the prospect is in a hurry and is looking for any rented space to live, so long-term drip marketing campaign won’t help and more drastic action should be taken to satisfy the prospect’s requirements and earn the commission.

IT Svit opinion on the data mining use

From the IT Svit team’s point, the cloud can be considered the ideal choice for storing the data gathered during data mining, yet its distributed nature can be problematic to support the big data scaling process. Cloud storages cannot perform to the level required for efficient big data mining. When building the immutable cloud infrastructure atop any cloud service provider or hosting data center, the businesses must consider the level of performance of the data storage facilities in the highly-distributed cloud environments.

Cloud storages cannot perform to the level required for efficient big data mining

For example, one of our customers, an Estonian travel agency, used data mining to analyze the behaviors of their site visitors. This helped them understand which products received the most clicks, the best times to offer promotions, the optimal ways to engage both the tourists and the guides, the optimal social marketing channels, etc. Standard Google analytics capabilities proved not sufficient, so a custom data mining project was developed, which now helps our customer to remain one of the most popular Estonian touristic agencies, serving thousands of tourist from the EU and CIS countries yearly.

P.S. Lately, I gave an interview to Clutch, where I expressed my opinion on how big data mining ties with the cloud computing. You can chack it out right here.