Analytics based channel evaluation and selection [6+1]
CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS Who brings in the most revenue for your company? Which customer is costing you the most? Are those customers that cost a lot worth it? are you wasting your resources catering to shoppers who aren’t even bringing considerable profits? All these answers (and many more) reveal themselves to you at the end of a successful Customer Profitability Analysis (CPA). Understanding Customer Profitability is an excellent step toward becoming more profitable in the long term. CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS Customer Profitability Analysis (CPA) is finding the profitability of each customer (or customer segments) by attributing profits and costs to each separate customer (respectively, each segment) over a certain period.
According to the Customer Profitability Analysis definition, CPA
is more of a management accounting tool than a marketing strategy. CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS CPA is a managerial accounting method that allows businesses to determine the overall profit a customer generates. A profitable customer is someone who generates a revenue stream greater than the cost of their acquisition, selling, and serving. Companies calculate the CPA on a customer level or for the entire customer group. When companies are more focused on products, departments, and locations of their offices, they often tend to lose focus on the customers. As a result, the companies have to sometimes bear the cost of maintaining unprofitable customers which is detrimental to their business. CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS CPA allows companies to evaluate their customers and know how beneficial it is for them to keep the customers. Based on this value they can decide upon the cost of serving them or even to decide whether to continue or let them go. It has been found in a study that the size of the customer is not directly proportional to their profitability. Sometimes even the large-sized customers can turn out to be unprofitable ones for a business. CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS To calculate CPA, you need the annual profit per customer, and the total duration a customer stays with your business.
Annual profit = (Total revenue generated by the customer in
a year) – (Total expenses incurred to serve the customer in a year) CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS The total revenue can be generated by the following sources that you need to include:
Recurring revenue Upgrades to the higher plans Cross-buying relevant products And, expenses can be incurred from the following sources which also you need to consider:
Cost of customer service
Maintaining a customer success team Loyalty perks Operational cost CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS Finally, when you have the annual profit, the customer profitability analysis calculation goes like this:
CPA = (Annual profit) x (no. of years customer stays with
company) CLUSTER ANALYSIS Cluster analysis is a data analysis method that clusters (or groups) objects that are closely associated within a given data set. When performing cluster analysis, we assign characteristics (or properties) to each group. Then we create what we call clusters based on those shared properties. Thus, clustering is a process that organizes items into groups using unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Cluster analysis is a useful and straightforward tool for understanding data patterns. The main goal of clustering is to identify the clusters and group them accordingly. USE OF CLUSTER ANALYSIS If you have large and unstructured data sets, it can be expensive and time-consuming to label groups manually. In this case, cluster analysis provides the best solution to divide your data into groups. When you don’t know the number of clusters in advance, cluster analysis can provide the first insight into groups that are available in your data set. When you need to detect outliers in your data, cluster analysis provides an effective method compared to traditional outlier detection methods, such as standard deviation. Cluster analysis can help you detect anomalies. While outliers are observations distant from the mean, they don’t necessarily represent abnormalities. On the other hand, anomalies relate to identifying rare events or observations that deviate greatly from the mean. CLUSTER ANALYSIS IN MARKETING When you don’t research and segment your market and customer base, time and effort may be wasted on product development or campaigns that simply don’t resonate with your potential customers. The solution includes cluster analysis, an integral part of identifying both consumer and market segments. Cluster analysis is a data analysis technique that identifies meaningful, naturally occurring groups within a dataset and distinguishes them as clusters. It is used to discover hidden relationships in data based on specific characteristics. CLUSTER ANALYSIS IN MARKETING Can you manually segment your customers and market? Sure, you can, but the manual method is limiting and only truly effective with a small number of characteristics or attributes. It simply doesn’t scale well. Cluster analysis with advanced analytics and machine learning can quickly scale to a high number of attributes. It’s also completely data-driven, using an unsupervised model (the algorithm learns patterns without tagged data), which makes it more accurate and credible. CLUSTER ANALYSIS : EXAMPLE A company has created what they consider to be the perfect cocktail dress. They have it priced at $1000. They want to target the appropriate market for the dress, so they know they need to find people who can afford it. Traditional segmentation might be based on their belief that only people over 45 have the income to purchase their dresses. But they used clustering and found that younger women of 25-35 not only have the income but are more likely to purchase cocktail dresses. This had a significant impact on their marketing strategy. COLLABORATIVE FILTERING As a popular approach to e-commerce product recommendations, collaborative filtering is a technique that can identify similarities between customers on the basis of their site interactions and then recommend relevant products to customers across digital properties. With collaborative filtering, marketers can tap user data to produce product recommendations tailored to users’ individual similarities and shopping behaviors. Like a friend who shares your tastes and offers suggestions based on books, clothes, and brands they love, recommender systems, backed by machine learning, aim to do the same. However, in order to effectively recommend products you might like, the system must understand who you are COLLABORATIVE FILTERING A popular approach to product recommendations, collaborative filtering is a type of personalized recommendation strategy that identifies the similarities between users (based on site interactions) to serve relevant product recommendations across digital properties. Recommender systems collect user information, mining this data to inform which items to display. The data includes, but is not limited to: Which products a user has viewed Which products a user has clicked on Which products a user has searched for Which products a user has added to their cart Which products a user has purchased before COLLABORATIVE FILTERING Analyzing these massive datasets based on a site visitor’s behavior and activity, the system analyzes product attributes listed in data feeds to begin crafting predictions, serving product recommendations across any page of a site to drive a customer closer to a purchase. To effectively do so, the system taps two different types of data: Explicit data: Data a user actively provides, such as answers to a questionnaire or survey Implicit data: Data inferred by a system based on a user’s behavior, such as a preference for sneakers after viewing several pairs and purchasing two pairs in the last six months EXAMPLES OF COLLABORATIVE FILTERING APPLICATIONS
Amazon uses CF to match products to customers based on their
past purchases. While the world was focusing on user-based collaborative filtering, Amazon came up with a new algorithm called item- based (or item-to-item) collaborative filtering in 1998. With this item-based collaborative filtering algorithm, product recommendations are created not just based on similarities between customers but also on correlations between products/items. EXAMPLES OF COLLABORATIVE FILTERING APPLICATIONS
Netflix is known for using collaborative filtering to
build its movie recommendation system 🎬. Here’s an example of how Netflix applies used-based CF to make a movie recommendation (Movie C) to User A: