08


Q2 • 2021


COVER STORY


for enrolled students at the university and fifth in a nationwide survey of factors that influenced college selection. It was undeniably a valuable data point that connected the student candidate to actual enrollment,” explains Hinderliter. From there, Hinderliter could organize the


information from the campus-tour-registration web page and compare it with their CRM and the university’s admission applications. They could see the connections between a campus tour and enrollment, as well as a problem—an 86 percent form-abandonment rate on the website. The team discovered what was targetable


data by removing many of the fields present on the form, leaving only the data collection points that Admissions could use for the campus visit and would thus make for a better onboarding experience.


Because Hinderliter and his team had taken the steps to determine if the campus-tour data was valuable and had organized the data against other sources, they were able to target students from the initial visit to the campus-tour web


Once you have your useful data, how can you put it to work and apply your creative to what you’ve learned?


page. They now met the criteria for explainable data sets for leadership to sign off on a proposed project to redesign and improve the campus-tour web registration experience. The result was the largest increase in campus-tour attendance in school history. Once you have your useful data, how can you


put it to work and apply your creative to what you’ve learned? For starters, consider the full journey of your consumer, not just where you want him or her to go in the end. In his book,


Hinderliter showcases The Modern Consumer Decision-Making Journey by Mark Michael, which discusses 14 stages that the consumer experiences and explains where marketers can adjust the creative messages at every stage by relying on the data gathered. “We can see this already in the differences


between creative designed for brand awareness efforts and messages designed within CRM communication plans,” Hinderliter says. Consumers don’t just trip and fall on the Buy Now button. Studies show that the more often consumers are exposed to a brand’s marketing message, the more likely they are to consider it. Now, imagine if that message never changes, always looks the same, and is always in the same location or channel. It becomes invisible to the consumer as they mentally begin to ignore it. On the other hand, a data-driven approach


would respect the consumer’s journey and adjust accordingly, making the message more effective, more persuasive, and harder to ignore. Hinderliter points to Netflix and sports-apparel maker Fanatics as companies that have found ways to achieve data-driven experiences while personalizing the journey to connect with the consumer. He highlights instances where these brands have used data to both create content and react in real time to consumer intent. Remember, though, that dynamic content doesn’t simply mean a “Hi, (first name here)”- style personalization. It means using different data points to determine which content elements to display for the consumer in a single message. “To be a data-driven experience it has to use strategic techniques like association, visitation, connection, recommendation, and location,” Hinderliter says.


He points to Experian’s Mosaic household-


based consumer-lifestyle segmentation as a prime example of association. Mosaic classifies more than 126 million households in the United States along with 71 unique segments within 19 groups. When it comes to visitation, Optimizely has things dialed in. A provider of personalization technology for websites, Optimizely created


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