Teradata Marketing and MGM #td3pi

Next up was a discussion of the Teradata Marketing applications with a presentation from MGM Resorts. I wrote about their marketing solutions back in 2013. These solutions have evolved and include in-house and acquired technology like Market Helm, Aprimo and others. These solutions are designed to bring cross-channel consistency and customer specificity. Individualization, real-time interaction, integrated across channels. The solutions cover Marketing Resource Management, Omni-Channel Marketing and Digital Marketing. All three are supported by Marketing Analytics and primarily focus on B2C or B2B2C customers.

Making a modern mix of channels work in terms of individuals requires a combination of anonymous ID manager as well as traditional master data management. Need some way to combine the two both to use aggregated customer data to improve anonymous data and identification events that allow specific anonymous data to be tied to real customers. A more open ecosystem for this data integration, more self-learning automation and increase analytics are the development focus today.

With that as background Adam Bravo from MGM Resorts came up to talk about their loyalty marketing program. MGM Resorts is a huge organization and Mlife is their loyalty program. Technology, he says, has allowed them to know more about their customers. This is essential as their revenue has shifted from 70% gaming to 60% non-gaming. A new mix of customers needs to  be understood and targeted/rewarded appropriately.

Data, he says, drives their direct marketing. The data has exploded as more of what customers do is digitized and tracked. Improved technology allows them to manage this direct marketing, providing better analysis in real time (especially predictive analytics) to drive more targeted marketing. Key elements to the approach:

• Segmentation – specifically analytic segmentation based on spending propensity, type of spend etc. This is critical as with 5.2M customers it’s hard to target them one at a time
• Targeting the messaging to the engagement patterns of these segments
• Customization to make the communication feel personal and targeted

This approach drives highly customized and personalized mail based on templated campaign in the Teradata system. These often lead with a carefully selected and targeted offers backed with a broader base of less targeted but still not generic offers. A few years ago millions of offers went out in 12 segments. Now more like 162 segments and thousands of distinct combinations, all driven analytically rather than manually. And test populations are constantly integrated to allow them to learn what they need to know to manage their margin, uptake etc.

Ongoing analysis is used to improve their targeting and email engagement. They have analyzed how customers engage with email, decreasing their block bounce rate, driving their in-inbox rate to over 98% and yet driving open rates up to 25%+ without simply focusing only on “best” customers. Good analytical email management.

Marketing Decision Management like this is a powerful tool for improving marketing results using data and analytics. I introduce the topic in an article here.