How Companies Learn Your Secrets

A fascinating and in-depth article in the New York Times - covering predictive analytics, habit formation, new product marketing psychology, ethical considerations and scaring customers.  Definitely worth a read by anyone interested in understanding how sophisticated the analytics initiatives are at some of the world's largest retailers. Beyond that it goes into a very interesting discussion on the psychology of habit which would be broadly interesting to anyone.

It begins... Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”       

The full article can be found here.

Reducing Customer Churn at a Mobile Telecommunications Operator

We recently released a case study about how mobile telephone operator 2degrees was able to utilize predictive analytics to identify those customers at risk of churning (leaving). This customer analytics solution utilizes propensity modelling to identify which customers are statistically most at risk of churning. 2degrees used 11Ants Customer Churn Analyzer to achieve an increase in identification rate of 1275%. Read the full case study here.

Predictive Analytics to Increase Marketing Response Rate by 166%

We recently released a case study on how e-commerce site Trade Me increased response rate in an electronic direct mail (EDM) campaign using predictive analytics. This customer analytics solution utilizes propensity modelling to identify which customers are statistically most likely to respond to a campaign offer. Trade Me used 11Ants Customer Response Analyzer to achieve an increase in response rate of 166%. Read the full case study here.