USAA: Playing to Win

Doug Mowen, Executive Director, Chief Data and Analytics Office at USAA, knows how important it is to play smart at marketing. USAA, which provides insurance, banking, investment and retirement products and services to 10 million members of the US military and their families, is known for its legendary commitment to members.

From the time he joined USAA’s management team in 2002, Mowen has continually focused on the best way to use analytics and insights to drive value for both the USAA membership and the enterprise. Under his leadership, USAA has established a brand identity that truly revolves around superb customer service. It’s a directive that ensures customer satisfaction and generates positive returns on marketing investments.

Mowen had a chance to put his marketing prowess to good use in 2009. That was the year USAA expanded its eligibility requirements to include anyone who had honorably served in the armed forces along with their eligible family members. It was a whole different approach for USAA, which was founded in 1922 by a small group of Army officers who decided to selfinsure each other when outside insurers felt they were too risky.

The 2009 eligibility expansion meant that USAA had to figure out how to quickly raise awareness with a large, new group of prospects. Based on his experiences, Mowen shares five tips that can help any marketing organization achieve excellence.

Key Insight 1: Define Success.

Which Insights Would Promote Data-Driven Decision Making?

As you design your measurement plan with stakeholders, the first things to ask are, “What are you trying to accomplish? What is success?” It’s crucial to get your stakeholders to clearly define this. Some stakeholders may say they want to generate responses or sell more products. These types of general answers should stimulate additional questions that can provide better answers about what insights are needed. So, for example, you could ask what types of responses they’re looking for – such as phone calls, website visits or other responses. And you should ask the stakeholders to clarify what counts as a response.

USAA: Playing to Win

Doug Mowen, Executive Director, Chief Data and Analytics Office at USAA, knows how important it is to play smart at marketing. USAA, which provides insurance, banking, investment and retirement products and services to 10 million members of the US military and their families, is known for its legendary commitment to members.

From the time he joined USAA’s management team in 2002, Mowen has continually focused on the best way to use analytics and insights to drive value for both the USAA membership and the enterprise. Under his leadership, USAA has established a brand identity that truly revolves around superb customer service. It’s a directive that ensures customer satisfaction and generates positive returns on marketing investments.

Mowen had a chance to put his marketing prowess to good use in 2009. That was the year USAA expanded its eligibility requirements to include anyone who had honorably served in the armed forces along with their eligible family members. It was a whole different approach for USAA, which was founded in 1922 by a small group of Army officers who decided to selfinsure each other when outside insurers felt they were too risky.

Key Insight 2: Target Carefully.

Understand Your Customers and What Drives Their Behaviors.

When you’re targeting your audiences, you should incorporate as much as possible from the wealth of data that’s available today. Demographic variables give you a good idea of what the customer looks like, and they’re generally good predictor variables. But USAA has found that behavioral data is a much better predictor. To find it, be sure to pull data from your website and call centers along with transactional and event-type data, such as marriage, moving to a new home or having a baby. All of this information can help you more fully understand your customers’ behaviors.

Key Insight 3: Align Resources.

Understand Who and What Is Available, and Know the Limitations.

After identifying who you should or should not target in marketing, you should decide how you will communicate with customers and how they will communicate with you. Do you want to create a full surround-sound campaign using all available marketing channels? Or do you have a limited budget and only want to focus on a few? In that case, which ones should you use? These are all important questions to help narrow your approach.

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Key Insight 4: Measure Carefully.

Determine the Incremental Benefits of Your Initiatives.

The importance of good measurement is hard to underestimate. To do it, USAA uses scientific methodology to examine the available models that it can use for targeting and vehicle assignment. Once it understands budget and success metrics, USAA uses a marketing mix optimization model to determine which channels to use for campaigns. Then it uses a vast suite of prediction models to further refine its target audiences – creating the best chance for success. Finally, it focuses on building the measurement (or test) plan. Where possible, USAA prefers to use a control versus exposed approach to measure the incremental value of individual tactics. And when it can’t use a control group, it turns to special types of A/B testing or time series modeling.

Key Insight 5: Build Credibility.

Certify and Clearly Communicate Your Results.

If you can clearly support and share your analytic results, you will be much more successful at building a business culture that relies on facts to make decisions. But keep in mind that if results are not favorable, people may question the data, the measurement techniques or the analysis itself. Sometimes these discussions can lead to additional knowledge or insights. But if your data and measurement techniques are solid, this unnecessary debate can strain your analytical resources across the organization.

To combat these attitudes, partner with your chief financial officer to certify your results. A partner outside of your organization can help develop, support and back your measurement techniques and certify the benefits, leaving little room for interpretation. You can also gain ground by overcommunicating your results. For example, if IT helped you create a data store or gather additional data elements, share the results with them. Let them know how their work directly contributed to your findings. The more people who can directly speak to your results and the insights generated from them, the more likely that everyone will rely on the results of analytics to guide their decisions.

How SAS Can Help

As you invest in marketing analytics technologies, you have to do more than just build a campaign management infrastructure, deploy a new social media analytics capability or build a huge, impressive data warehouse. SAS helps marketing organizations use big data to the fullest extent possible so they can better understand the customer, design appropriate interactions and ultimately drive better marketing results. Consider a few tips that can help your organization achieve these goals:

• Be able to show a clear connection between what you do and how the results drive your company’s revenue. Link your marketing metrics (campaign results, acquisition rates, lead generation scores, etc.) to business results (share of wallet, loyalty, category share, profitability, etc.).
• Learn as much as possible about the customer experience. That way, you can deliver branded experiences that are relevant, personalized and anticipated across all interactions. It’s also important to share your multichannel knowledge of the customers and their interactions with your entire organization. That could include a direct consumer campaign, but it could also include sharing information outside the realm of marketing – like technical support or market research to be used in other ways.
• Be prepared for multichannel campaign management, which consists of choreographing outbound and inbound conversations with customers. That could include things like targeted mail, direct mail, and all types of customer interactions on social media or through the call center. You must determine how to see and respond and communicate to the customer consistently across all those channels.
• Look for growth opportunities that are inherent in customer data. It’s not just about having relevant dialogues with customers – you have to be able to find hidden gems and cultivate relationships to drive revenue. And you have to make the right moves with all of your marketing investments – not just run better campaigns.
• Recognize the dramatic evolution of marketing campaigns so you can effectively sustain your brand. Along with billboards and full display ads, newspapers and magazines, marketing departments also have to take into account social media options and many different websites. With that comes an added expectation of immediacy and detailed measurement.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is all about finding the most profitable growth opportunities in your data, knowing where to place your bets, taking the best marketing action and ultimately maximizing the cross-business influence of every dollar you spend. Through a customer intelligence platform that aligns the customer journey with your marketing systems and processes, SAS® helps you accomplish all of these things.

With SAS, you can unite data, analytics, operations, customer engagements and marketing actions across channels to win, serve and retain your customers in an increasingly complex digital world. Marketers today frequently have to straddle this fence between art and science – which entails not just crafting messages and emotional connections with customers, but also having crisp measurements to put the proof behind what they do. SAS also helps them understand what works and what doesn’t – not only with a broad demographic or specific segment, but also at the individual customer level.

It’s not easy to do. But as USAA has proven, marketing analytics used wisely can return impressive results. Armed with the right tools, processes and technologies, marketing executives can have tremendous, positive influence across their entire organizations.