Ometria is a customer insight and marketing automation provider, working with a variety of brands to help them better understand the people who choose to shop with them. The aim is to provide their clients with as full and detailed a picture as possible, in order to help them make fully informed decisions about the best ways to engage with, and celebrate, their customers.
For Ivan Mazour, the founder, great customer service is vital. He writes regularly and eloquently on the topic, drawing on his experiences both as a service provider and as a customer.
His commitment to his customers, and his shrewd insights into the ways other companies succeed or fail to demonstrate the same, make him someone we were very keen to talk to. After hearing some of his thoughts at our first Discover Customer Love breakfast, we were interested to talk to him some more about the importance of fostering healthy customer relationships, and the ways in which he believes Ometria facilitates that.
Ivan is, first and foremost, a mathematician, and his true interest lies in how he can apply maths to real life and to technology. “Big data involves more technology than people think”, and more maths: Ivan believes in collecting that data, understanding it, and improving the way businesses work based on the insights he gleans from it.
When Ivan founded Ometria, his founding principle was that maths could both improve the customer experience and benefit the businesses he was working with. Looking for the right space in which to apply that logic, he realised that retail and ecommerce was the obvious choice, despite having little to no experience in the field. What he saw was that “there was a huge gulf between what customers wanted from their online shopping experience and what businesses were actually able to offer”.
He gave us two examples. First, one from his own personal experience: tactfully naming no names, he told us about a pair of shoes he had bought online from a well-known retailer, and three months down the line they are still contacting him with offers for the exact same pair of shoes. Second, a story about a client he had worked with in the past: they had sold a product to a customer and then, shortly afterwards, launched a sale on that same product. The customer had seen the sale and become frustrated, which he vented publicly on Twitter. The resulting negative publicity cost the brand far more than they made on the sale.
How does the internet impact customer expectations?
“The internet makes everything faster, and customer expectations higher.”
Whereas fifteen years ago business software only needed to work, it now needs to look like an iPhone app. It has to be easy to use, easy to integrate, and it has to look good doing it. Everyday customer expectations are higher than they have ever been and rising faster than they ever have before.
How does Ometria respond to this?
Ometria has hundreds of clients around the world but the business model stands out when compared to its competitors, such as they are, thanks to that intrinsic mathematical approach that Ivan brings to his company. “Customers and products are linked, mathematically, by transactions”: from fashion to furniture to e-cigarettes, the underlying mathematical model is always the same.
With any retail business, the data builds up because people’s behaviour is repetitive. They browse around, they make purchases, they’re drawn to certain types of things over others. Over time, that information can be used to create a better understanding of those customers and the way they like to shop, and in turn it can be used to influence their behaviour to improve both their experience and the outcome for the brand.
Essentially, Ometria is about enriching a brand’s understanding of their customers, but it is also about teaching brands how to quantify the value of that data. The question at the heart of most businesses is: how can we keep our customers? “Ometria provides the answers to those questions” and, in the process, teaches their clients to maximise the value of their marketing budget by enhancing their relationships with each customer they bring in.
Take cold water surf brand Finisterre, for example. They approached Ometria to help give them a single customer view, to understand the behaviour of their most loyal customers, and to establish how they could turn more of their customers into regular, repeat shoppers.
By using the Ometria platform, the brand was able to identify a big opportunity in preventing customers from lapsing, and in turn used Ometria to trigger automated, personalised emails to this group. As a result of this strategy, online revenue increased by two per cent, and revenue per email sent was boosted tenfold.
Do you think businesses understand the importance of all this?
“It’s a split answer.” Some do: they understand that customer loyalty is hard to win but that, once won, the lifetime value is higher. This, in turn, makes it easier to bring balance to a brand’s marketing strategy.
Many brands, though, are still new to digital marketing. They have a sense of the importance of data, and of customer experience, but their main focus is still on drawing new people in. They don’t fully understand how to use the data they’re acquiring, or why they should.
In that sense, a lot of what Ometria does comes down to explaining the importance of the data they collect.
What is the importance of 1st-party data?
“Ometria is a 1st-party data focused company.” 3rd-party data is all very well, but it doesn’t tell you who people really are. Retailers have lots of real, individual data which they can use to create tailored strategies and content to be put back in front of their customers, but often they don’t know how. Ometria’s focus is on enriching their clients’ understanding of their own data and teaching them to use it.
“In the finance industry, your own data is your edge.” The same is true of retailers, but unlike financiers, they don’t understand the value of their own data. People decide to build a brand because they have a vision of a product, but they don’t always recognise the importance of the other side of building a business, of the data they acquire and using it effectively.
Entrepreneurs in the US tend to be better at this. They create brands that people can identify with, but they create them in spaces in the market and they make them easily scalable, so that they can react to and build upon the insights they glean from the data they collect. Casper, for example, saw that there was demand for mattresses that could be bought online, but no-one had yet stepped up to answer it. As long as they could get their margins to match up with their customer acquisition costs, they were always going to be a success. The only difference between their business model and that of many other businesses is that a mattress supplier is not going to attract repeat customers, so their strategy doesn’t need to consider increasing their customer lifetime.
What is the importance of customer influence for brands?
Influential customers get a brand name out there to a wider audience than that brand might be able to reach organically. A blogger could have an incredibly wide audience: if he or she were to advocate for a product, that can be very influential.
Where do you see digital marketing heading in the future?
“In ten years, the term ‘digital marketing’ won’t exist”. Instead, it will be broken down into its different components. Digital marketing is made up of so many different strands and everyone approaches it differently - someone whose strength lies in email marketing might not have the same talent for retargeting, but they shouldn’t be expected to. Strategies that blur the line between digital and non-digital marketing are unnaturally categorised as one or the other but that will be less of a problem as “digital marketing” becomes less widely used as a catch-all.
“Now that digital marketing permeates everything, it should be split into smaller, more naturally defined roles.”
Even next year, there are going to be big shifts in attitude and approach. Where Facebook used to be a popular channel, it is no longer cost-effective for many brands. Instead, marketers will begin to shift towards other channels. Pinterest, in particular, is set to become very popular. In fact, it was actually correlated with the highest view-to-purchase conversion rate, at almost 50%.
Email remains a popular channel - it’s still the main way in which Ometria communicates with its clients - but other channels are likely to have shorter and shorter lifespans as marketers become wiser to trends in the industry and saturate new channels ever more quickly. Soon, brands will need to become super-savvy at spotting the next rising star and capitalising on them before they, too, become oversaturated.
Why does Ometria have a CCO? What does he bring to the business?
James, the CCO, is one of the four founders of the business. His job, essentially, is to make sure that every client actually sees the end result they’re paying for, and that it isn’t left in their hands to do so. “We never want someone to be paying without seeing the benefit”: whilst other, less scrupulous businesses might be satisfied as long as their customers are paying, Ometria is all about customer satisfaction. The future of the company, just like the future of every company, is ultimately tied to the happiness of its customers. In that respect, having a CCO and focusing heavily on customer satisfaction is reflective of Ometria’s brand.
The CCO works to understand the challenges potential clients are facing even before they become paying customers. He looks into the business to find out whether they are ready to make the necessary changes, as well as to ensure that a partnership with Ometria will be genuinely beneficial for them.
He then takes over the first campaign himself. It’s all very well giving brands the technology and the capability to collect the data they need, but if they don’t implement it immediately and effectively, they’re likely to become disheartened by the lack of tangible results. “We force teach them to fish”: the Ometria team knows the importance of making sure their clients are flying comfortably before they set them free to use the technology by themselves. Once they are seeing the wins and they fully understand the processes involved, they’ll be more incentivised to continue working at it.
“Between customer satisfaction and product is where Ometria’s brand sits.”
What is the most common mistake you see your clients making?
People focus too hard on customer segmentation: between demographic data and probabilistic data, marketers get caught up, but “that’s not how consumers actually work”.
Using actual data, derived from real customer behaviour, allows brands to understand what people really want, rather than what they are supposed to want. Which means that, when a 75 year old woman expresses an interest in clothes typically aimed at women in their twenties, it’s not the retailer’s place to tell her that those clothes are not for her. It’s their job to offer her the clothes that she, personally, wants to buy.
In short, it’s the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning: instead of making assumptions based on trends and demographics, brands should be offering content to their customers based on their individual preferences, gleaned through real behavioural data.
What do you think about word of mouth marketing?
Word of mouth is Ometria’s biggest and most profitable channel. Almost all of the business’ customers have, at some point, been exposed to some element of word of mouth influence, and Ometria tracks all of it. It is “absolutely vital” to the success of the business: “if the net promoter score drops even fractionally, the long-term growth rate drops too”.
Brands who have a large customer base should be measuring NPS - net promoter score - because they have enough data coming in to provide statistically interesting insights. Ometria has only recently reached a size with enough comparable customers at which it makes sense to measure NPS: for smaller businesses, it’s far too easy to produce skewed results.
What Ometria does make a point of measuring is customer happiness. They give every single client a Predicted Happiness Score, which is calculated by measuring and quantifying 25 different factors. This allows Ometria to address problems almost before they arise and keep their customers happier.
Can you give us an example of a particularly positive brand experience?
When one of Ometria’s cofounders signed up to thecorner.com, he browsed around as he normally would, and was sent relevant offers off the back of the data they collected about his activity. When he made a purchase, they followed up a couple of weeks later with more offers that were relevant to his original purchase, which inspired him to make a second purchase.
He later realised that, had they not been so accurate and thoughtful about their approach to following up, he most likely would not have returned for that second purchase. “He enjoyed being taken on a journey” and ultimately, both of the purchases he made were inspired, not by price, but by the experience of engaging with the brand and the way they communicated with him.
The thing that makes thecorner.com and thread.com unique is that they fill a hole in male consumers’ experience of online fashion. The data that they collect may be fed into an algorithm, but it feels like a human interaction, and that is where their strength lies.
Can you define customer lifetime value?
This should be split into two points.
First, “people don’t get it technically”. Ometria is capable of calculating CLV, but they choose not to include it in their base product because many of their customers find it mathematically intimidating. For their more advanced customers, however, Ometria does the calculation by bringing together lots of factors to quantify the value of each customer in terms of what profit they are likely to bring to the business over the course of their life.
Second, word of mouth should be factored into CLV, but is much harder to quantify. When businesses develop the ability to quantify the difference in value between “influencers” and normal customers, they will gain a whole new dimension in their ability to recognise the overall value each person brings. “This ability will signify a massive shift in the way we understand CLV”, and it’s something that Ometria is still working to crack. Factoring in a person’s Twitter following or how many hits they get on Youtube is useful, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. In the future, CLV will have to factor in word of mouth.
“But the real question lies in whether a CLV score will ever be able to tell us enough.”
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