For journals publishers, a holistic consideration of customer data makes sense – you can’t provide the best service, or make the most of sales and marketing opportunities, unless you understand all the ways in which a particular customer interacts with your products and services. The problem is that the relevant data tends to sit in lots of separate platforms – and that also makes sense, since those platforms are designed to support the different needs of different teams.
Fortunately, DataSalon’s MasterVision service is here to help! It draws together the data from all the specialized platforms you use, enabling you to search and analyse it as a whole. There are three main strands to this aggregation solution, which together create a flexible and powerful approach to achieving complete customer insight.
Linking up customer data
We use a combination of IDs, email addresses, and proprietary tools for matching against reference data sets (Ringgold or ROR) to join up every piece of information relating to a particular customer into a single standardised customer record. This gives insights that wouldn’t have been available from viewing the data in isolation. For example, looking at an institution’s journal subscriptions and usage in combination allows ‘cost per download’ to be calculated, highlighting institutions at risk of cancelling. For an individual, event attendance and alert sign-ups indicate subject interests – useful when searching for new authors, reviewers, or editors.
Associating individuals with institutions
Even where an individual’s institutional affiliation isn’t directly stated in the data, it can often be determined using the domain part of their email address. This means that you can identify institutions as good sales prospects from the activity of their related individuals, e.g. by finding institutions with high author submissions but no subscription to a journal. And looking at all the activity relating to a particular journal (turnaways, pay per view purchases, submitting authors, reviewers, and alert sign-ups) can show you the hottest leads for new subscribers, allowing limited sales resources to be used as effectively as possible.
Reporting at different levels
As well as viewing individual activity at an institutional level, institutional activity can also be considered at different levels. For example, it may be the case that subscriptions are taken out by an institution’s main library, while book orders are created by departments. We can ‘roll up’ the data so that this disparate activity can be analysed at the level of the main institution. And the institutional activity can itself be viewed in the context of any consortia to which that institution might belong, so that member holdings and usage data can be used to cost new consortia deals.
If you’d like to find out more about how MasterVision can help you with complete insight into the behaviour of your customers, please get in touch for a demo and to discuss your own use cases.
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