It’s obvious – right? Complete customer data is key. So, no, you can’t really know your customer – or how engaged they are with your organization – if you are only seeing small “slices” of their activity at a time.
That’s common sense!
Common sense is not called “common” because everyone does it. It’s called “common” because everyone knows they should do it. There are many good reasons that people don’t do things they know they should. One is that the torrent of work and activities leaves many people little time for new best practices. Another is that they don’t quite know how.
The speed at which technology is advancing, that data is being leveraged to pinpoint and target customer needs, and that customer expectations are being shaped by consumer experiences are all increasing. Navigating this environment without a full view of your customer (member, author, attendee, reviewer, reader) is ill-advised at best. It’s time to make customer data unification a priority, if you haven’t already!
Let’s say you’re a professional learned society. What could you do with a full view of your member, author, reviewer…? How could you serve them better and boost your value to them?
I asked a few of the partners in our industry how they believed a more holistic view of a member/author could benefit a society. Here’s what they said.
Ex Ordo (Laura Harvey, Chief Customer Officer)
There are three universal elements to events which make event data potentially very powerful for better understanding researchers. Events involve a scheduling/travel commitment, are interaction heavy and have connection and engagement at their core. All three of these points have the potential to add value to society publication, education, and membership workflows (and more!). Here are three ways this data could be utilized if it were unsiloed:
Events and Membership
When considering events in the context of membership, an obvious place to start is to see which members have submitted to or attended which society events (and when) to gauge interests, and the success of the events portfolio in engaging membership.
Drilling deeper and seeing which members attended which sessions by topic would allow for dynamic insights on member interest areas.
Diving into even more granularity: Imagine being able to see attendee event interactions — who asked questions via the chat? Who participated in session polls? Now imagine that layered onto your membership management system. You could identify active, engaged members for committee or editorial positions, and target active nonmembers for membership.
Events and Publications
One of the biggest opportunities here is collaboration between society events and publications.
Society events and activities arguably facilitate a lot of scholarship from their communities en route to publication, a better events/publications connection would allow societies to capture more of the benefit of those resulting publications, from OA revenue to readership.
At any given event, attendees are likely to include researchers with work at various stages of the research life cycle. Some may have work ready to submit, some may be at the planning stage, some may have results they want to share, and some may be writing a manuscript.
- It’s estimated about 40% of conference content ends up in a journal within 2 years. The lowest hanging fruit here is connecting your conference content workflow to journal submissions, not only to capture as much of the 40% in society titles specifically, but also to open the door to any of the remaining 60% which is suitable for publication. While society events and activities arguably facilitate a lot of scholarship from their communities en route to publication, a better events/publications connection would allow societies to capture more of the benefit of those resulting publications, from OA revenue to readership.
- Journal commissioning would benefit from leveraging event data on session topics and speakers seeing the most engagement.
- Using event data to identify active attendees per topic has obvious potential for editorial board and reviewer recruitment.
Events and Research Integrity
Now for the most sensitive, but to my mind the most unexplored possibility — using event data to enhance existing Research Integrity efforts. Attending a scholarly event involves financial and logistical barriers: registration fees, time commitment, possible travel. It likely includes interaction with other attendees. These data points could be extremely powerful from a research integrity perspective.
Imagine a submission within your publications workflow undergoing a research integrity screen. What if you could cross check all author email addresses, or other unique identifiers against paid event registration, attendance, and activity data? And then cross check the subject area alignment between the event and journal submission data? Event data offer another avenue of triangulation when evaluating the validity of submissions.
All event data at its core is a measure of engagement and interest. Connecting that data with wider society functions opens the door for building a 360-degree view of community members and moving up the data value pyramid.
All event data at its core is a measure of engagement and interest. Connecting that data with wider society functions opens the door for building a 360-degree view of community members and moving up the data value pyramid.
WILEY (Andrew Smeall, Vice President, Workflow Solutions)
As a journal publisher, I try not to forget that researchers don’t publish for publishing’s sake. I serve researchers who want to build careers, form peer networks, secure funding, publish scholarship, and impact society. These goals lead naturally from one to another: funding leads to scholarship leads to impact. Providing value for researchers requires data across these goals, so that we can position a researcher at the correct stage and offer them the right support.
Consolidate Identities
Providing value to researchers starts with understanding our audience and what they want. We need a rich, evolving understanding of each researcher that puts all contact points in one place. We need to understand what services we have provided in the past and what opportunities the researcher is looking for today, understanding that the same researcher wears many hats. What events have they attended? Have they published in any of our journals? What stage of their career are they in? Are they a potential author? Are they primarily a consumer of research? Are they looking for funding? A new job?
Researchers, for their part, should not need to create a new identity for every event, article, or website visit. They should have fewer places to go to see and control how they are sharing data with us. This complete view leads to being able to provide better services.
Visualize the Whole Research Journey
Our analytics tend to lose sight of research outputs as they move from one system to the next, making it hard to fix inefficient workflows. Events, conferences, and articles flare to life for a brief active period in one system and then ossify when the event ends, or the paper moves to another stage of the workflow.
Our analytics tend to lose sight of research outputs as they move from one system to the next, making it hard to fix inefficient workflows.
End-to-end analytics is a simple dream that remains elusive across multiple 3rd-party systems. All journal publishers should be able to watch a paper move through the stages of publication from one system to the next, with real-time data on the amount of work at each stage. We should aim for the same visibility in less well studied journeys, such as the pipeline from funding to impact, conferences to journals, or student to job searcher to active researcher.
Make Use of Usage
Signals from our content sites should inform how we interact with researchers. Search, browsing, and reading behavior signal if someone is in research mode, conference mode, or authoring mode. It can reveal exactly what a researcher is looking for (often quite literally, in the case of search queries). Value comes from linking these signals to an identity, so we can understand who asked for what when, and satisfy researcher needs.
Our systems today contain many detailed snapshots of data about research and researchers at moments in time. The challenge is to combine these snapshots to reveal the animated, changing reality of a researcher, an event, or a piece of content. The same person, event, or object appears again and again in different forms across our sites, events, and services. We unlock value by linking these entities, forming a more complete understanding of what to offer when. Getting this right will reduce the demands we place on researchers, provide faster turn-around times and better experiences for researchers, and help societies grow their audience more effectively.
Getting this right will reduce the demands we place on researchers, provide faster turn-around times and better experiences for researchers, and help societies grow their audience more effectively.
Hum (Dustin Smith, President & Co-Founder)
There is a good news/bad news story to first-party data and societies. The good news (honestly, even great news) is that societies sit on vast troves of helpful, mission-critical, and valuable first-party data spanning live events, virtual events, education (and sometimes credentialing), membership programs, community sites, and content consumption and creation, often including journals content (again, both what people are reading and what they are authoring and reviewing).
The bad news, as both Laura and Andrew have highlighted, is that almost always these data live in disparate platforms and functional silos, prohibiting societies from connecting the dots to see their various audiences clearly, or coordinate their audience’s experiences. This also limits the ability of societies to take advantage of AI, which relies on data for food.
“…data live in disparate platforms and functional silos… This also limits the ability of societies to take advantage of AI, which relies on data for food.
An increasing array of products now exist specifically designed to solve this problem. Some trace their lineage to retail ecommerce, where understanding the individual customer is of existential importance. The same is true of societies, and increasingly publishing societies, who now see individual authors as key customers.
One distinct technology solution is called Integration Platform as a Service (or iPaaS). iPaaS are cloud-based products that solve the basic data transmission problem, but don’t do anything in terms of profiling, insights, or AI upgrades. They are effectively a network of pipes that move data about people around a society’s platforms where this data is stored.
Customer Data Platforms
The second category is Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). These products connect to each customer-data-containing platform in an organization’s stack, ingest and unify customer data, and enable the creation of segments of people based on characteristics across all data points (for example, everyone in Georgia who bought purple shoes in the last 30 days and who has not yet purchased a purple belt). Those segments can then be marketed to via the CDP.
The latest generation of CDPs has taken this base functionality and put it on steroids. That includes broader data collection; AI toolsets that use, for example, the latest large language model (LLM) technology to better understand people, content, topics, and the intersection of the three (what content/events/courses/products will be of interest to which people); and even society- and association-specific functionality (for example, membership-specific calls-to-action and dashboards for things like turn-aways and read-and-publish agreements for publishing societies that sell via subscription).
With a full, un-siloed view of every customer and their activity, a society has an enormous opportunity to serve all their audiences better.
With a full, un-siloed view of every customer and their activity, a society has an enormous opportunity to serve all their audiences better. Better understanding member needs, interests, and behavior means that content, event, education, and membership teams can work synergistically to deliver tailored touch points, unified messaging, and membership experiences beyond traditional department boundaries.
How publishers and societies leverage customer data
- Spot active journal readers from specific companies or geographies who have never attended their annual conference and deliver targeted promotions with registration details or discounts.
- Discover likely members who routinely attend education seminars but haven’t joined (or renewed) and trigger personalized marketing across multiple channels (publishing platform.org site, LMS, events) to highlight the value of membership.
- Target marketing for an upcoming webinar to members that are highly engaged with the topics on the agenda but have not yet registered.
- Offer sponsors hyper-targeted, zero-waste advertising based on demographic (say, job title) and topical interest data.
- Identify topics that are driving engagement but are underserved within their content corpus, and then using this to drive new content development, build webinars, and craft educational programming to fill those content gaps.
- Drive annual event attendance from a specific target growth market. Reveal the most popular topics from journals and events to the desired audience segment (for example, non-academic practitioners) and use that to drive event programming.
- Reach anonymous journal readers with personalized information about/recommendations from events and educational programs. And vice versa – surface journal article recommendations to people visiting events or educational content.
- Personalize emailed newsletters based on what people are reading in journals.
- Create new non-dues revenue products, like campaigns where sponsors can follow-up with audiences at organizations that have shown interest in their products
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Now it’s your turn.
- How has your organization broken down silos (data or organizational) and what has been the result?
- What are some of the blockers making it difficult for you to get complete customer data?
- How proficient is your organization with data and analytics?
Or share any other comment you’d like to make about how we can leverage data (internal to our organizations or from external data sources).
Discussion
6 Thoughts on "Can You Really Know Your Customer If You Only See Them One Silo At A Time?"
I’m already bombarded with marketing messages from two of the learned societies I belong to. I doubt I’d notice if those messages became “smarter” as a result of a CDP working in the background.
As for personalized newsletters, I doubt even the best-funded societies could afford to create the vast salad bar of content that personalization would require.
All of the above is very interesting with some great ideas. But, society markets are very small and rifle marketing within a small population within a small market is very expensive.
I am a major proponent of evidence-based decision-making and value creation and I think these are excellent examples of how data can inform practice and serve clientele/members. What I wished for as I read through this was a greater sense of how the people who all this data represent should have agency with respect to how such data is joined up, mined, and applied. Maybe the thought is that it goes without saying that data capture, management, and use should be ethically-informed, security-conscious, privacy-protecting, etc. But, given the significant ethical breaches we see almost daily in the tech industry and with social media platforms, which are in part driving notably regulatory attention to user data, publishers would be well-served to ensure that things that go without saying don’t go without doing.
Completely agree, Lisa.
We could write a whole new post (series even) on “…data capture, management, and use should be ethically-informed, security-conscious, privacy-protecting, etc” and it is fundamental to any aggregation, analysis, and use of customer data.
Agreed! I find that consent in data capture feels especially important in our industry, where integrity and ethics are paramount to our missions. I talk often with other industry marketers about what ethical, “non-creepy” marketing looks like, and fortunately, policies like GDPR have helped to provide a framework for gathering data in consensual and transparent ways.
I’ve found that highly-consensual data capture and marketing efforts also lead to higher engagement, since the value exchange is made clear up front, parties can opt out at any point, and the content is highly relevant. To the point of this article, uniting data across systems only makes these efforts easier and more powerful.
Another challenge is that customers don’t view their field of study through the lens of whatever society they belong to.
Let’s say I’m a member of the Royal Astronomical Society. RAS knows that I’m interested in accretion disks, plasmas and neutron stars. Its CDP shows me papers from MNRAS in those topics.
The trouble is, I’ve likely read those papers months ago on arXiv. And the RAS CDP isn’t going to show me papers from rival publishers, which I’m just as interested in.
CDPs could be worth deploying. But it’s not enough to say, “Personalize emailed newsletters based on what people are reading in journals.” You also have to ask detailed questions like, “How many journal articles does a customer have to access before I discern their interests?” And “If I discover that a customer is interested in, say, nonequilibrium dynamics, do I produce enough content about that topic to keep filling a personalized newsletter?”
