Abacus NTV to analyze short-term customer value

Epsilon's Abacus has released its Near-Term Value (NTV) tool to give marketers better insight to a prospect's short-term potential.

NTV is also designed to help marketers determine how much to spend to acquire new customers, which channels reach the customers with the highest value and the best customers for test strategies and modeling.

“Abacus' core focus is to supply clients with prospect names for new customer acquisition, so it made sense, with the economy kind of taking a troubled turn and rising postal increases and rising paper and gas prices, that Abacus would come out with something to help customers better use each marketing dollar they have left,” explained Elisa Krause, VP of analytical services for Epsilon's Abacus division. “A lot of people were cutting prospect speculation, but when NTV is used correctly they can get a better bang for their buck for the same circulation. We heard from clients that they couldn't wait a lifetime for payback on a customer, and they needed to generate revenue in a short period of time,” she added.

To discover a prospect's NTV, Abacus compares a number of first-purchase indicators —including the amount paid at the first purchase, the month or season of the purchase and the origination source and channel. The NTV analysis forecasts a consumer's net profit over time as well as the point when marketing investments will become profitable.

For most NTV clients, Abacus will perform match-back to understand the initial cost to acquire a customer. Abacus then combines that knowledge with its in-house data on customers.

“We're leveraging a lot of information that we have on the Abacus Alliance, and that can help clients figure out how best to spend their marketing budgets to acquire and also look at attributes that might be important for subsequent content strategy,” Krause noted.

The NTV tool is available to anyone, but customers with a greater involvement in direct mail, larger volumes of circulation and more outside lists will probably find the most value in it.

Abacus has offered a customized version of NTV to clients for the past five years, but the new offering is automated and more widely available.