As lenders look for ways to market to small and midsize businesses, information providers are adapting event-based marketing services, once available only for consumer solicitation, to help with the search.
Experian Inc., the Costa Mesa, Calif., credit bureau, has developed a business-to-business service that alerts clients to changes in the credit behavior and demographic information of potential marketing targets.
The service, which is to be unveiled today, will help banks find small and midsize businesses that are shopping for additional credit or products, maintain updated demographic information for direct mailings, and avoid marketing to risky prospects, Experian says.
Equifax Inc. already offers a commercial triggering service that works only for marketing to small businesses.
Experian says its product, B2B Marketing Trigger, allows banks to further refine the types of changes that set off alerts.
“We detect a change has occurred, and the customer can then decide what level of change is important,” said Denise Hopkins, a senior director at Experian.
Jim Eckenrode, the vice president of banking and payments research at MasterCard International’s TowerGroup Inc., called the service “very relevant.”
Banks are “pretty good” at targeting the right customer, and “getting better” at targeting the right product, he said. “It’s getting the right timing that’s difficult.” Banks “are realizing that they need to move away from segmentation to a more events-based approach.”
Though many banks are using internal transaction data for event-based marketing, credit bureaus play an important role because they provide outside information, Mr. Eckenrode said.
“Banks cannot rely too much on their internal data,”he said, and “any data that provides a more comprehensive picture” of the customer is useful.
Experian, Equifax, and Trans-Union LLC offer a host of consumer events-based-marketing services. Ms. Hopkins said Experian’s service is the first of its kind to tap into such an extensive business database.
Roughly 3.5 million of the 16 million businesses Experian tracks experience a triggering event once a month, Ms. Hopkins said. (Clients can track a list of businesses with up to 19 triggers, 15 of which are related to their credit status.)
The bureau has been pilot testing the product with a “fairly large financial institution” that is using it to target credit card offers, Ms. Hopkins said. She would not name the institution.
Pricing is based on the numbers of names to be tracked and triggers to be applied. Clients should expect to pay 17 to 29 cents a name, Ms. Hopkins said.
