Affinity Solutions Launches its Purchase-Driven Marketing Cloud

Affinity Solutions today unveiled its Purchase-Driven Marketing Cloud, a software suite designed to help organizations uncover insights from purchase data and measure the sales impacts of their marketing campaigns. According to Nitin Duggal, senior vice president of products at Affinity Solutions, the technology's primary goal is to aid B2C marketers in their attempts at reaching customers during the most crucial moments of the buying journey.

Founded 15 years ago, Affinity Solutions established itself as a provider of loyalty management solutions to financial institutions and banks. Today, the company manages rewards programs for 4,000 U.S. banks. In addition, the vendor tracks and redeems the rewards funded by the merchants and retailers that distribute their offers to credit card holders through various channels, including email, websites, and mobile apps. "Because we can capture every debit card and credit card transaction for our customers," Duggal says, "we are now uniquely positioned to be able to inform marketers on their customer intelligence."

Affinity Solutions' Purchase-Driven Marketing Cloud—which includes Spend Insights, Buyer Graph, and Closed Loop Measurement—combines machine learning with individual purchase behavior data. The tools help end users better understand who is likely to buy their products and services in the near future, enabling them to maximize ROI by tying revenue to specific marketing actions. Through open API access, the technology can integrate into a company’s existing software stack, including its CRM system or marketing automation platform, thus allowing customers to be targeted with personalized messages on different channels.

The Spend Insights tool is designed to help marketers understand how people are spending their money on products and services, whether their own company's or their competitors'. It uncovers purchase patterns across categories, geographies, and customer types, while determining how much, how often, where, and from whom they are buying, to paint a better picture of a firm’s existing and potential markets and regions.

According to Duggal, one airline has already leveraged Spend Insights to learn about the segment of customers that spends more than $5,000 a year on travel, in the hopes of better shaping its loyalty programs to meet their demands.

An extension of Speed Insights, Buyer Graph leverages predictive analytics to indicate which customers are likely to buy from the business in question, as well as when that purchase is likely to take place. Rather than simply focusing on the person’s purchase history, it picks up on buying patterns and signals in real time. Duggal notes that the tool is useful to companies that want to understand why, for example, a customer has turned to a competitor.

The Closed Loop Measurement portion of the suite connects a customer's online behavior with his offline spending habits, as it tracks in-store and online purchases that take place after one has been exposed to a marketing campaign. Its goal is to help marketers see which of their actions led to a bump in revenue, so they can reconfigure their budget allocations and tactics moving ahead.  

Affinity Solutions today also partnered with Shopcom, a division of Kantar Worldpanel that specializes in addressable advertising analytics and insights. Through the collaboration, the vendors will work to help brand marketers and agencies improve cross-screen media planning, targeting, and closed-loop measurement.

Jen Bukich, vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Kantar Shopcom, said in a statement that the partnership is about giving advertisers "the intelligence to make better decisions":

"We are thrilled to partner with Affinity Solutions to create and offer the most precise retailer brand digital and mobile solutions in the marketplace. Having the power to understand consumers' purchase behavior gives advertisers the intelligence to make better decisions and improve marketing spend ROI."

All Purchase-Driven Marketing Cloud offerings are available now, as a package or on a stand-alone basis.

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