Spray-and-pray was a budget, not a strategy
Mass campaigns survived because precision was expensive. That excuse is gone. A short note on where the money leaks.
Every "batch and blast" campaign is a quiet admission: we couldn't afford to be precise, so we were loud instead.
That trade-off made sense when building a good segment took an analyst two weeks. It doesn't anymore.
Campaign value leakage
Where campaign spend leaks
The three leaks
Most CVM programs bleed value in the same three places:
- Talking to customers who'd stay anyway. Discounting the loyal is a tax you pay yourself.
- Missing customers about to churn. The signal was there — in usage, in tone, in a support ticket — nobody read it in time.
- Right customer, wrong offer. A generous incentive aimed at someone who only needed a nudge.
Precision fixes all three. And precision is now cheap.
Response rate by targeting approach
A better default
Instead of "who should we exclude from this blast?", start from:
Which 5% of this base has the highest churn risk and the highest response propensity to a small, low-cost nudge?
Base → actionable segment
That question used to be a project. Now it's a query. The teams that internalize that shift will quietly outperform — not with bigger budgets, but with less waste.