Neil Hoyne on Converting Customers Using Data

When the world’s biggest brands want to improve their approach to converting customers using their digital marketing strategy, they call Neil Hoyne – Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Senior Fellow at the Wharton School.

In his first book, Neil offers a simple, research-backed playbook that anyone can use to find their best customers and develop relationships that last. Under pressure for quick results and facing fierce marketplace competition, too many marketers are boxed into spaghetti-to-the-wall forms of digital marketing that limit the potential of their long hours, countless experiments, and warehouses of data. And in the end, they watch their competition sprint ahead.

But what if you built a business around long-term relationships with customers, using data to understand who they are, what they need, and where to find more customers just like them? You can. And you’ll leave your competitors, with all of their data and their short-term thinking, to poke around in the scraps.

In Converted, you will learn how to:

• Understand the full value of each relationship

• Engage in an ongoing conversation with your best customers

• Ask the right questions so you can anticipate your customers’ needs

• Find more great customers A real person is always on the other end of the transaction.

Converted shows you how to win their hearts. Neil has served as an analyst, researcher, inventor, lecturer and, in his words, the father of many forgettable slides of glossy funnels and Venn diagrams. A witness to and participant in billion-dollar successes, and instructive failures, all in the pursuit of building indestructible customer relationships through digital media.

A key player in the executive rallying cry to be more “data driven.” As Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist, Neil has had the privilege to lead more than 2,500 engagements with the world’s biggest advertisers. His efforts have helped these companies acquire millions of customers, improve conversion rates by more than 400 percent and generate billions in incremental revenue.

Immensely proud of the degrees he’s earned from Purdue University and UCLA, Neil returned to academia in 2018 as a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. This is his first book. He hopes you like it.

Topics in this episode include:

00:40: The origin of Neil's book

08:00: The goal of data for small business owners

16:40: How to gauge your customers more to get the data that you need

27:00: Enticing people to take more surveys

38:00: Figuring out your customer lifetime value

Get the book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688629/converted-by-neil-hoyne/

About Gene: Gene Marks is a former columnist for The New York Times and The Washington Post and now writes weekly on political, economic, management and technology issues affecting small and mid-sized businesses for The Guardian, The Hill, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Times, Forbes and Entrepreneur. He runs a 10-person company financial and technology consulting firm near Philadelphia.