Welcome to the Marketing Minute! We’re a short-form story-driven podcast designed to provide value and industry insight—all in under ten minutes. Every episode, we invite an expert guest to answer three questions: What’s your favorite story for marketing communications professionals? What were the insights gained? Why do you do what you do? It’s all the value and nothing else. Succinct. Insightful. Actionable. Give us a listen, subscribe, and follow! 3-2-1. Done.

Raj Khera
EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, WealthEngine
Raj is a former CEO & Co-founder of multiple software companies, two of which were acquired by public companies. At WealthEngine, he helps to create more value for customers through thought leadership and game-changing product enhancements. He is passionate about supporting higher education & cancer research and volunteers his time at the University of Maryland and local schools.
Karl Boehm:
Raj. What is your most insightful story for marketing communications professionals?
Raj Khera:
Well, I’ll give you an example of how you can use data to change the game. And so one of our clients is the Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society International. And one of the segments that they pursue is planned gifts. A planned gift is someone who leaves behind money in their will, in their trust, in their insurance plan that you become one of the beneficiaries. So the reason they do this is because planned gifts tend to be large amounts. And they found that their average planned gift from someone that they had not engaged with in the past was about $40,000. And they found that if they engage with that person and built a relationship, that gift changed from $40,000 to over $130,000. So they wanted to figure out who they should be engaging with and how many more people can they actually talk to, to start that relationship. The way they did it was they started with data they created a persona figured out who are the people that are giving money right now. And they find that the most the biggest givers are single females over age 65, I think is age 65 might be often that by few years who have a pet, and then other donors are single males, same age bracket who also have a pet. So starting with that, there’s a few more nuances but they dug deeper using insights from our tool WealthEngine, were able to create a very tight segment and then created ads on the post on Facebook of say, a woman in that age bracket petting her dog or something like that. And that started engaging people. But they placed those ads and targeted specific people who matched the profile. That’s where the data came from. That’s what they use artificial intelligence machine learning from our system to figure out who they should be targeting those ads to. Once they did that they started creating relationships with thousands of people who were their target market. The result? they generated $43 million in pipeline in 2019. Just from that campaign, huge ROI, huge ROI
Karl Boehm:
Really outstanding. What are the top insights derived from that story?
Raj Khera:
Well, the biggest thing is to use data to your benefit. segmentation, donor segmentation. customer segmentation is what it’s all about. There are tools out there right now that can help you do it. WealthEngine certainly one of the leading tools that can do that for you. Our clients include financial services firm, luxury brands, nonprofits, educational institutions, healthcare institutions, and they’re using the data that we provide to figure out who they should talk to, because that really enables you to focus on the most promising prospects and not somebody who’s just spinning your cycles, where you think they might be able to donate you think they might be able to buy, but they don’t really take action. Our data actually will show you a propensity score. So we give you a score from one to five, one being the highest of the likelihood that this person would donate, would engage, would spend. So those kinds of things, those kinds of data can really change, how efficient you are in your role.
Karl Boehm:
Love it. Okay. And why do you do what you do Raj?
Raj Khera:
I do it to help people like our mission at WealthEngine is to uplift humanity’s potential and that mission really resonates with me. And I, you know, I’ve been very fortunate my life to have built a few businesses and been successful with that. And so it really wanted to do something that helps humanity and this organization does that and does it in a big way because we find that when we help other people help their constituency, it helps humanity as a whole. That’s really important, especially in this time when we’ve got you know, the spring of 2020 everybody’s in lockdown with Coronavirus. You know, we all need to help each other and I think anything that people can do is really beneficial to help. So that’s why it resonates with me. That’s why I’m there.
Hi, this is Raj Khera. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at WealthEngine. Visit us at wealthengine.com and this is The Marketing Minute.