Database Marketing Assessment: Targeting and Analytics

by MarthaBush on April 8, 2010

Martha Bush

A few years back, SAS, the analytics giant, produced a chart that showed the growing impact to Marketing ROI from more and more sophisticated analytical approaches. We called it (affectionately) the “Bubble Chart,” because each higher, more sophisticated stage of analytics got bigger and floated a little higher representing the increased potential value to the marketer – drifting closer and closer to the highest level of optimized, exalted Analytics Nirvana!  It was a great way to describe the different maturity levels of marketing analytics and targeting.

Oftentimes, our first approach with new clients is to understand their business with a Five-step Maturity framework that ranges from basic to sophisticated — we hope to objectively rate where a client’s database marketing expertise falls on a scale of 1–5 and we provide a score and a roadmap for organizational improvement. In these few posts, I’ll review the types of questions we often ask to understand where an organization fits into our framework and where the biggest opportunity for improvement lies.

20 Questions for Targeting and Analytic Assessments:

  1. How do you evaluate the success of your overall enterprise?
  2. How do you evaluate your position relative to competitors in the marketplace?
  3. Do you know how different your customers are in terms of their value to you?
  4. What reports are routinely produced? What types of ad-hoc questions/reports are requested?
  5. What reporting tools are being used, and who uses them?
  6. Are standard campaign reports produced for acquisition, renewal and retention campaigns on a regular basis?
  7. Are there any standard metrics that are currently being reported on regularly?
  8. Do you examine the return on investment for campaigns?
  9. What models exist and are routinely used to score subscriber and prospect lists?
  10. What retention, renewal and acquisition models exist?
  11. Have any customer profiles been done to understand the different customer segments?
  12. What is the relative size of each of the segments?
  13. Has any analysis been done that identifies the lifetime value of customers by segment and sub-segment?
  14. Are the results of analyses from renewal, reactivation and acquisition shared between departments?
  15. What are the titles and roles of each of your analysts?  Where do they spend the majority of their time?
  16. Where do the analysts get the information that they use?  What percent of their time is used to manipulate the data prior to its being usable for analysis?
  17. What are the biggest challenges your analysts face?  Tools? Datamart?  Additional data?
  18. What are the short-term priorities for the analytics group?
  19. What are the key metrics that are reported for marketing?
  20. Are standardized metrics and measurements reported to management in a dashboard format?

With these types of questions, you can begin to assess your company’s progress in targeting and analytics.

About the Author:

Martha Bush is SVP of Strategy & Solutions at SIGMA Marketing Group.  Follow Martha on  or connect with her on .

Related Posts:

Database Marketing Assessment: Data Management

Database Marketing Assessment : Campaign Management

A good place to start: Database Marketing Assessment 101

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