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MarthaBush

Pareto’s Law or the Long Tail Theory? What Marketers Must Measure Now.

The foundational concept of all database marketing is the Pareto Principle, that 80% of your sales and profitability will come from about 20% of your customers. When we have analyzed our clients’ customer bases to prove out this theory, we often find that the distribution is even more uneven– that 100% or more of customer profitability comes from an exceedingly small group—because clients are actually losing money from some part of their customer population. The 80/20 theory often holds true for product sales as well – 80% of sales often comes from just 20% of the products offered by a manufacturer. This concept has driven everything in database marketing from audience identification to campaign structure, sales strategy etc.

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Understanding the Five Customer Relationship Stages to Full Engagement With Your Brand

As our clients juggle new channels, new technology and new media, we realize that their relationships with their customers and prospects have to be 24/7 and “always on”. How we help them with Analytics, strategy and marketing technology today really goes beyond just the marketing process, but helps them deliver a consistent and relevant brand experience across the entire consumer relationship.

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Are Personas the New Customer Segments?

The digital concept of Persona is catching up with the database marketer’s idea of Segmentation. The web experience has become richer and web strategists have embraced the idea of many personas and tooled the experience to deliver choices and personalization and different pathways to support the different groups of visitors. Marketers commonly talk about Personas in the plural form, and this is a great thing for improved relevance for consumers.

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Why ROI Measurement Is So Elusive

Definitions for Marketing ROI abound, but the pressures to achieve it have increased to fever pitch across all channels and marketing specialties. Why? One reason may be that with all the new marketing technology tools―with their claims of incredible measurement capabilities blasted to your in-box daily―the real complexity of getting to ROI has become washed over. Expectations have been raised. You need to figure it out.

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Marketing Assessment: Messaging

Building the groundwork for sophisticated multi-segment, multichannel messaging strategies first takes some digging. We often work with clients to understand their level of messaging sophistication with a Five-step Maturity Framework that ranges from basic to sophisticated— we hope to objectively rate where a client’s expertise falls on a scale of 1-5 so we can help build a roadmap for organizational improvement. In this post I’ll review the types of questions we often ask to understand where clients land on the messaging scale and where the biggest opportunity for improvement lies. 20 Questions for Messaging Assessments.

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Database Marketing Assessment: Data Management

Data management is clearly not the sexiest part of our work, but nothing else can be accomplished without intelligent data management and data hygiene processes. I can even say now, after the passage of several years, that I am grateful that I was forced to attend a weeklong training program called “Data Hygiene Boot Camp” when SIGMA was part of The Acxiom Corporation (the mental scars have healed).

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Best In Class Marketing Analytics Start with Business Requirements

Hats off to the marketing departments for the Marketing Technology companies who do a fantastic job at selling the sizzle of their technology! Unfortunately for the many failed implementations, falling in love with a tool is just not the right way to bring marketing analytics and measurement into your organization. Forrester’s Liz Boehm* phrased this nicely “Don’t Put the Technology Cart in Front of the Business Case Horse”

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Database Marketing Assessment : Campaign Management

As we’ve been discussing in these Marketing Assessment posts, 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. Let’s look at some of the questions we ask when it comes to Campaign Management.

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Database Marketing Assessment: Targeting and Analytics

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.

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A good place to start: Database Marketing Assessment 101

The idea of using an assessment framework to understand the maturity of an organization’s functional areas is as old as time — and it forms the foundation of most consulting firms’ practice. It’s often a wonderful way to get to know a new client, and a good way for them to get to know how you might approach their business. The outcome is often a fast-start project opportunity where everyone can win with a new relationship quickly.

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