From the category archives:

CRM

IT and Marketing: Are They Working Together? (Part 1 of 6)

Welcome to the first installation of a 6-part series on exploring the importance of unity between IT and Marketing. Our inspiration for this discussion was the recent article published in the April 2011 print edition of Information Week, “IT Meets Marketing… Will Business Technology Teams Answer the Call?”

In this first installment, we explore the overall premise that IT and Marketing should work together to address the changing marketing landscape. Listen to what Kenyon and Mike had to say in a recent interview on this burning question.

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The 3 Fundamentals of Multichannel Marketing: Part 2 – Customer Intelligence Hubs

Touch-point attribution, or the measuring the success of marketing programs across multiple channels, is one of the building blocks of cross-channel marketing. This kind of marketing intelligence can only be obtained if there is a repository of data from all channel sources, otherwise known as a customer intelligence hub (CI Hub for short). This is one of the pre-requisites for implementing true multichannel marketing.

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A Multichannel Marketing Roadmap: Analytics and Insights

“Unified Marketing,” “Customer Engagement Marketing,” “Marketing 2.0” and “Consumerism” are all concepts of marketing practice that aim to create the most relevant dialogues with the possible. Whether the conversation happens at retail, on the phone, on the Web or in the form of direct response to mail and/or email, the interaction with your customer or prospect should be informed by customer intelligence. The practice of building customer insights into every interaction, and listening to the response so the next dialogues can keep getting better, is at the core of smart Multichannel Marketing.

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A Philosophy of Customer Understanding: Looking Backward While Looking Forward

At the start of new client relationships, prior to implementing a new campaign management solution or a major investment in database marketing clients should have some customer and market-focused analytical benchmarks that can be used to help make the decisions about new ventures. Most clients have done campaign-focused analytics, but often don’t have the time to look for insights that can come from a 360° view of their customers.

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SIGMA Marketing’s Top 10 Blog Posts of 2010.

2010 has been an exciting year for digital and database marketers. As new trends and technologies emerge, it becomes even more pressing to stay on top, stay educated, – not only for marketers, but for those seeking marketing technology and solutions. In keeping with that, here are the ten most read blog posts on Fifth Gear Analytics from 2010. It’s an interesting mix of articles, but you can see by the list below, B2B social media and web analytics seem to be a priority.

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Measure Twice, Cut Once: 3 Essential Steps to Take Before Investing in Marketing Technology

As 2010 draws to a close, it is time for all of us to reflect on all we have accomplished both on and off the job. It’s also a time to assess how our strategies to engage with customers are working and to develop the plans (and the hopefully the budgets!) to take it to the next level in 2011.

Before we get too carried away on our big plans for next year, however, let’s make sure we have the right foundation in place to make our future CRM initiatives are successful. It reminds me of the phrase my dad told me when learning how to build things…”make sure you measure twice, and cut once”. Nothing beats solid preparation and planning, whether its painting, building a bookshelf, developing a predictive model or investing in the right marketing technology platform. Time and time again, we see clients get overly aggressive with their marketing database, campaign management and business intelligence plans.

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10 Marketing Trends for 2011

The meaning of marketing continues to evolve and how that changes the way we engage with our customers. Trends are emerging in customer engagement, how we integrate data, how we leverage marketing analytics. As marketers, we are also seeing social media usage mature, changes in mobile marketing and increased conversation about customer privacy. Customer touchpoint becomes a priority and understanding how all of these trends can work together will be the key to marketing success in 2011.

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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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Understanding B2B Campaign Responses – Building a Methodology

SIGMA Marketing Group has recently completed an analysis of past B2B campaigns and we have discovered some important findings that are now guiding our campaign designs. We discovered that prospects respond at a significantly lower rate than customers. It’s also clear that response rates vary by the methodology used to conduct the marketing touch, with email prospecting consistently performing at the lowest response rate. We found that prospect response rates vary depending on the relationship the company has with the prospect, for example if the prospect is a past customer they are more likely to respond then other prospects.

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