From the category archives:

Database

11 Ways That Cloud Computing Will Help Marketers.

When I was given a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “What Every CEO Needs to Know About the Cloud,” I was expecting to hear some of the same hoopla that’s been going around for a year or so about cloud computing. What I wasn’t expecting was to be gripped by the enormity of the change. After reading and research, I’ve listed 11 ways that cloud computing will affect marketing; I’m sure I’ve missed some, so let me know what you think.

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4 (Plus) Steps in a Complete Database Marketing Assessment

As the remainder of 2011 winds down, we have been pulling together some popular reading on a variety of topics. Marketing assessments continue to be an area of interest, and in particular, database marketing assessments. Start with the basics and then take a look at data management, targeting and analytics, campaign management, messaging and even the technology behind them.

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When Asking for Data, Know When to Say When.

Folks here at SIGMA are always up to their necks in data from our various clients. We love it, love it, love it. In fact, there’s a special office here where our marketing analytics team can, individually or as a team building exercise, toss data on the floor and physically roll around in it.

Our clients love data too. Uniformly, they’re just giddy about the stuff. But to be clear, we don’t share the data that we’ve rolled around in with our clients because that’s unseemly and goes against all data hygiene best practices.

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Database Marketing Grows Up. Interactive Marketing Gets a Seat at the Table

For many database marketers and those that have spent over 10-15 years in the CRM-related, direct marketing and digital marketing fields, it was often the norm to refer to our “interactive” area of the business as “below-the-line,” “new media” or even part of “IT,” since we often lacked the big budgets and “glamour” of the mainstream media channels.

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Key Questions to Answer Before Starting a Predictive Modeling Project

In a recent post, I talked about how predictive modeling helps businesses better target their prospects (customers and/or non-customers) and implement marketing and sales programs in a more efficient way to improve business results.

In order to ensure that your modeling project supports your implementation plans, it’s critical to define the objectives and scope of the project. This effort should include members from the business as well as analytical teams. Following is a starting list of questions to help guide you through this process along with sample answers in italics.

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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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Proven Ways to Improve Affinity Marketing Results

SIGMA has been able to identify a number of marketing services that have dramatically improved affinity marketing results. For each of these critical services we have identified how top-performing organizations provide the service. Even if you are currently providing the service, you may identify improvement opportunities by examining the top-performing methodologies. These marketing services are related, and synergies are achieved when they’re provided in pairs or groups; however, each can return strong benefits if they are singularly provided. Clients often phase the service enhancements, normally beginning with analytic services and then building out other services based on expected value gains to their organization.

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Marketing Database Creation.

At some point in every database marketing project the ‘build vs. buy’ decision must be made. As a marketing practitioner I was tasked with building the marketing databases at two different companies. I then spent the bulk of my career on the provider side building marketing databases for clients, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of database marketing creation. As a Marketing Information Manager tasked with building a marketing database for a large regional bank, my first thought was to build it in house. After all, not many companies in those days had more computers or programmers than banks and I’d only need a small team to build and maintain the database. After pursuing this course for a while, I determined that the only way to get this accomplished in any sort of reasonable time frame and within budget was to contract with an outside database supplier.

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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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