From the category archives:

Marketing Database Management

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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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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Is the Enterprise Ready for Cloud Marketing Services?

Is the typical Enterprise ready for marketing services from the “Cloud?” This question is one that involves more than marketing technology. As more and more services are becoming available over the internet or “the cloud,” the question will be asked, and answered, more frequently. A likely influencing factor is the maturity of the Enterprise’s Datacenter. The datacenter’s evolution may just offer Marketing the flexibility to evaluate more marketing technology options.

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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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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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The 7 Features You Must Include in Your B2B Sales Playbook

An effective B2B Sales Playbook can energize your sales team and make them more productive in closing new sales. With a playbook they will have fewer unproductive calls and reduced time spent in pre-call planning efforts. The sales playbook is an important tool that Marketing often uses to provide invaluable marketing information and sales tips.

Sales playbooks exist in many styles and forms, selected are key features that are common to those that are the most successful.

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Improving Health Care Member Engagement on the Web with Marketing Analytics.

Many of the nation’s top health insurers and health care organizations are looking to engage members and customers in a more meaningful way using available technologies such as interactive websites and mobile applications. The challenges we find when working with these organizations are that many are not tracking the right engagement information or, even worse, don’t have access to the information in the first place. Most organizations that have robust website will use some sort of web analytics as a component of their interactive offerings, but how are they using this analytic information to improve member engagement and reduce expense?

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Marketing Data Security: 3 Tips to Maintain Email Security

Email has become the modern day communication business tool. We use it for everything from selecting a lunch spot to passing contract signatures. Did you know that sending email across the internet is not secure? Your email message can be, and often is, read by other people. What do you think might happen if you attached a report containing customer data to an email and sent it? You have possibly published that information to the world! There are several things you should do to protect your email…

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Marketing Data Security: Accessing Corporate Resources From Offsite Securely

Suppose a hacker really wanted your corporate data; how would they go about trying to access it? Would they try to hack into your company? Probably not. Your company has an IT group dedicated to keeping data secure. Instead, the hacker will get a company listing of employees and attempt to hack the employee home computers. It is less likely that a home computer or home network is secure. The following are some things you can do to stay safe while accessing corporate resources from offsite…

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