From the category archives:

Marketing Metrics and Reporting

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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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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B2B Marketing ROI – Are You There Yet?

As the 2010 Direct Marketing Association conference (DMA:2010) wrapped up, I took a minute to reflect on the conversations I had with a wide variety of marketers over the past few days. As a B2B marketer, I have a special interest in the state of B2B direct marketing so I focused on the conversations that I had with other B2B Marketers and compared them to the conversations that I had with our consumer marketing brethren.

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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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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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What the Grateful Dead Can Teach Us About Consumer Insights and Marketing.

The Grateful Dead created a lasting legacy. You may not like their music, or identify with the culture and period of time when the band was at its high point, but you have to appreciate and admire what they cultivated in terms of followers and passionate fans. So, what does this have to do with marketing insights, targeting and all the other great stuff we talk about in our Fifth Gear Analytics Blog? Well, the book provides some interesting takeaways for those of us interested in consumer insights and using marketing analytics to improve our products and services.

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Is Web Analytics Alone Enough to Understand Your Web Interactions?

We’ve discussed this at length in previous posts… Perhaps the fact that we keep bringing it up my elude to the fact we believe this to be critical to marketing successes in the future. The Web Analytics Association defines web analytics as “…the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.” From a web design perspective, that’s an appropriate description. However…

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Evaluate Your Marketing Campaign With Analytics BEFORE You Launch It. (Part 1 of 2)

Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. The cost of not pre-evaluating marketing campaigns through analytics and account services can be deadly. Follow standard business objectives to ensure successful campaigns every time. (Part 1 of 2)

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Web Analytics 2.0 – It’s Not All About the Web.

By now, most marketers have embraced the digital channel and the fact that a majority of consumers are spending a significant amount of time playing, researching, transacting and communicating on the web. According to Advertising Age’s 2010 Digital Market Facts (Feb 22, 2010), Internet spending as a percent of all U.S. marketing spend is estimated to be over 20% by 2012.

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