From the category archives:

Marketing Metrics and Reporting

How Much Are Your Customers Worth?

As marketers, we have heard about it for years: It is important to understand the total value of your customers over the “lifetime” of their relationship with your brand, product or service. Makes sense, right? Why would you not want to understand the total impact a loyal customer can have on your acquisition and retention efforts based on this calculation? However, a great number of marketers we speak to still overlook future revenue opportunities by not recognizing the true lifetime value of current customers. Even though quite a number of companies can recognize differences among customers’ loyalty over a lifetime, they are often unable to quantify or act on those differences.

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Sophisticated Data Modeling and Analytics Lead to Better Marketing Metrics

Marketing professionals need to track and analyze the effectiveness of their marketing programs. Best practices align marketing activities, strategies, and metrics with business objectives. Creating a framework to track and measure marketing performance is critical in today’s marketplace. Marketing metrics focuses on measuring, managing, and analyzing performance to maximize effectiveness and optimize marketing ROI. Three elements play a critical role in managing marketing performance; data, analytics, and metrics.

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CMOs Need to Grow Up to Sit at the C-Level Table.

There is a general consensus that marketing is both an art and a science. With the increased importance of technology in today’s marketing environment, it’s clear that the pendulum has swung to the science side of the equation. Technology, analytics, and measurement are at the forefront and, with the pace of change expected to quicken going forward, they’ll only increase in importance in coming years. A technology-enabled CMO will help companies prosper in this new world order of marketing.

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The Transition of “Digital Days” to “Multichannel Days.”

Earlier this month, I attended the Digital Days conference sponsored by the DMA in New York City. The conference highlighted how critical it is for companies to look at their direct, digital and targeted marketing in a multichannel context. The issue is: Is it really only about Digital these days?

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A Hyper Digital World Still Leads to Offline Cash Register Sales.

Just as web analytics grew from measuring hits to ever more sophisticated metrics, the ability to escape the world of hits is now the Holy Grail, to attribute that online activity blanketing the world in ones and zeroes with the actual individual souls who make the decisions with human interactions using complex and intricate data management practices aligning digital channels of all stripes with offline – dare one say, real-world experiences.

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Rx for Your Web Analytics

Do you remember in business school when you were presented a case study and there were always detours called “symptoms” which really weren’t the underlying issues but instead pointed you to the real problem? That’s what we have here. This inability to measure ROI for online channels is a function of the lack of skilled web analytics resources and not an inherent problem with web analytics.

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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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Your Customers Are Mobile, Are YOU?

Thanks to devices like the iPhone, BlackBerry, and now Android, mobile is no longer an afterthought in most marketing budgets, but a well-deserved line item. Be it through the skyrocketing number of iPhone and other Smartphone device sales or mindboggling downloads of applications — more than four billion on for the iPhone in less than two years — mobile is fast becoming a central channel for your customer engagement efforts.

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Social Media Analytics — The Next DEWmocracy?

Web Analytics Demystified provides objective strategic web analytics advice to companies striving to realize the full potential of their investment in web analytics, while Altimeter Group is a research and advisory firm that provides companies with a pragmatic approach to disruptive technologies.

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Why are Marketing Analytics Like Cracker Jacks?

Marketing analytics offers the same promise as Cracker Jack — chock full of tasty insights plus a free surprise! With marketing analytics, the high maintenance customer is actually the high-value customer! Kudos to Zappos, which saw the “surprise inside” their data and leveraged it for greater brand value.

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