From the category archives:

Customer Data Integration

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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Web Analytics + Customer Voice = 20/20 Vision.

In the age of tweeting of every customer’s every impulse, and the power of exquisite multivariate tests generating thousands of permutations, there is no shortage of data inputs that can drive a business’s reactions to, well, nearly everything.

Web analytics is a balance of a number of different disciplines, but unlike a #16 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament, it’s never one-and-done. A recent web analytics engagement put the spotlight on an outcome when the results of multivariate testing conflicted with what came next.

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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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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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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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Unified Marketing: Buzzword or Bellwether?

Unified Marketing is all about unifying the data across multiple marketing channels. I often cite the statistic from Forrester that more data was created last year than in the history of world up until now. What happens to it? Most of it is garbage and what is good is seldom, if ever, put into an integrated customer database housing both online and offline date. In this article we share some of the obstacles that hold brands back from a truly unified marketing approach.

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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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Call Center Optimization Through Better Marketing Analytics

In this case study, among the available prospect data records, only half were contacted each month, leaving the other half of the prospect data records untouched. The initial list selection was based on annual sales/revenue, which succeeded in eliminating the poorest performing prospects. However, those prospective customers were not further prioritized for their call center representatives to focus on the best prospects.

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Customer Engagement: A New Spin on Customer Intimacy

A while ago, one of my advisors challenged me to read an old business book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, by Treacy and Wiersma. It was first published in 1995, and I didn’t think it had much relevance to today’s fast-changing world of marketing strategy. So it wasn’t until recently, when I was stuck on a 10 ½ hour flight, that I opened the book. The book detailed three dimensions of competitive strategy: value leadership, product leadership and customer intimacy. And it was in the latter section that I was astounded by something written 15 years ago and what I perceived as a foreshadowing of today’s enthusiasm for customer engagement.

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How Complex Is Your Communications Landscape?

The market will continue to invent new ways to communicate and, therefore, new channels for marketing to master. The flexibility of a multi-channel tool to adapt to new channels will be a key factor in the success or failure of marketing initiatives as the communication landscape continues to evolve.

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