From the category archives:

Marketing Technology

Database Marketing Assessment: Data Management

Data management is clearly not the sexiest part of our work, but nothing else can be accomplished without intelligent data management and data hygiene processes. I can even say now, after the passage of several years, that I am grateful that I was forced to attend a weeklong training program called “Data Hygiene Boot Camp” when SIGMA was part of The Acxiom Corporation (the mental scars have healed).

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Best In Class Marketing Analytics Start with Business Requirements

Hats off to the marketing departments for the Marketing Technology companies who do a fantastic job at selling the sizzle of their technology! Unfortunately for the many failed implementations, falling in love with a tool is just not the right way to bring marketing analytics and measurement into your organization. Forrester’s Liz Boehm* phrased this nicely “Don’t Put the Technology Cart in Front of the Business Case Horse”

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Marketing Analytics for the New Marketing Reality. Part 3 of 3

According to Brian Haven, senior analyst at Forrester Research, Engagement involves four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence, each built from data collected online and offline. “Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers’ actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others…”

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Database Marketing Assessment : Campaign Management

As we’ve been discussing in these Marketing Assessment posts, our first approach with new clients is to understand their business with a Five-step Maturity framework that ranges from basic to sophisticated – we hope to objectively rate where a client’s database marketing expertise falls on a scale of 1-5 and we provide a score and a roadmap for organizational improvement. Let’s look at some of the questions we ask when it comes to Campaign Management.

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Database Marketing Assessment: Targeting and Analytics

Oftentimes, our first approach with new clients is to understand their business with a Five-step Maturity framework that ranges from basic to sophisticated — we hope to objectively rate where a client’s database marketing expertise falls on a scale of 1–5 and we provide a score and a roadmap for organizational improvement. In these few posts, I’ll review the types of questions we often ask to understand where an organization fits into our framework and where the biggest opportunity for improvement lies.

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Marketing Analytics for the New Marketing Reality. Part 1 of 3

The new reality for marketers is that the old techniques aren’t working. The marketers who will break through and succeed in the New Reality will be those who can bring the traditional measurements together with the monitoring and measurement of customer engagement. In my next post, I’ll further explore the new world of customer engagement and how it affects our ability to measure what counts with consumers.

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Growing revenues with multichannel marketing analytics

Consumer goods companies and retailers know that multichannel customers are more profitable, and often more loyal. Industry research shows that these shoppers spend 30 to 50 percent more than those who buy through a single channel. The challenge for marketers is ensuring top-notch customer experiences and availability of cross channel marketing analytics to help attract, retain and grow these high-value customers.
Consumers are going to interact with your brand in ways that fit their needs based on convenience, preferred communication methods and their comfort in dealing with your product or service. So, how do you regularly turn multichannel marketing challenges into profitable opportunities?

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A good place to start: Database Marketing Assessment 101

The idea of using an assessment framework to understand the maturity of an organization’s functional areas is as old as time — and it forms the foundation of most consulting firms’ practice. It’s often a wonderful way to get to know a new client, and a good way for them to get to know how you might approach their business. The outcome is often a fast-start project opportunity where everyone can win with a new relationship quickly.

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6 Key Steps to Implementing Multichannel Campaigns

Regardless of your company’s sophistication, there are six key steps that have to occur in order to successfully implement multichannel campaigns. The challenges of multichannel marketing are many, but will have far reaching implications once they’re overcome. Read more to understand the 6 steps to rolling out multichannel marketing campaigns.

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Multichannel Marketing Needs a Measurement Rosetta Stone

I’ve been a Direct Marketing person for a long time, and I like my marketing measurements pretty tangible: “number of people responding to my message,” “total sales per person,” “number of buyers per household,” “return on marketing investment,” and so forth. Measurements like GRPs and Pass-Along Copies always seemed pretty squishy to me – it always seemed like someone was getting fooled, yet no one really got upset about it! I was secretly delighted the other day to read Forrester’s David Cooperstein write (in his January 15th article “The Future of Media Measurement, Preparing for a Convergence of Measurement across Channels”):

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