From the category archives:

Personalized Communication

Identifying decision makers enhances marketing analytics

A key to any sales effort is to identify the decision makers, influencers and recommenders and convince them that your products and services are needed to drive the business value they are striving for — whether it is efficiency, revenue generation, cost take-out, market share, etc. But, it often take weeks or months to determine the real decision-making process and its participants. Your effort up front to gather as much information about the company as you can and to go further to identify the decision makers will make your marketing analytics smarter and your sales efforts more effective.

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Using data and marketing analytics to define the multichannel marketing mix

Use Analytics to Adapt Quickly to Your Audience’s Changing Preferences
Most marketers would agree that their consumers are now using multiple channels to research, shop and purchase. Offline and online communications are more tightly entwined than ever before. For example, many marketers have known for years how targeted direct marketing and cataloging will drive the right [...]

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I love it when the client is RIGHT!

I had created a “sample” email to facilitate discussion, but did not have specific customer information. I had included benefits proving her brand was superior to the competition, and several compelling offers. But since I did not know who my customer was — it was just undirected information. By my doing it wrong, we could launch into a conversation of what kind of analysis needed to take place in order to do it RIGHT!

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Are your customers suffering from email fatigue?

The rapid adoption of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook by the business world has stimulated discussion about the need for more business-facing social software platforms. What are you doing to make sure you are listening where your customers are most likely to be talking?

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Marketing Assessment: Messaging

Building the groundwork for sophisticated multi-segment, multichannel messaging strategies first takes some digging. We often work with clients to understand their level of messaging sophistication with a Five-step Maturity Framework that ranges from basic to sophisticated— we hope to objectively rate where a client’s expertise falls on a scale of 1-5 so we can help build a roadmap for organizational improvement. In this post I’ll review the types of questions we often ask to understand where clients land on the messaging scale and where the biggest opportunity for improvement lies. 20 Questions for Messaging Assessments.

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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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Creative Enhanced by Marketing Analytics

As a Creative Director, I spent 15 years working at a general agency before dipping my toe into direct marketing. I still believe that brand equity is king, but I’ve been bitten by the “Direct Marketing Bug” and there is no cure. I love the advantage that analytical insights provide when designing creative, and the opportunities they provide for constant improvement.

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5 keys to get the most out of your database marketing investments

In today’s rapidly changing world of consumer fragmentation, product proliferation, and evolving marketing channels and technologies, marketers need to carefully assess and take stock of their marketing capabilities before committing to investments in technologies that could hold them back in the years to come. Now more than ever before, consumer-focused companies need to make sure they have a clear plan for capturing valuable customer insights and applying that information with integrated marketing technology.

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He Has a Great Personality Online. Why it’s imperative for marketers to merge online and offline behavior data

As digital communication becomes pervasive, people are cultivating their personalities online, and they aren’t always the same personalities displayed offline. An entire generation of the digitally sociable are far more comfortable online than in real life. What does it mean for marketers when your customers’ online personalities and their real life selves are total opposites?

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As a campaign metric, ROI beats response rate every time

A simple ROI calculation does it all: Test cell revenue/test cell cost. Run the numbers on your next campaign and you may find some fascinating new insights about the results of your programs.

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