From the category archives:

Web Analytics

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: Understanding the Real Value of Online Conversions.

Nobody loves numbers more than your boss. Except his or her boss. Oh, and your boss’s boss too, unless you’ve already reached the top of the totem pole. Web analytics tools are at their most powerful when you can interpret and integrate the numbers they provide—the rapturous layers of percentages and pie charts—with what happens in the context of your organization’s business, outside the world of site visitor data. Did you get all that? In two recent SIGMA web analytics engagements, the key to the findings wasn’t was happening on page 27 of the site, or who was coming from Google. The key was to find the magic number—the value of what the online conversion or successful engagement meant to the company.

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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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The Social Media Bandwagon Has Become a Supersonic Jet.

As a Social Media marketer with SIGMA Marketing Group, I am still amazed when I meet business savvy folks who have not yet adopted social media usage in any way, shape or form. There are varying degrees of usage and unique formulas for different business types and vertical markets, but I don’t care who you are… Social Media is here to stay, and will continue to evolve rapidly. I recently wrote an article on social media usage by industry, which focused primarily on B2B Social Media, but it provided some interesting insights about what industries have adopted social.

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Pareto’s Law or the Long Tail Theory? What Marketers Must Measure Now.

The foundational concept of all database marketing is the Pareto Principle, that 80% of your sales and profitability will come from about 20% of your customers. When we have analyzed our clients’ customer bases to prove out this theory, we often find that the distribution is even more uneven– that 100% or more of customer profitability comes from an exceedingly small group—because clients are actually losing money from some part of their customer population. The 80/20 theory often holds true for product sales as well – 80% of sales often comes from just 20% of the products offered by a manufacturer. This concept has driven everything in database marketing from audience identification to campaign structure, sales strategy etc.

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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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8 Tips to Improve Campaign Landing Page Conversion

Are you running campaigns that are getting a decent click through rate, but no conversions? Are you running campaigns that don’t really deliver? You might want to consider these 8 tips to improve landing page conversion.

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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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Email Marketing Experts Expose All (Well, Great Tips Anyway)

Whether you’ve dabbled in the email marketing space, or you are proven expert, this supplement include page after page of tips and trick, insights and things to think about to make your email campaigns even more successful. I’ve been doing email marketing for years, and recognize that the industry and technologies are always evolving.
Here are some of my favorite snippets form the DMNews Email-Marketing Guide 2010.

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