Posts tagged as:

database marketing

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Marketing Database Creation.

At some point in every database marketing project the ‘build vs. buy’ decision must be made. As a marketing practitioner I was tasked with building the marketing databases at two different companies. I then spent the bulk of my career on the provider side building marketing databases for clients, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of database marketing creation. As a Marketing Information Manager tasked with building a marketing database for a large regional bank, my first thought was to build it in house. After all, not many companies in those days had more computers or programmers than banks and I’d only need a small team to build and maintain the database. After pursuing this course for a while, I determined that the only way to get this accomplished in any sort of reasonable time frame and within budget was to contract with an outside database supplier.

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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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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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Lean Marketing Analytics

Lean allows organizations to understand their business processes and streamline toward customer value. Productivity will increase, costs will decrease, work backlogs will decrease, and customer value will rise. If your organization is facing difficult times due to a challenging economy, Lean may be a perfect way to gain productivity.

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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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Lead Generation: Are you using B2B marketing analytics?

Certainly, lead generation has value and should be an element of every sales and marketing organization. However, “leads” come in all shapes and sizes. They come from traffic generated at a trade show, from a web visitor downloading content from your website, from a direct marketing campaign or from a web seminar, among other efforts. Yet, some of those “leads” are simply your competitors trying to find out what you are up to. Other “leads” are companies that you cannot afford to sell to due to their limited budgets. And still others are just interested in the topic with no project in mind, or authority to act.

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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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Get Smart: Make Sure Insights from Marketing Analytics Reach Your Sales Force

Armed with an intelligence-based “playbook” of identified and prioritized account level opportunities for each product/service in the portfolio, the sales representative has a focused territory plan, with resources aligned to drive customer and market share growth, while shortening the sales cycle. Don’t leave the sales process out of the mix when applying marketing analytics and insights. Now that’s getting smarter!

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