Archive for the ‘DataBase Marketing’ Category

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Operations is Operating Just Fine

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

99.99% Up time and No Broken Links – What Else Do You Want?

Do you remember web sites when the web was ruled by engineers?  Before Marketing-oriented folks  forced issues like analytics, usability, and testing into the mix?

Just because systems are Operating within Operational guidelines doesn’t mean they’re Optimized for Marketing / Experience.  Yet often these systems are responsible for customer touch point execution in one way or another, directly or indirectly, and have measurable effects on customer value.  Call center screens and scripts.  VRU’s.  Invoices and Packing Slips.  These are the obvious ones. 

Here’s some others:  Contact Reason Codes.  Payment processing.  Inventory management.  Mail room and Address Correction.  Depending on your business model, there are probably dozens.

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Onliners Return to Start

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

With thoughts on what this means for offline media and planning

I wonder how many of today’s online marketers, and particularly the evangelists in Social, have read Permission Marketing by Seth Godin (1999) or The Engaged Customer by Hans Peter Brondmo (2002).  Why?  Because these two books tell you why Interactive is different, explain how it is different, and provide the background you need to be successful at it.  For example, they explain how Social works before Social even existed in its current form.

How could these books predict the current climate?  Because “Social” - the Interactive behavior and psychology that drives it - is what happens when you create Interactivity.  These ideas are fundamental to Interactivity, they exist regardless of the tools to enable them.

Social, the tools and applications, are simply software iterations around these fundamentals.  Software continues to morph and evolve.  But the emotions and behavior driving today’s Social activity are fundamentally no different from the emotions and behavior that drove the proper use of interactivity for Marketing in CompuServe or discussion boards or e-mail discussion lists.  Community.  Sharing.  The rules and etiquette of good Interactive relationships.

What I’ve come to realize after a lot of discussions and thought is this:

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Posted in Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations | 1 Comment »

Social for Business

Friday, August 1st, 2008

Sam Decker of BazaarVoice has posted a cogent, well-supported argument on the business benefits of social applications.  Many of the themes will be familiar to readers of this blog, including the substantial cross-functional reduction of Friction that can take place when you have this kind of data, and some of the cultural issues surrounding adoption of the data-driven culture.

Here’s what I don’t get though.  Many of these goals could be accomplished though customer service analysis and other data the company already has.  In fact, you could argue in many cases, the data you get from internal sources would be better since you could work some of the bias out of it and correlate with actual behavior.

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Chief Friction Officer

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Speaking of the Friction Model, I came across an article based heavily on work done by Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research reviewing the state of the Chief Customer Officer position.  You know how I feel about this idea; this CCO function should be performed by Marketing.

Why?  Because Marketing has the ability to measure, predict, and act on the Friction in the system which causes dis-Engagement.  Heck, lots of the time Marketing (examples) causes this Friction.

Here’s an interesting quote from the article:

“This job is about helping the rest of the company improve, not taking responsibility for the improvement,” Temkin said.  “At the end of the day, you still have to have an executive team responsible for running the business.  The only way to proceed is to get customer experience embedded into what they’re doing.”

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Posted in DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations, Web Analytics | 2 Comments »

Friction Model

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

There’s been another eruption of discussion on Engagement.  If (like me) you’re more interested in the higher level ideas not so oriented towards the “tool” aspects of this discussion, make sure you catch this post and hefty comments.  For more, also here, here, and here.

Friction in Campaigns

At a high level, there really are 2 kinds of Engagement, and I think it would be helpful for us to start differentiating between them.

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Posted in DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics | 2 Comments »

Offline Path Analysis

Friday, July 11th, 2008

It’s always a treat to work with bright, committed people and I’m happy to say this was the case with the folks at the Oriental Institute.  These higher ed environments can be exceedingly complex from a Marketing perspective, and the OI is way up there on the complexity scale.  So much to do, so few resources to do it with.

That said, we came up with a crackerjack plan that should significantly boost paid Membership at the OI without additional time or money resources.  How?  Path Analysis.

Personally, I have never understood why many web analytics folks don’t care for Path Analysis; I can only surmise these folks are simply not doing it correctly.  For one thing, Paths don’t make any sense without the context of a behavioral segmentation – entry page, campaign, etc.  Just like any other web data, Path is useless without segmentation.  Or perhaps these folks don’t know how to interpret the data they see because they can’t survey a Path for the answers. 

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Posted in DataBase Marketing, Marketing Research, Measuring Engagement | 2 Comments »

Off to the Oriental Institute

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Oriental Institute

I’ll be spending next week at the Oriental Institute in Chicago leading a good ‘ol Marketing Makeover featuring Database Marketing.  While non-profit environments can be challenging from a resource perspective, fortunately there are grants available to these Institutions, and very fortunately for me sometimes these grants can be used to increase Marketing Productivity.

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Marketing Bands: the Numbers

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

(A post by post index of this Marketing Bands Series is here.)

Just wanted to add a quick piece about the results of Optimizing the Bands (see Band Model) - this is the Marketing Productivity Blog after all!  Thanks Moe for the reminder. 

As we Optimized, there were changes in budget allocation by Band, and as a result there was an increase in Net Customer Value – the goal of the Optimization program in the first place.  For those of you not following the whole story, the budget remained constant, we simply allocated it to the highest and best use through testing.

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Optimizing End of LifeCycle (Bands 6 – 8)

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

In the Band 5 Optimization for HSN, we looked for high ROMI special situations in the database.  This is really classic database marketing stuff, you’re looking for segments, and you’re looking for ways to Optimize those segments.  You could spend the rest of a career doing this kind of thing; there are always new segments like FIPS being revealed if you have an active analytical staff.

There were other programs in Band 5 based primarily on product-related transition phases in the LifeCycle; I won’t go into these here.  If you are interested in these ideas, I wrote one detailed example, which combines Customer Experience Management / Band 3 – Customer Comment Analysis / Math / Product / Marketing right here.

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Peak Engagement (Band 5)

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Optimizing Individual Communications

Where the Band 4 Optimization optimizes general communications like newsletters, the Band 5 Optimization is all about hyper-targeted communications to individuals.  We’re talking mostly about special circumstance stuff here, more exotic ideas that may actually fall outside what you might traditionally think of as “Marketing”. 

If Band 4 is the “Air Cover“, Band 5 is Special Ops (see Band Model).

In Band 5, you basically have algorithms of various kinds that are ”sniffing” the databases looking for special situations that have exceedingly high ROMI.  Often, these ideas deal in one way or another with high value customers that appear to be dis-Engaging; many of these scenarios related to Marketing, Service, or Product in one way or another.

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Posted in Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics | 9 Comments »

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