Archive for the ‘Analytics Education’ Category

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I’m at Training 2007 (the Conference)

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

Yea, I know, kind of weird.  What the heck is a Marketing / Web Analytics guy doing at this event?

The Training Conference and Expo is the largest conference of training professionals in the US.  It’s the first conference I have been to in 10 years that I’m not speaking at.  Probably the first conference I have been to in 20 years where just about everybody knows more about the topic than I do. 

And I have to tell you, that’s incredibly refreshing. 

I’m thinking I have to do this more often!  After all, what exactly is the point of going to conferences on material you already have deep knowledge of?  Unless it is to present, of course…

I’m here on behalf of the Web Analytics Association scouting out vendors to administer the Certification test we are developing for web analysts, and to learn everything I can about best practices in Certification.  One of the challenges is we are looking to certify folks not on “software” related issues like implementation / set-up (the vendors do a fine job here) but on the business side, where the issues are often not as quantifiable as they are in software land.  So we need a vendor that can work with us on a more flexible testing methodology than many are used to.  If you have any suggestions / advice on certification test vendors, let me know.  There are 9 vendors here.

Here are some interesting things I have learned so far:

1.  Virtually none of these Training / HR folks have ever heard of web analytics before.  They have no idea what the heck I am talking about, or that web analytics people even exist from an HR perspective.  The typical response is “we could have used somebody like that when we were setting up our Intranet … what is their typical job title and who do they report to?”

 2.  The primary model used in training course development is called ADDIE.  It stands for:

Analyze
Design
Develop
Implement
Evaluate

which is a formal sequence of tasks where “Evaluate” has an arrow looping back up to the top pointing to Analyze, meaning you repeat the sequence and there is a continuous improvement process.  Hmm, that sounds kind of familiar, where have I seen this before?  Perhaps filed under Best Practices for web site development?

3.  Lots of the communication and behavioral models used in Marketing are used in Training - Training is in many ways a specialized kind of Marketing.  I initially thought I was dead wrong about this but when I put forth the idea, nobody threw me out of the room or called me a Newbie.  So I think there is something worth exploring about this parallel, especially since e-Learning delivered through web interfaces is a big deal to these folks.

More to come as the event unfolds…

Posted in Analytics Education | 2 Comments »

The Deconstruction of Marketing

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Seems to me these days “Marketing” is being deconstructed into a bunch of pieces.  When I was coming up through the ranks, Marketing included Customer Service plus all the stuff now called CRM, Customer Experience, and all the related ideas.  The person in charge of Marketing was in charge of all these things.  It made so much sense to manage a business this way, because to control your fate as a Marketer, you had to control or at least influence all the customer touchpoints.  So why are these responsibilities being split off into little sub-cultures today?

The answer is they’re not really; that’s just the way it looks to me, because every industry I worked in for 25 years was rich with customer data and we used that data to prove why it made so much sense for Marketing to be in charge of all these aspects of the company interface with the customer.  We proved time and time again that by exerting cross-silo influence where the customer was involved, Marketing could generate much improved profitability.  Every Marketing program worked even harder towards generating profits when Marketing got all the silos aligned.

So I guess it just looks to me (and some other data-driven Marketing folks) like these functions are being split out of Marketing.  The reality is that many companies never had any of these data-driven functions before, and when they start getting access to customer data, they created these areas as new entities.  The question: why not create them under Marketing?  This approach sure would have saved a lot of trouble in CRM, for example. 

And I suspect the answer is the Marketing folks took one look at this new data-driven world with the associated need to have a basic understanding of technology issues, and said, “No thanks, I’ll stick to Advertising and PR”.  And as Marketers let go of / failed to capture control of these key operational touchpoints with the customer, they essentially devolved Marketing from a strategic C-Level force into “MarCom”.

And that’s a real shame.  This splintering of Marketing Management by technological issues is a waste of time at best and a long term problem at worst.  Ultimately, after we go through all this CRM and Chief Experience Officer stuff and whatever else you want to call it (seems like a new name every day), people will realize that all of this belongs in Marketing.  And then we’ll just need some brave Marketing folks who think they can handle it to step up to the plate and really make it work.  If you’re a mid-level MarCom person and want to start preparing for this transition, start making some friends in Finance, Technology, and Customer Service.  Find out what it is that keeps them awake at night, and think about how Marketing could help solve their problems.

And to jump-start your brain towards making Marketing decisions based on customer data rather than using nameless, faceless GRP’s, try taking a look at the business side of web analytics.  You’ll be amazed at how much of it transfers directly to Data-based / CRM / Customer Experience Marketing.  Why?  Because the web analytics community has decided best practices require a cross-functional team approach with a focus on Customer Experience and a requirement to examine the Financial implications of actions taken.  Web analytics teams are a functioning microcosm of what Marketing used to be, and what it should be in the future.

Posted in Analytical Culture, Analytics Education, Marketing / Tech Interface | 3 Comments »

Sense And Respond Marketing

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

Ron Shevlin of database marketing powerhouse Epsilon thinks a new core competency requirement for marketers is the “ability move customers through the buying cycle with a sense-and-respond capability”.  This is something I often talk to people about, it’s really a subset of the “I have the data, now what do I do?” problem.  Marketers are more familiar with creating campaigns based on nameless, faceless GRP’s than the behavior of real people.  And that’s the problem. 

I think part of the problem is in segmentation, they simply don’t understand how powerful behavioral segmentation is, how different it is than using demographics – and they lack the ability to ask for / get this information in a format that drives action-oriented thinking.  The granularity of “people” as opposed to GRP’s throws them off.  With Sense And Respond Marketing, or what I would call Relationship Marketing, you use the Customer LifeCycle to influence messaging which is meaningful to people based on behavior, not demographics.  The behavior is the message, not the age, income, make of car, or whatever.  Using behavior makes so much more sense when you see an 80 year old on a Harley.

Here’s an example.  One thing that happens with interactivity is people tend to “gorge” themselves on something, get tired of it, and move on to the next experience (video games, Friendster).  So you have to work very hard to hold on to them.  At HSN, we used to listen very carefully to what customers said on the air and reviewed comment trends in customer service every single day.  One thing we started hearing was “I’ve only got 10 fingers” which is the customer saying “you are selling too much jewelry”.  At the same time, we were looking at the LifeCycle of best customers and found that most of them were fashion buyers who started buying in jewelry – regardless of how old they were or what their incomes were.

So we have customers telling us we sell too much jewelry, and we end up losing a lot of them because they get bored.  But at the same time, best customers are created when someone starts buying jewelry and moves into fashion.  We have a natural transition from new customer / jewelry to best customer / fashion that some customers found their way to and others did not.  Knowing this behavior exists and that it’s very profitable for HSN, can we influence it?  Can we get more people to make the jewelry to fashion transition with a marketing campaign of some kind?

Well, the first thing is timing.  When to drop the campaign?  You can’t drop it on a “date” to all customers, you have new customers coming on each day and they are going through a LifeCycle.  However, the data said if the customer did not start buying fashion by the 120th day of their LifeCycle, they would probably never buy fashion.  So somewhere in that 90 – 120th day after becoming a new customer, we need to hit them with a “buy fashion” message.

OK, so what is the message?  Well, we know from customer comments (and remote selling in general) that people are reluctant to buy fashion remotely because they are worried about fit.  So what would be the easiest fashion item to sell a remote customer?  How about something like a running suit, you know, Small-Med-Large-XLarge?

So we put together these special fashion shows geared to “no brainer fit” fashions and had them run at very specific times on the network that we could promote to the customer in advance.  We dropped a very simple piece that said, “We’d really like you to try our fashions, here is $10 off, here is when to watch” kind of thing.  And we dropped it somewhere in the 90 – 120 day window after the customer’s first purchase.  Understand, these pieces went out every week but they went to very specific people with specific behavior who were entering “the zone” of 90 - 120 days after first purchase of jewelry.

And we literally printed money from that point on with this program.  For every $1 in cost, we generated $25 in incremental (versus control) profit in the first year of the customer life, every day, day in and day out, as a higher percentage of new customers converted into long-term, highly profitable fashion buyers.

Was that a hard program to design?  Not to me, seems completely logical.  You have behavior, you know the customer, you have timing points, copy is simple and direct.  I think Ron probably had something a little more sophisticated in mind when he wrote Sense And Respond Marketing, but the basic concept is the same (and after all, we were dealing with mainframes and snail mail at HSN in 1994, so cut me some slack!).

So why is it again that people have this “I have the data, now what do I do” problem?  I suspect it’s because they may have the data, but it’s not in any kind of actionable report format that generates ideas.  GRP Marketers simply don’t know how to ask for the data / can’t get the data in a format that lends itself to creating effective campaigns.  And that’s a shame, because it’s pretty simple to have someone do it for you or you can do it yourself.

Posted in Analytics Education, DataBase Marketing, Marketing / Tech Interface | 4 Comments »

Do You Read IT Management Magazines?

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

If not, why not?  Just because you are a marketer?  How then, do you talk to IT people in a language they can (partially) understand and get anything done?  How will you increase the Productivity of your marketing efforts without having a useful dialogue with IT?  If you can’t increase the Productivity of your programs and deliver better results, what will happen is your job will be “absorbed into the Network”, as Regis McKenna would say.

If you are in Marketing Management and are looking for a seat at the strategic table you have to understand some of this stuff.  The CEO, COO, and CFO do; why not you?

At least try to read these magazines:

Intelligent Enterprise – the data / architecture side of Marketing Productivity; Business Intelligence, Data Modeling

Optimize Magazine – More about Business Process Stuff; Modeling, Management, Sensing and Alerting, Six Sigma

BaseLine Magazine – This provides hard core, detailed case studies on Business Optimization.  Amazing stuff, hard to believe they get execs to fess up to some of these giant productivity disasters.  Mostly focuses on operations, but why is operations not of your concern?  Operations impacts the customer, the customer is your main focus (right?).  When you read these cases, imagine how these customer-touchpoint disasters affected the outcome of every marketing program running at the company.

DM Review – this one can be some tough sledding, a lot of it is about systems, but hey, how long are you not going to care about systems?

You will not understand everything these magazines are talking about (especially the last one), but that’s not the point.  The point is to learn what they are talking about, and try to figure out how you can take advantage of it when it happens.

Heck, even help it happen or make sure it happens in a way that is the most productive for marketing.  These magazines are must reads for any marketing person thinking of joining a Business Swat team.

Posted in Analytical Culture, Analytics Education, Marketing / Tech Interface | No Comments »

Root Cause: The Five Why’s

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

There are many marketing productivity situations you will encounter where a change in the metrics, positive or negative, is being caused by something you or your area has no control over. For example, your marketing campaign generated a lot of leads but these leads failed to convert at an acceptable rate. Since this campaign has always generated good leads in the past, you ask yourself, “What happened? What was different this time?”

Upon further research, you find that the leads were of the same quality, but for some reason most of the leads failed to make it to the salespeople they were intended for, and instead went to a brand new salesperson in training. This “process failure” resulted in a low conversion rate, and is the root cause of the campaign failure.  Here is the head’s up on root cause: make sure when analyzing campaigns and other metrics that you understand what “failure” you are really dealing with. Relentlessly search for root cause.

Getting to the Root of It All

I often speak about cross-functional teams in the management of the analytical culture, and the concept of root cause is the driving reason for this, as the road to root cause is often cross-functional in nature. Having a cross-functional mentality in place ensures that these complex root cause issues are addressed without finger-pointing. In a good cross-functional team, there is no “blame”, only learning and continuous improvement. If you don’t chase down the root cause of your issues, the problem likely will continue, creating pain for all members of the team. 

We can look to the practice of Six Sigma for some help in performing Root Cause Analysis. A popular technique is known as “5 Why’s”. The “surface” problem or “effect” as it is called in Six Sigma is written down, specifically, at the top of the page. Then the team asks, “Why did this happen?” This answer, or “cause” in the language of Six Sigma, is written down underneath the effect. “But what caused this to happen?” is asked, answered and written down under the previous cause, and the process repeats until the team agrees that the “real”, or “root cause” of the problem has been arrived at. 

If you solve this last problem, you will fix the root cause, which typically means you will solve all the other “causes” above it.

For some reason, the root cause is often reached around the 5th “Why”, hence the name. You may reach your root cause sooner or later depending on how well the problem is understood and defined in the first place.

Let’s take the example of the lead generation campaign above and run it through the 5 Why’s process:

Effect: The campaign failed to generate leads that converted at an acceptable rate.

Why?

Cause: Because the leads were distributed to a sales person who was in training

Why?

Cause: Because the sales manager who usually distributes the leads was out of town and the only person available to distribute leads did not know the leads are not supposed to go to sales people in training

Why?

Cause: Because there are no rules in place to guide somebody on how to distribute leads when the sales manager is not available

Why?

Root Cause: Because the sales manager has not provided specific instructions on how to distribute leads

Solution to problem of under-performing campaign: 

Have sales manager create lead distribution rules and appoint a person to control distribution of leads in her absence. Probably a good idea to appoint someone to control distribution of leads if both the sales manager and the 1st level appointee are unavailable as well, so any “cascade” effect is stopped and campaign budget not wasted.

See how that works? The root cause doesn’t have much to do with web analytics or marketing, but the impact is felt there and as such, the cross-functional root cause for failure should be uncovered and repaired.

Now, as an analyst, you may want to “tweak” the “5 Why’s” process a bit. While useful in getting a discovery process going, particularly in cross-functional team settings, there is a real problem for the analyst. Do you see it?  

Here it is: where is the analytical rigor in this process?  For each cause the team agrees to, I would ask for proof or evidence of the causal relationship, or else you might end up going down a dead end road.  Examine this proof and determine if it completely explains the relationship between the effect and the cause.

Posted in Analytical Culture, Analytics Education | No Comments »

Web Analytics Unwrapped

Monday, December 25th, 2006

If you want to do anything else with your life for a year and a half, I would not suggest you take on the creation of a complete set of continuing education courses on Web Analytics.  But then again, you don’t have to, because I did.  The courses are a joint effort between the Web Analytics Association and the University of British Columbia.

And you wondered what took me so long to start a blog…or why I’m starting it on Christmas Day, for that matter…

Introduction to Web Analytics, Web Analytics for Site Optimization, Measuring Marketing Campaigns Online, and Creating and Managing the Analytical Business Culture are all available for your analytical growth path, delivered 100% online.  Students are raving about the immediate applicability and usefulness of the content.

Many thanks to the heroes who contributed.

Posted in Analytics Education | No Comments »

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