Category Archives: Analytics Education

Measuring the $$ Value of Customer Experience

Marketing IS (Can Be?) an Experience

Early on I discovered something from the work of leaders in data-based marketing business models: they were always very concerned with post-campaign execution – not only from  marketing, but also through product, distribution, and service. I thought this strange, until I realized they knew something I did not: when you have customer data, you can actually identify and fix negative customer value impacts caused by poor experience.

This means you can directly quantify the value of customer experience, budget for fixing it, and create a financial model that proves out the bottom line hard money profits (or losses) from paying attention to the business value as a result of customer experience.

And critically, this idea becomes much more important as you move from surface success metrics like conversion and sales down into deep success metrics like company profits. Frequently you see the profit / loss from “marketing” often has less to do with campaigns and more to do with the positive or negative experiences caused by campaigns.

Examples

You might think taking the time to provide special treatment to brand new customers would always encourage engagement and repeat purchase. You’d be wrong. Sometimes this works, sometimes this does not work, depending on the context of the customer. Does it surprise you to find out customers often do not want to be “delighted”?

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Digital Customer Analysis Going Mainstream?

Is it possible the mainstream digital marketing space is about to finally move on from a focus on front-end measurement (campaigns, etc. ) to creating knowledge around how enterprise value as a whole is created?  And actually enabling action in this area?

Judging by the material coming out of the recent Martech conference in Boston, one would think so.  And it looks to me like I’m not the only one thinking “it’s about time”.

A couple of years ago I lamented:

It’s been very popular among marketing types to talk about “the customer” but seek metrics for affirmation other than those based on or derived from the customer. Digital analysts have followed their lead, and provided Marketers plenty of awareness, engagement, and campaign metrics. As I’ve said in the past, this is a huge disconnect. Does it make sense (analytically) to have discussions about customer centricity, customer experience, customer service, the social customer, etc. and measure these effects at impression or visit level?

If you’d like to review some commentary on the conference, see a list of 5 posts here.  I found the list of tweets here particularly indicative of Martech’s potential, for example:

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All Talk, No #Measure

Hypocrisy in Web Analytics?

Before every eMetrics (I’ll be in San Fran teaching Basecamp, at the Gala, etc.), I try to ask myself, what is the most critical issue facing the web analyst community right now?  Then, at the show, I ask everyone I run into what they think about this issue.

There’s lots of issues to choose from.  Career path I think is a big area of discussion, given the mergers in the space and trend towards outsourcing.  Then there’s the “we don’t get no respect” thing; senior management doesn’t seem to listen / understand / act on the information provided.  And one of my favorites from the past is still out there, data torture – people being pressured to manipulate data to reach a predetermined analytical outcome.

But seems to me, more important at this juncture is trying to resolve why there is so much written about the importance of “the customer” but very little measurement at the customer level.  Think about it.  Customer experience, customer centricity, the entire social thing, it’s all about customers.

But when folks wants to trot out “proof” that this or that approach is the road to the promised land, they analyze impressions, visits, clicks, etc.  Visitor-level stuff.  Does that seem like the correct approach to you?  Seems to me, if you want to provide knowledge about customers, you should measure customers.

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