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.
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.
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.
(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.