InsightIQ Blog

On a recent project, I was involved with running data validation tests to ensure that each constituent in the marketing database is accurate.  The tests were designed to validate that each record has correct contact information, relationships to dependents, products, etc.  In that effort, we took a holistic approach to testing the data; we validated information in the database, validated the output of campaigns, mail file quality checks, etc.

As expected upon reviewing the validation results, we found data that needed to be fixed. And it was clear that certain things needed to be fixed immediately. At that point, we began the process of prioritizing items and developing an action plan to fix them.  It can be tricky to define the priority and it depends upon the factors you are considering. Should you look at the number of records impacted, or look at it from economic value perspective? I think the answer may be obvious - it makes the most sense to focus on maximum economic value.

The economic value depends on where you will get a higher return from the data. As an example,  if you have 100k records from an online source that have incomplete information vs. 10k records from a reliable source, it's worth considering data from the reliable source. Focusing on this group could lead to a higher success rate in reaching out to those contacts as well as response rate. If each response translates to selling products/services with a direct impact to revenue, focusing on the smaller, effective, data source first makes a lot of sense. Sometimes, it can be misleading if you just focus your energy on the record volume.

What do think? Is there another dimension we should consider?

The Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) industry continues to not only define what’s possible for marketers, but also helps them realize their vision for true multi-channel marketing.  Interestingly enough, this niche technology category has become very attractive as of late to the major tech giants, including IBM, Oracle, SAP, and NCR, to name a few.  I always felt it was a matter of time before consolidation fully took hold of this space – and it is certainly underway.  It seems like only yesterday when companies like Unica, e.Piphany, SAS, Siebel Systems, Aprimo, Portrait, Metavante and a handful of other niche CRM software providers were blazing the trail during the dotcom bubble years.

The landscape has definitely changed, as most recently evidenced by the bevy of acquisitions (including IBM’s announcement of its acquisition of Unica last week) and the high rankings that Gartner and Forrester have for solutions from the likes of SAP, Oracle, Teradata, etc. 

First let me apologize for the sensational title of this posting. I am fully aware that this title does nothing to move us as a culture away from the hyper-emotionalism that has driven marketing for quite some time now. Then again, since marketing does strive to captivate the heart as well as the mind, I feel somewhat justified. I'll get right to the point. There are two reasons why this blog is worth your time:

1) You are a CFO with a company meeting rapidly approaching and you are wondering if all the dollars you are throwing at the Marketing department are yielding any fruit, or...

2) You are on the other side of the equation and you are a Marketing Director having to bear the burden of obtaining the elusive ROI measurement for the CFO. 

IBM purchased Unica Corporation late last week at a very significant premium - more than double Unica's closing price the previous day.  IBM has been a partner and client of Unica and this purchase has long been rumored, so it was not entirely a surprise.  The premium was eye catching in this market, particularly in light of Unica's financial performance this past year, but it was a small deal for IBM and, if they can leverage this asset through their bigger reach, it will have been well worth it.

I often speak to organizations that are considering moving their marketing infrastructure from a proprietary database and marketing platform to an open, relational one.  The reasons most of them are undertaking these initiatives usually center on a few key pain points:

• The functionality and flexibility provided by the campaign management tool is limiting their ability to execute campaigns.
• Adding new data elements to the database schema is either very time consuming or not possible at all.
• There are many patches and “workarounds” that have been put in place and this makes for inefficient  processes and too much time spent reconciling and verifying accuracy of the data.
• Their internal IT group will no longer support the application or the database processes.

This past spring, I attended the Forrester Marketing Forum out in LA and came away with some interesting insights, especially in the social media sphere.

George Colony, Forrester's CEO, delivered a keynote called, "The Social CEO," during which he discussed the involvement of senior corporate leaders in social media. Having worked at several small companies, this topic is quite near and dear to my heart. I have worked with CEOs who really believe in SM and others who do not. Frequently, even the "believers" who want to contribute don't seem to know how, when, how often, and where. Try though we may to guide and educate these leaders down the right path, I really believe that each must find his/her own way, own style, own tools of choice.

Collections are tricky but if your collection strategies embed analytics, use the analytics to create proper collection treatments, and allow for ongoing test-and-learn adjustments you will optimize your collections efforts.   However, I do not want to focus on collection analytics at this time.  Why?  Because regardless of how well-oiled your collection efforts are, the single largest bad debt impact happens at the point of acquisition.

"Abridged" versions online?  What a bad idea for the online reader and the publisher. Instead of full stories, Time Magazine's online readers get an abridged version (a puny little paragraph) followed by three possible upsell suggestions: 

1. You can buy the issue on the iPad... that's helpful, thank you, when I am currently reading the article on a clunky old PC and needed yet one more reminder that my digital world is limited.
2. You can buy a Time Magazine subscription... why would I buy a print subscription when I am currently consuming the content online... yes, that would be great, please mail me the magazine so I can read the full article in 7-10 days.
3. Or you can buy a digital Time Magazine subscription... but I only care about this one article, I don't want a whole subscription... so why not make a few bucks by allowing me to just pay for the article... or how 'bout a day pass where I might discover more of your great content and possibly consider subscribing to the digital version?

No, that makes way too much sense.

At the recent Forrester Customer Experience Forum, Principal Analyst Dave Frankland spoke about the four tenets of breakthrough marketing accountability: organizational alignment, cross-functional business processes, value-based metrics, and communicating results. In addition to these core components, here there are some other things which are also critical to establishing marketing accountability:

As a frequent flyer one of my pet peeves is the presentation of credit card offers by flight attendants on behalf of their financial services partners.  I feel bad for the flight attendants having to sell this stuff, presumably to get commission to supplement their incomes.  However what really irritates me is the assumption that I am willing to listen to or am even remotely interested in hearing yet another credit card offer, especially when they know I am a captive audience.  

So I want to start a “do not solicit” list for frequent flyers (I am only half kidding) which would prohibit this annoying interruption.  It seems like the worst form of untargeted marketing.  Surely the airlines and their partners have learned the lesson of the past several years that the more relevant and timely your offer, and the more personalized its presentation, the better your chances of conversion. 

There has been a lot of buzz about customer engagement agencies (CEAs) and the role they'll play helping companies address marketing challenges.  But what is a customer engagement agency and what capabilities does a firm need to have to call itself one?  We've put together this short flash video to share our thoughts on the topic.

Have you taken the time to look around at what's happening across many business organizations lately?  The typical IT and Marketing departments have gone through a dramatic change.  The last few years have been quite a renaissance for these groups.  Gone are the IT operations and development groups.  Most of these roles have traveled the less-expensive-yet-not-always-faster outsourced direction.  Now, there are more clouds than switches.

At Quaero we are often asked to help marketing organizations that feel like they are “inefficient”.  Sometimes what I find is that they are, in fact, fairly efficient, but that their marketing investments are not “effective”.  In other words they execute well but do not get good outcomes.  By the same token, I work with companies who are effective – they get good marketing results – but who collectively tear their hair out every time they work together on a marketing program because they are so inefficient and it’s therefore so hard to get things done. 

Recently, CSG Systems commissioned a study of 260 consumers nationwide between the ages of 24 – 49 with Frost & Sullivan to investigate consumer impact of positive and negative customer service, including:

• Identifying the positive and negative customer service experiences that drive consumers to take actions such as changing service providers, to recommending a service to a friend. 
• Learning how customers receive communications from their cable operators today and which channels they are most likely to use when buying new products and services.
• Identifying customer willingness to share personal preference information and receive targeted advertising.

I recently attended a fabulous webinar sponsored by CustomerThink, part of their Social Business Executive Summit: How to Win in the Social Economy. The specific session that I am referring to is, "Best Practices to Create Online Communities to Engage Customers and Increase Loyalty." During this webinar, Jason Mittelstaedt from RightNow Technologies spoke about social media as part of the customer experience.

Jason mentioned that most companies who are engaged in social media (SM) strategy are taking a very silo'd approach rather than viewing SM as part of an integrated brand experience. So many marketers are worried about capitalizing on the social experience that this becomes an inevitable result - jumping on the tools because that's the easy part. Marketers know that they have to be a part of the conversation or they will be left out so they jump.

I recently attended the Neolane Evolution 2010 in wonderful Paris and I was impressed by the number of attendees. I had the opportunity to talk to a number of them about the challenges that they are facing in marketing today. It was also a great opportunity to hear from marketers about the interesting things and areas that they are exploring, as well as how they are leveraging Neolane.

Here are some of the broad themes that I heard at the conference:

One of the things that struck me most at the recent Unica MIS conference was how far some of the participating organizations have gone to create a progressive and expansive approach to marketing.  They have consciously and deliberately invested in strategies, analytics, processes and technology that move them away from broad-based outbound marketing to a more real-time and interactive mode of customer engagement.  That contrast between “marketing” and “engagement” came across very clearly to me and I believe is something that all organizations should be thinking about. 

A colleague of mine has two chidren - ages 8 and 5 – with no plans to increase the size of her brood.  So you can imagine her surprise when she received a box from a leading baby food manufacturer that contained five samples and a letter, which welcomed her to their loyalty program and indicated that she would be receiving additional samples and offers in the coming months. And, then they came – direct mail pieces with diaper samples, coupons and other goodies - at least eight in total.

Talk about an expensive “mistake” for the manufacturer. Who knows how my colleague ended up on this particular marketing list, which was obviously geared towards a particular demographic (i.e., women with babies), but I'm pretty sure she wasn’t the only one who ended up on the list erroneously.

Which leads me to the topic of this blog post – how do companies avoid these marketing blunders, which can be costly in terms of both reputation and hard dollars?  The answer will be revealed in the video clip below.

We are thrilled to announce that Quaero is a 2010 American Business Awards Finalist in the category of Website/Blog. Quaero's blog, InsightIQ, has been recognized for excellence in this category. The American Business Awards were created to honor the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and business people worldwide so we are honored to have been named a finalist.

Thank you to our bloggers, our readers and congratulations to all 2010 American Business Award Finalists and Winners!

Not too long ago, a client with a leading edge reputation and revered loyalty program contacted me to discuss how we can help them re-affirm their direct marketing vision.  They are staffed with long tenured and notable marketers, but were seeking a fresh perspective of the initiatives and capabilities they might consider to drive the very best customer experience.

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of high performance computing and an example of why it is relevant in marketing.  This article will serve as the foundation for many other articles I will write.

What is High Performance computing?

High Performance computing or HPC is the use of a supercomputer or computer clusters to solve complex problems that involve an astronomical number of calculations.  Supercomputers or computer clusters are simply aiming to achieve one goal: wicked-fast computing.  They try to achieve this by adding more processors which adds parallelism.  Parallelism gives the system the ability to do multiple calculations simultaneously.

Customer Analytics in many environments provides significant competitive advantages, which culminates in minimizing waste / costs while maximizing revenue.  Many times one of the largest barriers in analytic adoption is the lack of understanding of the analytic outputs, which hinders the proper strategic application of the analytics - both short-term and long-term.

Marketing Operations is a term that has been in common use for several years now.  It has become synonymous with improving and automating direct marketing processes to achieve maximum throughput at minimum cost.  Given the tough economic conditions that have prevailed over the last few years, the focus for work in the marketing operations area has naturally been on being more “efficient," meaning doing more with the same resources or less.  As the economy slowly recovers however, marketers are beginning to think beyond the efficiency of the next campaign or branding initiative and are focusing in two related areas – (i) the changing nature of the marketing they are doing (or should be doing), and (ii) redefining or enhancing marketing operations to support those changes.

A big component of lead management strategy in B2B marketing is the process of building relationships with your prospects and engaging a prospect with meaningful dialogue that moves them through the sales funnel until they are ready to become a customer.

By now we are all familiar with the online media business model. It’s all about hits – well sort of. First, we have to remember that media companies have two groups of customers: 

1. Those who consume their content.
2. Those who purchase rights to advertise alongside their content.

When you purchase advertising in print newspapers, the rate card will often include demographics and circulation data.  This provides the marketer with information about who their ads are targeting.  This is far from perfect. The advertiser cannot select to target say, only affluent subscribers, or those looking to purchase a car.