Blog: CRM EDU

When it comes to deciding between implementing a CRM solution in-house or partnering with a provider for delivery, you'll want to be confident about the availability of your application and have a robust monitoring process.  At CSG's Quaero, monitoring is an integral component of the Operations processes and is standard across all clients.  

When it comes to "What" and "How" to monitor, things can be daunting.  Consider these four categories to simplify the process:

Just like Momma used to say, (data) cleanliness is next to Godliness. Well, not quite, but you get the point...this will make sense by the time we get to the end here.

One weekend not too long ago, I found myself enjoying one of the first sunny days in a while and as I was wrapping up the yard work I wandered out to the mailbox to check the daily delivery of bills and credit card offers...that's when the clouds rolled in again.

It's a fact that bringing on new customers is a very expensive and time consuming proposition. It makes sense, then, to invest in the ability to track down and retain your best customers, no matter where they may go. 

Consumers on the move (over 40 million Americans per year), complete a Change of Address card at their local US Post Office.  Those cards are compiled and published to licensed full-service providers (such as CSG's Quaero) in a database with 160 million other American consumers who have moved in the past 48 months and changed their addresses.  Our clients have access to all that rich address information when CSG Quaero runs their customer or prospect database through NCOA (National Change of Address) and can find out which of their customers are on the move.

The best way to improve return on a marketing effort is to make sure you are targeting the correct customers or prospects.  An important piece of this is suppression.   There are plenty of list brokers who will have no problem selling or renting you a list of deceased individuals, prison addresses, bankruptcy records, etc.

Here are a few tips to saving money on suppression:

So just when you thought you knew what you were talking about,  someone gives you a requirement for reusable offers in Unica version 7.5. Do you know how to make offers reusable in Unica? I asked some Unica representatives this very question, "What happens to an offer in Unica 7.5 once you assign it to a cell? Can you change the offer description?" Go ahead and take a shot yourself at this question. If your knowledge of Unica is pretty good, go ahead and try and answer the question. Here is the question again,

"What happens to an offer in Unica 7.5 once you assign it to a cell? Can you change the offer description?"

As a consultant for a leading marketing firm offering our clients real-time multichannel customer interaction, I am continually asked to build things in Unica that are reusable. One of the ground floor tenants of automation is the ability not only to automate a process, but to ensure that what is automated does not require high maintenance. Reusability is the buzz-word for low maintenance and should apply as well to the automation of your Unica applications. This article is the first in a series of articles about how to take full advantage of your Unica 7.5 environment - that is, how to make things reusable.

At the highest level, reusability for Unica 7.5 would pertain to your ability to take the entire environment - for instance a production environment - and recreate that environment elsewhere. That is exactly an exercise which we recently performed for one of our clients. Below are the steps to moving your Unica application from one environment (ENV#1) to another environment (ENV#2).

The behavioral targeting and online advertising industry is keenly watching the online consumer privacy debate unfold. As consumer groups and experts on both sides debate the privacy guidelines, it is expected to have far reaching consequences to online advertising and could drive a fundamental shift from behavioral and contextual targeting to analytic driven segmentation and targeting.

In these economic times, marketing budgets are tight and email provides a lower cost medium and applied with segmentation and personalization techniques could be a high ROI medium. More and more marketers are looking towards to email to engage customers and have relevant messaging but also monetize ad revenues by targeted advertising.

It seems that every time I log into my Comcast email account, I have a million new emails to go through (o.k., I'm exaggerating), and I wonder, for the majority of them, how the sender even got my email address.

I'm sure there are better ways dissect emails that should be important to me, but I generally scan the sender name (and immediately delete those that I don't recognize) and then delete any email that doesn't have a subject line that is appealing.  My guess is that you have a similar method to the INBOX madness.

Each one of us is unique in his or her individual way.  These differences between one person and another add the "spice" to life.  Why is it, then, that most organizations don't recognize these differences and use this information to create customer strategies, experiences, and marketing activities that resonate?

Case in point: a co-worker and I are virtually identical - demographically.  We are both female, the same age, married, without children.  We both own a convertible sports car and our own home.  Our income, credit-worthiness, and interests are very similar.  Each of us travels extensively.  We subscribe to some of the same magazines.  We even live in the same town.  To most organizations, we would be considered "the same" and marketed to identically.  However - we are very different from one other in how we prefer to interact with organizations and buy their products.

Advertisers will shift their focus away from last-click attribution toward multi-click and custom attribution models. Over the last year there has been a dramatic shift in the way multichannel advertisers evaluated their return on investment. Among the advertisers conducted in a recent study, it's fair to say that last-click attribution methodology is a minority approach in theory if not in practice. In some cases search engine optimization benefits from this, and in some cases it does not. Either way, advertisers are making smarter decisions about their marketing investments. This will no doubt accelerate in 2009.