Let's head out for a real-world spin and see analytics in action, helping to drive marketing campaigns and programs to the next step.
Say you're ready to send ou
t hundreds of thousands of email messages to your customer base for which the purchasing cycle has just ended. When is the best time to push the send button? You can use marketing analytics to identify seasonality of the purchasing cycle within your customer base to establish optimal campaign timing.
Or, perhaps you are seeing too many purchasers leave your online store with a single product in their basket. Leveraging information gathered via marketing analytics, you can present purchasers with additional products related to their primary purchase, which in turn boosts attach rates.
Another example is if one of your marketing teams purchases a large list of names for an upcoming campaign. You estimate that 80 percent of the potential recipients aren't even interested in the subject. You could forge ahead with the "spray-and-pray" approach, or you could turn to your marketing analytics team to identify those customers most likely to respond. This will reduce list purchase and production costs as well as increase targeting by providing recipients with information that they are actually interested in. In turn, your response rates should improve and the recipients will likely opt to accept information from you again.
Here's another real-life scenario: a much-hyped demand generation activity generates ineffective leads and plenty of tension between marketing and sales.
Marketing analytics can help avoid this kind of negative
campaign outcome. You can develop a decision framework through the analysis of past leads and sales data to optimize lead routing - and create a prioritized lead-follow up score based on budget, authority, need and timeframe. This can generate increased sales and marketing effectiveness, keeping both your marketing and sales teams happy.
Tracking the Trends
Today, marketing analytics can already touch everything you do around customer behavior and marketing spend. So what's next?
Many companies will begin to combine clickstrea
m analysis with deeper insight into who your customers really are, what they are thinking and what motivates them. Through more complex quantitative methodology, you'll be able to not only understand customer behavior patterns but also understand what prompted them to exhibit that behavior in the first place - and, most importantly, if the prompts ultimately generated the targeted revenue.
Marketing analytics is also likely to become more of an efficient macroeconomic activity as it scales out from the narrow focus of an individual regional marketing person tracking a campaign on a PC to a more global, corporate-wide focus. At the same time, larger IT systems and data warehouses will enable you to effectively reach more customers with a more repeatable, sustainable process.
Whatever path your company chooses to follow, you can look to analytics to help you improve marketing efficiency and increase marketing effectiveness - with greater understanding of and accountability for the results.
Marketing Analytics Checklist: What Works, What Doesn't
No matter where you company is today regarding marketing analytics, a common set of challenges presents itself as you seek the right balance between the art and the science of marketing. Keeping these guidelines in mind can help surmount, or even bypass, some of the biggest challenges.
Start with the data itself. Are you already collecting data? Is it the right data? How do you access it? Is it centralized? You need to place equal emphasis on the quantity and the quality of data. Both are equally important. Likewise, don't always implicitly trust all the data you receive. Mistakes can be made along the way in terms of data entry and maintenance. Don't be afraid to question the data when it feels right to do so.
Don't get too fancy too fast. If you do, you run the risk of losing sight of your analytics objectives. It's easy to get more caught up in how you are solving a problem than in reaching an actual solution. Consider simplifying analyti
cs to align with basic business rules. You don't always need to employ the most sophisticated analytics methodology or technique to generate results that are right for your business. Even the most basic analytics tools can take your company far.
View analytics as a strategic core function. It's not just something you dabble in here and there or something you start and stop. It's a continual process. Consider establishing a central analytics team, much like an R&D function. Then use that team to help transfer knowledge from one team to another across your global and regional sales and marketing organizations. Also consider establishing a unique career path for your analytics professionals. This can help you attract and retain the best in the field.
Commit to marketing analytics. And follow through on that commitment. Don't just talk about marketing analytics. Invest in it. You can start with a pilot program or two, but when that program delivers positive results, leverage it. Build on what you've learned as you scale, and repeat the program in other relevant marketing areas.
Build partnerships within your company. Marketing analytics initiatives should logically intersect and integrate with your IT and corporate strategy.
Secure executive buy-in. As with any program or initiative, the effort you put into securing executive sponsorship for your marketing analytics program helps turn your plans into successful execution and delivery.
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