Silo-ization is a silent killer. It destroys the most effective factor in marketing: people.
Leveraging Big Data for better prospecting and improved conversion rates.
Proposed do-not-track regulations will indeed harm the Adv/DDM industry.
The TV data revolution with audience targeting is happening on the local level.
Proving marketing ROI is tough with today's channel proliferation. All marketers win if those succeeding share their strategies.
Hearst, Macy's, JPMorgan Chase, and Starwood share their data-driven engagement secrets.
For consumers, personalization is the true value of providing personal preference data.
All of us have access to more data every day, but how do you understand and uncover insights from that data? That's the sweet spot in the Big Data revolution.
Looking for insight from customer data? Here are four timeless ideas to help you find it.
Four areas of concern and interest about data and privacy for marketers right now.
If you're a segmentation purist (and I am), you view segmentation as a strategic tool meant for managing a customer portfolio.
The potential ways to use Big Data for customer segmentation are only limited by the imagination of the direct marketer.
Today an individual is more than just a user or buyer of products and services. Empowered by their personal devices, people engage with brands in multiple roles.
Big Data is like the population in some emerging countries. There is a lot of it (volume). It's incredibly diverse (variety). And it's growing at an extremely rapid rate (velocity).
Companies that use Privacy by Design can better balance targeted marketing outreach with customer expectations.
Topological data analysis can help marketers discover valuable, unexpected insights from Big Data.
Two ways to tap into Big Data Disruption to optimize your marketing investments.
Six steps for combining personas with automation to build stronger customer relationships.
Systematic testing and measurement—even at today's Internet speed—is essential to the continuous improvement of marketing results.
Marketing in its optimal state is a science, honed using data to be relevant, targeted, and of course, direct—and that never goes out of style.
The question isn't how well do you know your customers—it's how well should you know them to meet your goals while best serving them?
Big Data is just data. In our experience, however, it does require a new way of thinking because of the possibilities it offers to marketers.
It is understandable for marketers to feel a little underwhelmed by the Big Data revolution.
Leveraging the power of Big Data analytics—through the integration of all data elements—is a new approach and a must for the faster decision making required today.
Designing data-driven maintenance service programs that deliver ongoing annuity streams.
Effective marketing isn't just about analyzing data, but about providing guidance on what data needs to be retrieved and analyzed.
Marketers must be cautious about how they share data with partners.
One customer data point essential to lead scoring—the phone number—is becoming harder to verify. Three related data points can help.
Don't get so distracted by Big Data that other challenges or opportunities go unheeded.
Marketing will continue to drive momentum for Big Data analytics and the business gains possible from deep customer insight.
When it comes to your customers, are you relying on data or do you still rely on intuition when making decisions?
Direct marketers should adopt, in conjunction with Big Data, the concept of Big Measurement.
Without the right customer data even the best marketing tactics can go awry.
Too many marketers try to automate processes before they have a central hub a clean data to support their marketing efforts.
Too many marketers overlook the essential ingredient of direct marketing: Testing.
Encouraging loyal, engaged customers to recommend and refer can help enhance marketing performance and improve sales results.
Being a remarkable marketing leader starts with understanding your customers.
Three tactics for companies to reward (and attract) influencers this holiday season while building brand loyalty and generating sales
Loyalty is about transforming from generic earn-and-burn "transactional" models to interactive, personalized, and differentiated "emotional" ones.
For loyalty marketers and retailers, one ongoing challenge is finding new ways to create, maintain, or increase customers' attachment to their brand.
Marketers face an emerging issue that represents both an opportunity and a potential challenge: how to leverage large data sets, Big Data.
Unstructured "human information" makes up 90% of all known Big Data, and it's growing with incredible variety and velocity.
Marketers and customer service leaders need to unite. The customer expects no less.
Imation is one company blending art and science, creativity and analytics, to improve marketing performance.
As marketers, we need to understand that it's no longer about what journey we want to take customers on; it's about meeting them where they are in their journey and making ourselves adaptable along the way.
The term "customer obsession" has become popular as businesses endeavor to create meaningful connections to break through the marketplace clutter.
Data and creative are ultimately complementary. Data alone doesn't drive brand engagement and great creative, if not properly focused, often seems purposeless.
Today's consumers are not just individuals we actively sell to; they are informed buyers.
There are some simple steps every organization can take to make sure they are saving money and reaching the right customers for any marketing campaign.
The U.S. Postal Service has clarified the rules offering a free ounce for promo inserts to businesses mailing automated pre-sort First-Class Mail — and the industry should take advantage of the offer at once.
For more than five years now, the direct marketing industry has possessed the analytics and intuitive tools to create and execute individually personalized contact strategies for customers. However, there has existed one single limitation keeping these innovations from seeing the light of day, and keeping us in our spreadsheet-driven, file-passing entrapment.
When shopping for a database marketing services company, there are "must-haves" that should be on everyone's list.
Integrated customer marketing is the key to driving increased loyalty, customer lifetime value and overall return on ad spend.
Typically, the most insightful digital profile attributes come from one of three primary sources.
It is not uncommon that the retail side of a business doesn't know what the Web side is doing.
One of the best ways for database marketers to maximize their budgets and increase ROI is to find the appropriate mix of contact methods for each customer segment.
Marketers must develop a consistent, repeatable approach toward optimizing customer experience.
While the arsenal of tools available to market researchers has certainly grown over the years, perhaps none has been more insightful than what is referred to as structural equation modeling.
Here are our top five best practice tips for implementing better database marketing.
Follow these few simple steps to get a good start on mining the value of your customer data.
Unlike a traditional ad campaign, a well-executed database marketing campaign never ends.
Rising costs, channel proliferation and fragmented consumer attention make it tough to turn a profit on acquisition campaigns.
Marketers must leverage data in service of the consumer and protect their information like never before.
When connected to different lifecycle marketing stages, marketers can more effectively message their customers to produce a better customer experience and stronger results, and increase retention rates.
Twice a year, the marketing business pauses in its reinvention to expose its fear of fundamental change and highlight the disconnect that exists between what it says and what it does.
While privacy concerns are understandable, what most people care about at the end of the day is the price-value equation. They're willing to give up personal information about themselves if it helps a marketer target them more effectively and efficiently. If you can use past behaviors and stated preferences to deliver a better experience and waste less time, go for it.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but not every one of my observations is worth a full column. Or so my editors tell me. Most, however, are worth at least 140 characters. With that in mind, and to help ring in 2012, I proudly present my Twitter-ready views, insights, unsolicited tidbits of advice and meaningless random thoughts on the absurdities of modern marketing.
Be my Valentine! Now, let's see what I can buy/purchase/consume to express how I feel. A greeting card, for starters, pre-printed with someone else's sentiments, a frilly box of chocolates complete with a picture chart so you can avoid biting into the one with that weird green cream, or a dozen red long-stems.
Walking the streets of New York City after a recent Sunday brunch, an out-of-town friend delighted in the sight of a woman making her way home in what seemed to be the outfit she had worn out the night before. "That's what I love about New York: the anonymity," my friend said.
Data opens the door for marketers to connect with customers at a personal, emotion-charged level. But this portal to customer-centric marketing remains locked for many organizations — both client-side and agencies
Marketers must invest in a cross-channel platform to deliver relevant communications.
Look to competitors and companies outside of your industry to develop enhanced customer experiences.
Marketers in the publishing and catalog industries predict digital will serve a greater role in their campaigns over the next three years, but it will not completely replace print.
Integrated within the CRM system, social media data can now be used to power more effective email campaigns.
Darla is a customer service rep for American Express. But to me, she is more than that: she is the face, or more precisely, the voice that saved the brand's image in the mind of one loyal longtime cardholder.
Small businesses, with their small ad budgets, tend to be a forgotten entity in the advertising and marketing arena.
Instead of treating loyalty programs like old-time banks, we should treat them like playgrounds.
Lead nurturing is about cultivating leads that aren't ready to buy and keeping prospects engaged.
With the advent of social CRM, companies can now track and monitor customer behavior to inform segmentation and customization of marketing messages.
The data available in response databases is generally quite similar in accuracy and completeness to compiled data.
Marketers must figure out how to embrace new channels while maintaining performance in existing ones.
There are four crucial moves that every innovator must make to succeed in this new economic and technological landscape.
Building customer insights into every interaction, and listening to the response, is at the core of smart multichannel marketing.
What makes great editors great is that they are able to connect to both the heart and the head. They know what makes their audience laugh, think, stick around and respond. Great editors also have a head for business.
In the coming year, b-to-b marketers must shift to account-based marketing — online and offline — moving away from delivering individual leads to delivering qualified accounts.
I have heard many marketers complain about the escalating cost of acquiring customers in our fragmented, distracted media environment.
The advent of group discount sites, search engines, auction sites and product review sites have eroded brand loyalty and made it more difficult for marketers to maintain strong customer relationships.
Direct marketers still spend more time than they like trying to prove to the rest of us that their industry is not populated solely by junk mailers and cheesy infomercial pitches. They have a good case. It can easily be argued, and has, that all marketing in the digital age is direct marketing.
When you think of direct marketing, do you think of a static print piece addressed to "occupant," a printed direct mail piece personalized with an individual's name, or are you thinking of a customized cross-media campaign where individual recipients are sent relevant marketing materials regardless of media channel? Over the last two decades, direct marketing has transformed dramatically, but the main purpose has not changed.
I was fortunate to be in the audience during the taping of the historic Jeopardy! match pitting IBM's Watson computing system against the game's all-time champions. As Watson proved its speed and accuracy in answering questions across many different categories, it was clear this type of groundbreaking technology will benefit a broad range of industries.
In a world inundated with communication, everything we do creates a data point. But, the reality is, your company probably doesn't use information as effectively as it could.
As marketers we seem to have an innate temptation to complexity, perhaps driven by the range of analytics tools and processes at our disposal.
Brilliant customer insight can only become an asset to your business if analyzed intelligently and used in the right way.
The use of b-to-b titles in segmentation and messaging can prove fruitful, if handled correctly.
Companies are looking for ways to apply direct marketing measurement and targeting to Web audiences while creating an integrated customer experience..
Company of the week R2C GroupR2C creates, produces, distributes and measures messages that inspire and compel consumers to do something with a brand to drive commercial advantage. The full-service advertising agency specializes in creative, production, media, analytics and performance. |
What's in our mailbox this month: fitness postcards from Retro Fitness, American Woman Fitness Centers, Union's United Taekwondo Academy, and Bally Total Fitness. (We're totally pumped.)
Social data can improve a brand's bottom line and customer relationships. Just ask brands Infiniti and Diamond Nexus.
Here are three must-have data sets that every marketer should include in his or her email strategy.
