Fifi Monty Poo might win the Best-of-Breed category for Pomeranians at the most prestigious dog show in the world and Mimi Majestic Meadow may take home first prize in the small terrier category, but do you really want Fifi Monty Poo and Mimi Majestic Meadow pulling your sled in the Alaskan boonies? Or would you prefer a pack of Huskies that have been bred for strength, speed and endurance and, more importantly, to work seamlessly together as a team?
OK, maybe this isn’t a completely fair analogy, but you get the idea. For too long, best-of-breed point solutions have been pervasive in Web analytics and this has led to a lack of customer synchronization, a higher cost of integration with CRM systems that leads to longer implementation times and therefore a delay in truly understanding the customer. With the availability of integrated Web analytic solutions that address and solve these issues, using a point solution model to address your Web analytic needs is outdated. Best of breed is dead.
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In today’s market look for an integrated Web analytics program that comprises the following capabilities:
- An integrated campaign management and e-mail marketing system to handle inbound and outbound campaigns.
- Real-time decision management to enable you to find superior ways to capitalize on customer interactions, improving profitability and the overall customer experience.
- Marketing performance management to help you understand, measure and ultimately improve the effectiveness of the marketing function. This enables marketing executives to see the status of the overall marketing strategy, associated key performance indicators, as well as the ability to dive into details around campaign-specific performance that affect those KPIs.
- Customer data integration to achieve a complete view of your customers. CDI allows you to integrate all customer touchpoints and get a single view of the customer.
Because the Web has become the central method of communicating with customers, you must be innovative when planning for your needs in this area. Increased use and adoption of mobile, VOIP (voice over IP), RSS, Rich Internet Applications and IPTV (TV delivered over the Internet) make it vital to choose a Web analytics solution that has a forward-looking plan to address these areas if you want to fully harness the intelligence from your data.
Ultimately an integrated Web analytics solution should allow you to concentrate on improving the customer experience. When you can do this, profitability will inevitably take care of itself.
