Tuesday’s post on matching technology prompted a contact from Zoomix, a data quality software vendor just entering the U.S. market.Zoomix makes the best case I’ve seen for the use of statistical methods without predefined reference data within data quality systems. Basically, they apply machine learning techniques that let users train systems for specific data quality applications. Part of this training involves inferring general rules for matching and data cleansing. That much is fairly standard. But Zoomix also captures specific information—such...
Thursday, 31 May 2007
Wednesday, 30 May 2007
SAS Institute recently released a survey of senior executives’ attitudes towards marketing performance measurement. The primary result was what you’d expect: depending on the medium, just 7% to 14% of executives rate their marketing measurements “very effective”. But the details were perplexing. Respondents found direct mail to be the significantly less well measured than other media: 33% said direct mail measurements were either “very” or “somewhat” effective, compared with 50% to 58% for advertising, collateral, public relations and events....
Tuesday, 29 May 2007
I’ve been looking at name and address matching software recently. This is a field I’ve stopped following closely because action has moved to the higher planes of Customer Data Integration and Master Data Management. If there’s any trend in the matching field, it’s the development of generic string matching techniques that can be used on any data, not just names and addresses. Like all matching engines, these return a score indicating how closely two strings resemble each other. In name/address matching, the scoring method has usually been pretty...
Friday, 25 May 2007
Wednesday’s post about online marketing systems generated some interesting discussion. You’ll recall it drew a picture of several systems (Web ads, mobile messages, email, paid search, unpaid search) feeding traffic to a Web site, which in turn was served by several more systems (behavioral targeting, site optimization, Web analytics, real time interaction management) that manage customer treatments. I speculated that the most likely candidates for combining all these systems were either the Web platform vendors or enterprise marketing systems.But...
Thursday, 24 May 2007
Accenture released an intriguing study (registration required) earlier this week contrasting the views of high-tech executives and their customers regarding after-sales support. Perhaps the most substantive finding was that while 74% of the executives who implemented new customer self-service systems believed they now had higher customer satisfaction, only 14% of their customers rated their experience as “much better”. Twenty two percent actually said service had gotten worse. This is intriguing for two reasons. First, it shows that customers...
Wednesday, 23 May 2007
What with all the recent acquisitions in the digital marketing industry, I thought I’d draw a little diagram of all the components needed for a complete solution. The results were a surprise.It’s not that I didn’t know what the pieces were. I’ve written about pretty much every variety of online marketing software here or elsewhere and have reviewed dozens of products in depth. But somehow I had assumed that the more integrated vendors had already assembled a fairly complete package. Now that I’m staring at the list of components, I see how...
Tuesday, 22 May 2007
I receive a great many press releases from Business Objects. Mostly I swat them away like gnats, on the theory that Business Objects is Business Objects and the details don’t really matter. But they did catch my eye this morning with their announced purchase agreement for Inxight, one of the leading text analysis software vendors. What made this intriguing to me was that I’ve always thought of Business Objects as providing reporting—that is, access to data--as opposed to the technically sophisticated analytics of a SAS or SPSS. Its high profile...
Monday, 21 May 2007
The public debate between on-premise and on-demand (hosted) software has largely been won by the on-demand side, particularly where small businesses are concerned. Faster, cheaper and easier deployment seems an overwhelming advantage, even though on-demand long-term costs may be higher, integration more difficult, and functionality not quite as rich as for on-premise systems. And yet—plenty of on-premise software is still sold. In fact, although I haven’t seen actual figures, I suspect on-premise continues to hold a larger share of the market....
Friday, 18 May 2007
Somehow I received a copy of “Increasing Revenue Through Automated Demand Generation” (registration required), the kind of title that sends chills up my spine. The paper, from Manticore Technology, recommends five best practices for business marketing: (1) define a unified marketing and sales pipeline; (2) deploy an integrated marketing and sales platform; (3) measure pipeline activity; (4) automate lead nurturing; and (5) focus on the top of the funnel. There’s a bit of special pleading in items (2) and (4), and item (5) seems a bit arbitrary...
Thursday, 17 May 2007
I had truly intended to give lifetime value a rest, but then an email arrived from Aberdeen Group asking me to participate in one of their surveys on “customer value management”. You can fill it out too by clicking here and earn a free copy of the results. They’re asking all the right questions, although I wonder how many people can really answer them accurately. Aberdeen’s “research preview” for the study certainly is pro-LTV. And I quote:“Recent Aberdeen research indicates that Best-in-Class organizations utilize “customer lifetime value”...
Wednesday, 16 May 2007
More news from the mobile marketing front: AOL yesterday announced it had acquired Third Screen Media, which will operate as part of its Advertising.com www.advertising.com subsidiary. Third Screen runs a mobile advertising network and provides tools for advertisers, publishers and carriers to research, place, administer and report on mobile ads.Basically this illustrates the continued convergence of mobile with other digital advertising. It doesn’t explicitly address the unique capabilities offered by mobile—individual (tied to a person), local...
Tuesday, 15 May 2007
Last week, WebSideStory announced it was going to become part of the Visual Sciences brand. (The two companies merged in February 2006 but had retained separate identities.)The general theme of the combined business is “real time analytics”. This is what Visual Sciences has always done, so far as I can recall. It’s more of a departure for WebSideStory, which has its roots in the batch-oriented world of Web log analysis. But what’s really intriguing is the applications WebSideStory has developed. One is a search system that helps users navigate...
Monday, 14 May 2007
I’m starting to rethink my focus on lifetime value as the key to customer centricity. I’m still fully convinced of my position: LTV is the essential guide for customer level management. But that message just doesn’t seem to resonate, even among managers who have accepted customer centricity as their goal. I haven’t quite figured out why this is. The specific objections—lack of data, no practical applications, need for short term results—all have responses that I find convincing. Others may not, but I sense the problem is less specific objections...
Friday, 11 May 2007
Last Tuesday, email marketer Silverpop announced it was acquiring Vtrenz, which provides an integrated email / Web marketing suite. This is the third recent acquisition by a email service provider—the others being Kefta by Actiom Impact and Loyalty Matrix by Responsys. I think it’s the most intriguing of the three, because the other two primarily added analytical capabilities, while Vtrenz adds a strong Web marketing component. This makes Vtrenz more of an integrated online marketing solution than the other two—or, at least, it will if and when...
Tuesday, 8 May 2007
I could easily fill several blogs with personal tales of poor customer experiences, but don’t generally feel it adds any value. Today I’ll make an exception, only because the story illustrates how incredibly inept even a presumably sophisticated organization can be. Plus I’m really annoyed.So, I walk into my local Chase Bank branch (yes, we’re naming names here) around 11:30 a.m. to make a quick deposit when there won’t be a line. Not a customer in sight. But I’m intercepted by an unfamiliar young woman at the service desk who offers to “help”...
Monday, 7 May 2007
One final thought on last week’s string regarding LTV vs. product-based metrics. The precise relationship between LTV and conventional measures such as profit and cash flow is this: profit and cash flows are constraints, while LTV is what you optimize. Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’d like to point out that today’s New York Times has not one but two articles on mobile marketing. One is on the front page of the business section (“Hollywood Loves the Tiny Screen. Advertisers Don’t.”, The New York Times, May 7, 2007, Business Day, page C1)...
Friday, 4 May 2007
I received my custom-printed “LTV RULES!” t-shirts yesterday. Naturally, you buy these over the Internet. The customer experience was painless at www.designashirt.com and I’d highly recommend them. What’s interesting from a Client X Client point of view is that the company offered a $.50 discount on each shirt if you add their logo. Maybe I shouldn’t be too impressed at their cleverness in recognizing that the product represented an advertising...
Thursday, 3 May 2007
You may suspect that some of the people I mention in these posts are created by me for dramatic purposes. First of all, I’m not clever enough to do that, and secondly, you may have noticed that they’re usually smarter than I am. Rest assured I will not willingly lose an argument to a figment of my imagination. On the other hand, I do try to avoid giving away true identities, since I don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy.So you’ll just have to take my word for it that I really was discussing marketing metrics recently when, quite unprompted,...
Wednesday, 2 May 2007
I think yesterday’s comments on lifetime value and product reporting need a bit of clarification. It’s important to distinguish measurements of customer acquisition efforts from measurements of other customer contacts. With acquisition, lifetime value in as a formal financial measure is very important and widely accepted, even though the actual calculation often does not include the full scope of future cross sales and other ancillary values. Here, the sort of attitude measures I was proposing as a more-accessible proxy for future value calculations...
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
I’m still thinking about how to measure product performance a customer-based world. Where I ended up yesterday was pretty much that there’s no alternative to using lifetime value, which specifically means calculating the incremental impact of each product sale on a customer’s future value. The main objection to this is the numbers will contain a great many estimates that will probably seem arbitrary, political or downright incomprehensible to most product managers. This violates one of the fundamental rules of management metrics, which is that...
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