A Better Way to Mine Data.

The good news, for marketers, is that data mining really can make a difference to most bottom lines. The bad news is that, despite what data mining can do, it is so often used so poorly that it is virtually useless. Companies are today storing huge amounts of data. Companies in the  'Petabyte Power Players' club include eBay Inc., with 5 petabytes of data, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which has 2.5 petabytes, Bank of America Corp., which is storing 1.5 petabytes, Dell Inc., which has a 1PB data warehouse In many cases, the data is a big part of the problem. Even in the most reputable companies, data is often "dirty,"--out of date or otherwise irrelevant. Most commercially available data mining packages lack the flexibility and functionality that real world marketers need. The problem with "data quality" is ownership. No one seems to own this critical asset! Without doubt , the line functions have to own "data quality". Data quality can only be impacted substantially "at source"-either a salesperson fills up inaccurate information for a customer while he wildly chases his target or an operational group incorrectly data enters a customer record!One of the most frequent and most difficult causes of data quality is culture. If people do not think that data quality is important, it isn't.James Standen makes this interesting point;Data quality starts on the ground. The further from the ground, and the deeper into various operational systems, ETL jobs, staging tables, data warehouses or data marts we try to fix the problem, the harder it will be.http://blog.cequitysolutions.com/ The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), an organization that develops software to solve complex mathematical problems, has three suggestions. One, try hiring a mathematician who is a data-mining expert to guide your efforts. Two, consider developing data mining applications in-house using fully documented components (algorithms) from a reliable library. And finally, don't give up. When data mining works, it is well worth the effort.See what Rob Meyer has to say about ‘A Better Way to Mine Data’. http://www.nag.co.uk/IndustryArticles/ABetterWaytoMineData.pdf

NEXT-GENERATION CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT: ENGAGE YOUR CUSTOMERS

For many marketers Campaign management is purely a tactical and operational process. While to some extent this is true,what marketers do not realize is that at its core Campaign management needs deep insights into Customer strategy and without that creating automation to support customer engagement is meaningless! Often the Campaign manager ends up being the execution arm and is not able to influence the levers of customer strategy. Especialy in growth markets where customer acquistion rates are galloping,it is all the more important to allow a coherent customer strategy to drive your company's campaign management.

Marketing can no longer afford to simply act as a bullhorn pushing the product du jour or blasting cross-sell and up-sell offers. Ad overload, consumer neglect is only the few things that marketing campaign management cannot ignore. The requirement is for creating an integrated marketing effort across the organisation to enhance interactive marketing.

http://www.customerthink.com/blog/next_generation_campaign_management

Building a customer-centric marketing organization (CCMO) - Marketing needs to lead this change

 

At Cequity, in many of the client engagements with CMOs across organizations, we always highlight the changing marketing environment, where the world of "monologue marketing" has shifted to "conversational marketing". This necessitates in marketing departments an understanding of data, closed-loop marketing competency - leads to conversion to relationship integrated messaging and marketing measurement. Here's an interesting article on how to increase marketing roi:

Many of today's marketing organizations were built and optimized for a scenario in which they had nearly complete control over the consumption of messaging. Changes in technology and society however have dramatically altered this picture. Due to shrinking reachability, and greater addressability the control has shifted to the customer. To remain relevant, therefore, marketing organizations need to re-optimize around the reality of this changed environment.

To truly optimize, marketing organizations need to reinvent themselves from the ground-up.

Strategic Platform

The core foundation of the marketing organization needs to be remodeled around the customer. Organization structure, segment valuations, KPI's, everything needs to be defined in terms of the customer.

Tactical Planning

Where the strategy piece was about establishing where you wanted to go, the tactics is about steering things on course. The hard part, of course, is figuring out what and where you need to measure to generate useful information critical for making the right adjustments. While analytics is clearly the center piece, user experience and insights also plays an important role in this stage. Together, these groups need to work together as a team to map out a course for continuous interaction improvements.

Execution

From an operational structure perspective the execution piece remains the most unchanged. It's not so much the how, but rather the what that has changed. Messages will still be delivered multi-channel, but the content and plan behind the message will be radically altered.

A couple of generalized thoughts on this topic; First, content is going to explode. In the age of conversations, each interaction is going to need a much more refined, personalized piece of content. Not only is more content going to be created, but will need to be managed.

Case Study: How Harbor Sweets uses customer data effectively

 

Harbor Sweets is a Massachusetts-based gourmet chocolate company that offers a variety of premium sweets. In 1973, the company emerged from humble beginnings when Ben Strohecker set out to create the "best piece of candy in the world." The result was Sweet Sloops, a sailboat shaped piece of almond butter crunch, covered in white chocolate dipped in dark chocolate and crushed pecans. Over the years, the company grew to feature additional candy lines and retail outlets across the U.S. Harbor Sweets also added a significant mail-order catalog division.

Their catalog program was successful in delivering sales during key holiday buying seasons, but the company also wanted to ensure that holiday mail campaign mailings- the main driver of catalog business - were maximizing sales. Harbor Sweets needed a solution that would efficiently turn existing customer data into actionable next steps for their campaign planning. Essentially, Harbor Sweets wanted to find out if removing a single mailing to "active customers" from the holiday mail schedule - which included mailings every month from September through December - would conserve marketing resources, while refraining from negatively impacting revenue or overall response rates.

Harbor Sweets conducted a suppression test, assessing how effective the holiday campaign mailing had been at driving sales. To measure the effectiveness of their campaign services Harbor Sweets mailed the catalog to everyone in December and ran a suppression test for September, October and November. The results were surprising. Harbor Sweets was actually hurting sales by mailing too many catalogs to customers during the holiday season. The results also found that the cadence for the catalogs could be reduced to three, while still achieving similar results.

Additionally, Harbor Sweets learned firsthand that it is imperative to be open to analyzing data and customer behavior in new ways. The more information available on existing customers, the more effective the software is in its results, whether it is predicting customer's next steps or customer attrition.

The results allowed Harbor Sweet to develop a long-term customer-centric marketing process for the future. Better target identification results in the revenue saved by removing one mailing is now applied to another mailing during non-peak times to provide customers with a more effectively targeted, timely catalog.

Take a look at this DM review article which talks about how we can leverage customer behavior information for better customer management