Multichannel Marketing Metrics
with Akin

Exciting times! The consolidation in the marketing technology industry is producing a big league of solutions providers.

Dreaming ahead into the future, what can companies hope to achieve with this new breed of marketing software and services providers?

The end-to-end conversion optimization vision that still seemed far reaching to me back in February, looks much more limited now given the new outlook today.

Disclaimer: The following perspective reflects only my personal dreams and shouldn’t be taken to represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.

Digital Enterprise Marketing++

It isn’t possible to do the coming future justice by calling it next generation analytics, campaign management, or marketing automation. The step up in caliber requires also a step up in language.

Might the following become every day terms in enterprise marketing technology in 2011 and beyond?

Marketing Mix Management (MMM)

Today’s discussion is at the level of point solutions such as search bid management tools (for PPC) and demand side platforms (for display advertising). In coming years, will we see all these combined into a single solution for MMM?

MMM would not only allocate advertising budgets towards marketing mix optimization. It would also automate the execution of these ad strategies, their testing, and the data collection into marketing performance management.

Marketing Performance Management (MPM)

Today’s discussion is at the level of web analytics, benchmarking, landing page and site optimization, social media monitoring, predictive analytics, BI, analytical CRM, social CRM, etc.

In coming years, will we see all these combined into a single MPM environment?

MPM would have to combine the aforementioned point solutions for analytics into one interoperable data environment. Users would want drag & drop flexibility to analyze across silos. Think Minority Report.

The data that flows into MPM would include in-house data marts with sensitive information. That means that we may see the pendulum swinging back to in-house software for things such as web analytics.

Interactive Marketing (IM)

IM is the successor to behavioral targeting and direct marketing. It is based on the accepted notion that marketing is more successful when it is timely and relevant. Therefore, interactions via websites, IVR, email, and any other addressable channel should take into account each user’s past and current behavior to personalize content and marketing offers.

Marketing – Fulfillment Synchronization (MFS)

The dream of automating marketing mix execution requires good synchronization with fulfillment. After all, you wouldn’t want to advertise on product XYZ if it is out of stock. And your ability to set a max PPC bid price for product ABC depends on its true margin, i.e. includes product costs and not just ROAS (ROAS=revenue/ad costs).

Companies such as Amazon have been working on creating ads programmatically for years based on inventory. MFS would take this capability to the enterprise software market.

Marketing Operations Management (MOM)

Already used by the largest marketing operations today, MOM is the successor to spreadsheets, notes on napkins, and the like. It is used e.g. at one famous furniture retailer to orchestrate the development of their catalogues. If any of the other ideas above are to become true, hordes of marketers in the organizations need to work together like a machine. Digital assets need to be created in support of personalized messaging. MOM provides project and workflow management on steroids to facilitate all that.

 …

One level down we may see practical applications that include software and services in support of specific steps in the customer lifecycle. These more confined solutions may help companies start small, prove value, and grow from there.

On-Boarding Concierge

Successful on-boarding is key for turning newly acquired customers into clients with a high lifetime value expectation (e.g. in banking). The automated concierge would connect to marketing performance management and interactive marketing in order to monitor and orchestrate what needs to be done.

Re-Marketing Optimizer

Re-marketing may be the oldest trick in the book. But it is still tricky to predict who needs just a reminder vs. who needs an incentive to come back. The re-marketing optimizer would provide that intelligence based on marketing performance management insights and connect to interactive marketing to get the message out.

Multichannel, Multi-touch Marketing Attribution

Point solutions for marketing attribution online vs. response attribution in direct marketing need to merge into one multichannel platform. Marketers should ask software vendors for more than just attribution reports. They should also ask for advice on which touch points deserve how much of the credit. Ideally, the marketing mix modeling function would also be covered by providing advertisers with a prediction as to what they can expect from placing their next ad dollar in each channel.

…

And the list could go on and on.

…

None of the above can replace good old fashioned, customer service with a smile.

But for companies that are already doing a good job at taking care of their customers and building products that delight, the next step can be to compete on Marketing.

Exciting times should be ahead for that.

For those about to rock & roll with marketing, I salute you.

Tags: Business Metrics, Customer Centricity, Direct Marketing, Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Search marketing optimization, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing by akin
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Last Wednesday (March 31st) Eric Siegel presented on 5 Ways of leveraging predictive analysis using web analytics data.

Registrations and attendance were very strong which isn’t surprising because the WAA”s yearly survey had recently shown that predictive analysis is a top question on which web analysts seek to get more education.

You can access the recording of the webcast here.

Meanwhile, Eric was nice and speedy enough to answer all the questions that came in during the webcast. You can access the Q&A on the new Unica blog.

Check this Q&A blog post out even if you don’t have enough time to watch the webcast.

By the way, did you know Unica had a blog? It was recently restarted and is on fire with lots of contributors blogging across the company now.

Thanks much to Eric Siegel for a super insightful webcast and Q&A. If you had any doubts on whether predictive analysis makes sense on web analytics data, then be sure to watch this webcast to open your eyes.

Tags: Business Metrics, Customer Centricity, Direct Marketing, Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing, targeting by akin
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In the two years since publishing the Multichannel Metrics book, the face of marketing has changed drastically.

We are entering a critical crossroads in 2010.

By 2013, will we look back and find that this was the year when marketers from online and other marketing teams first realized how similar their goals have become and took steps towards integration across camps?

Or will we look back and find that the camps remained ignorant of each other and instead set in stone silo’d technologies making integration more difficult than ever? 

What do you mean, web and direct marketers’ goals are aligned now?

Marketers have had no choice.

Greatness has been thrust upon them!

Direct marketers

1. Have seen marketing dollars beginning to shift from offline to online
2. Finally see clearly that a large portion of interactions with their customers has moved online. For example, according to anecdotal feedback from several older European banks, 25% to 50% of their clients use online banking now. Some financial institutes acquire the majority, if not all, customers online.

Online marketers

1. Have had to abandon their silo’d, website-centric thinking because their websites are now only one component of their total web presence. Other presences include social media, mobile sites, behaviorally targeted ads and personalized emails.
2. They may continue to treat the offline as a step child for another couple years. Yet, they are already adopting multi-online-channel marketing practices for the purpose of integrating all these web presences.
3. The latter has required them to move from their traditional focus on aggregate level metrics and dashboards to looking at data about individuals across website, mobile, social, and advertising. This experience with individual level data will also make it easier for them to integrate their customers’ offline interactions down the road.

As a result, both online and direct marketers are now pursuing multi-channel data integration at the level of individual prospects and customers. Both camps do this for the purposes of

1. behavioral targeting,
2. better understanding of marketing ROI.

The technology gap is closing

While all vendors talked the talk for 360 degree views, the reality was different. Web analytics data was far removed from a direct marketers’ access.

• After all, the data are owned by the web team who couldn’t care less about individual level data at that time.
• The data are also hosted remotely at SaaS based web analytics vendors that prioritized reporting and good looking charts over granular data. As a result, data feeds (while available) would come with no SLAs. A feed might or might not arrive at the agreed time of night. That made it too unreliable for driving interactive (let alone real time) marketing programs.

Meanwhile, web marketers could integrate analytics based targeting into email marketing only by bridging the gap between several vendors and paying for integration services.

These technology gaps are now increasingly closing.

• Omniture is positioning its online marketing suite along with integrations with ESP partners through its Genesis program.
• Unica is positioning both
  • Its eMessage and Interact products for email and web personalization integrated with Unica’s web analytics and campaign management products for enterprise clients
  • Its recently launched Interactive Marketing OnDemand product where SaaS based customers use web analytics, email, and web personalization within a single application and UI.

The crossroads

This alignment of methods, goals, and technology represents our arrival at a crossroads.

(note added on March 12th): Maybe the word alignment is too much said.  But methods, goals, and technology are now more parallel and similar than ever.

But will we leave these crossroads into an integrated future or will we set in stone two silo’d multichannel worlds between online and direct marketing teams?

That is the big question.

—

In part 2 we will look at direct marketers vs. digital. Then in part 3 we will review where multichannel web marketing stands in 2010.

Tags: Business Metrics, Direct Marketing, Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing by akin
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“Hey, in 2010 let’s be strategic with our web analytics. Let’s not get lost in the tactical weeds”

OK, so what’s a web analytics strategy vs. tactic then?

• The web analytics solution that you use is a tactic. The strategy is in the reports that you run.
• The reports that you run are a tactic. The strategy is to start with your key performance indicators (KPIs)
• The KPIs are a tactic. The strategy is to equip, free up, and incentivize your web analytics team so that they will focus on value generating analytics vs. lolligagging or answering to never ending reporting requests
• The web analytics team and incentives are a tactic. The strategy is to compete on analytics
• Competing on analytics is a tactic. The strategy is to treat your customers well
• Treating your customers well is a tactic. The strategy is to increase their lifetime value to your company
• Your company is a tactic. The strategy is to have a happy, healthy, peaceful 2010

Some people wield the words “strategy vs. tactic” as if they were swinging a sword and being profound. Yet they mean not much more than “left vs. right”.

No matter where you stand, there is always something to your left and always something to your right.

So, … maybe the strategy is to hug both of them, the strategy and the tactics.

Happy holidays

Tags: Business Metrics, Web Analytics by akin
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Other than “How about cookie deletion?” the second biggest question that I have received in the past year when discussing the topic of online-offline integration is the question about privacy.

• Will it be OK with privacy regulations if I integrate click data from web analytics with customer data in order to improve the relevance of my marketing communications?
• More importantly, will it be OK with web site visitors’ expectations?

The regulations side is usually a short answer for me. Mind you, the regulations seem rather cumbersome to read. But the bottom-line boils down to:

• Have a clear privacy policy on the site
• Make it as easy to opt-out as possible, ideally a single click
• Extra credit, if in addition to opt-out you allow the individual to set their own preferences of how they’d like to be contacted and on what topics
• In countries where it is required, work with opt-in

To me, the bigger question seems about site visitors’ expectations.

It may seem we are wearier of being tracked than ever. There is always a big outcry when Facebook et al announce a move towards ad targeting.

But in reality, we are much more public with our lives than ever. especially in our social networks. See this article for instance.

So what is it about this privacy thing that we really want?

The following examples help me.

Privacy in a store

We hate walking into a small store if the sales person is too much in our face and doesn’t let us browse the items on our own. Maybe we fear getting pressured into buying something before we are ready. Heck, we may well be browsing for entertainment and not thinking of buying anything at the moment. And the shop keeper that is in our face makes us feel bad about ourselves.

But we also hate being in a big box retail store and not being able to find someone to answer our questions when we are ready to ask them.

Really, we want the person to be right there — magically — just when we need their help but not before. And we love it if they understand us so well that they can recommend just what we will benefit from buying.

Privacy in a restaurant

We hate when the waiter is too much in our face, especially after we are done with the meal. Maybe we fear pressured in vacating the table for the next guests.

Just as much we hate it when the waiter is nowhere to be found when we need the check or want to order something (else).

The waiter should just — magically — refill the glasses as soon as they are empty. They need to be right there with the desert menu and our check just when we want it.

Magic???

How does it work in those stores and restaurants that do this well? Is it magic?

No magic.

The perfect shop keeper and waiter are super observant. They put a web analytics tool to shame when it comes to tracking our behavior.

But they aren’t in our face about it.

And they don’t pressure us into buying something or ordering an appetizer along with the expensive main course.

They are at our service.

And yet they still do bring us the best cross-sales offer at the best time.

Marketing so relevant that it feels like a service

I still cringe when I hear that marketing should be so relevant that it feels like a service. At first glance it seems a cheesy thing to say. It seems a utopian dream of techies like me.

But wait.

How about all those educational webinars on the web that I love to attend and learn from?

Guess what! The people doing them (e.g. me, myself) aren’t altruistic at all. Their purpose is purely marketing. They cost a ton of money, by the way. Yet, it is a service and doesn’t feel like marketing at all unless the speaker is too salesy.

There are other examples too:

• How about book recommendations on Amazon
• Movie recommendations on Netflix?

They tend to be quite relevant and not at all in your face. Ignore them easily if you want.

In fact, haven’t you come to expect and demand that any product page on a retailer’s web site will contain information on accessories that go with the item?

So, it can be done

These examples prove that marketing, in the ideal cases, can:

1. feel like a service
2. be not in your face and not pushy

My take away is that the combination of click and customer data, if used the right way, can absolutely enable service oriented marketing. But if you abuse it for span, you will cause all of us marketers to look bad and to lose out.
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(This post is part of a series on the state of multichannel metrics today, one year after the book came out.)

Tags: Business Metrics, Customer Centricity, Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Uncategorized, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing, targeting by akin
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(This post is part of a series on the state of multichannel metrics today, one year after the book came out.)

The previous post paid homage to the original innovators behind the online-to-offline conversion improvement idea, namely the automobile industry. Now, let’s look at a modern adaptation from the B2B, high tech, sector at National Instruments.

National Instrument’s Michelle Rutan and I presented this case together at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Jose this May. By popular demand, the session will be repeated live, online, namely in the WAA”s upcoming webcast on July 21st.

The challenge

Take these stats in:

• The company’s web site has 1 million unique URLs.
• Visitors reach the site through one of 500,000 monthly keywords.

Add to that the fact that there are more than 6,000 part numbers of National Instruments (NI) products. So what we have at hand is a great challenge for managing a long, long tail of web pages, keywords, and products.

In this complex situation, how can the sales and marketing team get insight into what prospects are interested in? Imagine being a sales person and asking your account whether they’d be interested in one of 6,000 products today?

Hey, how about a 200 MhZ Wave form generator for you today? Would you like Fast, Flexible 6.6 GHz RF Instrumentation with that?

Or imagine being a marketing person crafting an email that will be perceived as relevant.

Hey, we got to Wave form generators for the price of one today?

Boy, that seems hard.

The general idea

Much like car buyers, many of NI’s buyers use the web site to do their own product research. So NI said to themselves, why should we ignore the click signals that buyers are sending us through their keyword searches and content views?

As a side note, there is one great advantage for this in B2B that some companies leverage. Namely, buyers need not even be registered for their clicks to be attributed to a specific prospect. Often it suffices to translate the IP address into the company’s domain name to know that somebody from company X has been visiting the site.

“What happens on the web site, stays on the web site”, no more.

You could say that in web marketing 1.0 the web site was a silo by itself. Prospects might do their research but marketers and sales teams would pretty much ignore them until they email or call in.

At NI, the marketing team has been pondering for a long time already how they might turn the data on visitors’ behavior into better customer service.

• Surely, a recent and frequent visitor to the product (not support) section of the site is more likely to be an active prospect.
• Surely, a visitor who is deeply engaged with product pages (again, not tech support pages) is likely to be an active prospect.

But identifying active prospects is only part pf the equation. With a long tail of products the question for sales and marketing remains what these prospects are interested in.

Getting to the essence of a prospect’s interests

Profiling visitors’ interests based on their web behavior turned out to be much easier said than done.

NI experimented with several methods of mapping keywords and web content to the products that the pages relate to. Turns out this isn’t so easy at all. Several methods were tried and eliminated.

• Do each of 1 million URLs really contain the necessary information for mapping them to their content?
• Can you conceive of a way to map that many URLs to their essential contents manually — and keep the mapping up to date?

Not so easy.

Then Michelle Rutan had another totally cool idea of how content and keywords could be mapped out. Applying this new mapping to her web analytics data, she generated a test segment of prospective buyers for a particular product and geo area.

The Results

The test campaign was launched as an email and achieved a whopping 44% open rate and 25% click-through rate!

This is great testament to the fact that recipients perceived the content as relevant.

The data is still so fresh that resulting sales information was not available (not that it would be publicly available anyway).

The million dollar question:How did Michelle map web behavior to prospects’ essential interests?

Since this is entirely Michelle’s idea, it isn’t for me to reveal her innovative approach. But if you are curious, you can hear from her directly by tuning into the upcoming webcast.

Michelle will present from the business perspective. Then I will run through a lab case of how this idea can be turned into reality by integrating web analytics into the data warehouse, BI, or CRM system.

I know, Michelle and I look forward to your questions.

Tags: Business Metrics, Customer Centricity, Direct Marketing, Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing, targeting by akin
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If you missed the May 19 WAA Webcast with Kevin Hillstrom and Jim Novo, you can replay it any time on demand.

By the way, do you think it will be 5 or more like 10 years before all TV will be much like the Internet?

That is to say, you will turn on the tube and a big bing or google box will appear in the middle of the screen. You’ll type in “Kevin  & Jim webcast”  and get your multichannel marketing fix while sipping a cup of old fashioned tea.

Unless, of course, you see my PPV (pay-per-view) ad show up towards the right of your TV screen and click on it to read this blog.

Meanwhile,  recommendations will appear at the bottom of the screen that are targeted to your remote control behavior.

Hopefully, something better than “Meet exciting online and offline marketers in <your city>”.

Tags: Business Metrics, Customer Centricity, Direct Marketing, Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Uncategorized, Web Analytics, brand marketing, targeting by akin
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If you liked the previous post, then you will love this.

Well, only if like me you live in the SF Bay Area, that is.

Friends of analytics are invited to some quality evening entertainment on Thursday, April 23d, at 5.30 pm. The Silicon Valley AMA is conducting a panel discussion in Santa Clara. The topic: Managing integrated marketing through analytics.

The event is generously sponsored by one of my most highly regarded competitors: Coremetrics.  And Coremetrics have been even more generous by permitting keynote speaker Andreas Ramos, co-founder of analytics agency The CCG Group, to invite me to join the panel.

As for me, I am burning of course to learn the kind of questions that the audience will ask and to learn from the experience of the other panelists.

If you are local, come and join! Register here.

Thank you to Andreas for the invitation.

Tags: Business Metrics, Web Analytics by akin
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For those about to compete on analytics – I salute you!

The reference to ACDC isn’t unfounded. After all … data rocks!

If you want to create competitive advantage for your company by using analytics more cleverly than your competitors, then the first question is:

What kind of data will you use for those analytics?

When it comes to customer data, most marketers today have many choices to to pick from. Their (unified or disparate) data marts contain everything from

• transactions
• to personal details
• to marketing contact and response history,
• and in much too few cases also the web site interaction history of individuals, i.e. web analytics at the personal level

Leaders have found ways of using some of this data to leave the competition in the dust:

• Online marketers may think of Amazon, for example, or its cousin in the Netherlands: Bol.com.
• Offline marketers may think of companies such as CapitalOne who grew rapidly thanks to clever direct marketing fueled by analytics (as documented in the book Competing on Analytics.)

Yet at many other companies the customer data unfortunately are sitting idle in the data mart, collecting dust, and are not getting leveraged as well as they could be.

With some imagination, you could visualize the idle data silos talking among themselves and scheming how to get out of their isolation and boredom.

You could say, the data are in a competition with each other to get adopted by the marketer first. For that, each data source needs to make the case that it is the best weapon for the marketer to take with her into the battle against the competition.

“Hey, pick me, I can help you more than the next data silo”

So in the hustle and bustle of the various data sources fighting it out with each other, you might catch following battle cries:

“I am the transaction data”

I come in many forms, for example, shopping baskets at retailers, call data records at Telcos, and account transactions at banks or credit card companies. Since virtually all companies study me already though, it is going to take some more ingenious analytics before you can differentiate yourself using me.

Such distinguished analytics can for example be behavioral event detection, i.e. the detection of changes in individuals’ patterns of behavior. For example, banks do this very successfully by flagging individual customers who may be ready for cross-sales or retention efforts. This may for example be the case when a customer has an unusually large deposit on their bank account relative to the individuals’ personal past deposit averages.

Companies that use me well have increased their marketing success rates 5 to 12 times. So you betcha you can compete using me!

“I am the marketing contact and response history”

Most marketers think of me as just a tactical “log” of past interactions. If at all, I am used for calculating a direct marketing campaign’s response rate.

But in today’s world of multichannel, interactive (or dialog) marketing, I have a much more strategic role to play. Namely, a marketer that doesn’t take me into account is like someone who is talking while turning a deaf ear to the conversation partners’ responses.

Therefore, I am the one who can help you go from mass marketing to interactive (or dialog) marketing. Since few marketers use me well today, you can really compete on analytics with me!

“I am demographics data”

Most companies have some form of me available.

I am often helpful for framing who is in the company’s target audience so that you don’t waste your marketing funds talking to people who won’t buy anything from you anyway.

But I have been around for such a long time, even I can’t remember how you could use me to create a competitive advantage. What can you do with me that your competition isn’t already doing?

“I am the customers’ permission and preference data”

I may seem like a bore at first — after all I represent the customer’s interests and not the marketer’s. But companies that use me well are able to continue the interactive exchange with customers while companies who ignore me lose their permission to market.

For example, leaders in email marketing offer their subscribers not just an “opt-out” but a way to manage for themselves when and how often they wish to be contacted about what. Ditto with RSS marketing. Instead of losing a prospect to an opt-out, you are given a chance to be relevant.

“I am the web analytics data”

Most web marketers package me into reports and good looking dashboards. They use me to make their web sites and advertising more successful.

But since I am used that way by almost everyone already, it is really tough for you to compete on me this way.

You have to be cleverer than that to turn me into gold!

A straight forward but rarely tapped opportunity is to make web analytics personal (download the whitepaper), i.e. to learn about each individual prospect or customers’ current interests as demonstrated by their most recent web site sessions, clicks, and keywords.

This can fuel behavioral targeting, event based marketing, or highly predictive analytics. Marketers can use me to send the right re-marketing, on-boarding, cross-sales or retention recommendation to each customer at the right time.

Companies that use me well today are the leaders in their space, e.g. Amazon, eBay, Verizon, and many others.

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So, if you have so many data to choose from which should you pick?

This will depend on your business and your competition. Most likely you have many more than just a single opportunity. And just like any other marketing investment you want to forecast potential returns vs. costs of getting there.

You’d start implementing the opportunity that has the best potential. But you shouldn’t stop there. Rather, all initiatives that promise a lucrative ROI (above your hurdle rate) are worth doing and should be funded. That is the only way in which you will maximize total returns.

So, go ahead, make your business case and your CFO will get you the funds.

Yes, these days many budgets have been cut.

But just today I was hearing from a business intelligence manager at a large client of mine. She made her case for solving a long standing business problem through extremely innovative use of (web) analytics. This was a business problem that the company hadn’t been able to solve through any other means. And sure enough, three weeks ago she got the resources that she wanted.

For those about to compete on analytics, we salute you. You rock!

Tags: Business Metrics, Customer Centricity, Direct Marketing, Marketing Disciplines, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing, targeting by akin
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Here is a quick take-away from our webinar with Apogee’s CEO Bill Leake today: Don’t be shortsighted in applying analytics for boosting success from online lead generation, specifically paid search:

• Don’t just measure conversion rate. It is a tricky metric that can often lead in the wrong direction. Instead be sure to measure further down the funnel, as Bill  emphasized
• Measuring further down the funnel means getting closer to ROI metrics, e.g. a cost per sale or cost per lead.
• Ideally you measure even further down the funnel to get to an ROAS or ROI metric.
• If you are selling offline rather than online then you can do this by adding the data on individual’s keyword referred visits into the CRM system

Continuing on the theme that Bill started, I also recommended using web analytics in more than just shortsighted ways:

• Don’t just stop at reporting results
• Don’t even stop at improving results by making informed changes to fix funnel leaks indicated by your web analytics
• But open up the gold mine of making web analytics personal, i.e. behavioral targeting or what we refer to as Interactive Marketing at Unica.
• For example, if Mary searched for blue shoes coming to your web site then:
  • Of course the web site should take that into account in targeting content to Mary.
  • But your email marketing can leverage the same info to personalize its outreach
  • And there is no need to forget about Mary’s interest in blue shoes when you send her an offline brochure or she calls your call center. Rather, today’s marketing automation solutions enable you to extend the dialog beyond  online to the  offline channels.

If you missed the event, here is a replay link for the webinar with Apogee and Unica.

Thanks for all the attendees that dialed in. Bill and I will post the question to which we couldn’t get shortly.

Akin

Tags: Business Metrics, Web Analytics by akin
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