InsightIQ Blog

Data quality strategies are sustainable over the long run when they are approached with programs that provide a framework for data-centric projects. However, the absence of such programs in your organization should not make you exempt from embracing data quality as an important part of your marketing database. If you are building your marketing database, or are re-evaluating an existing one, consider the following items as you drive data quality into the plan:

Data quality is relative. In physics, the 'Theory of Relativity' posits that all motion must be defined relative to a frame of reference.    The same holds true for data quality; your baseline should be measured relative to the purpose of its use. In other words, data lacks quality to the extent it does not satisfy the intended use.

Evaluate quality from different angles. Data have many properties that define its quality, and these properties will likely vary greatly depending upon where the data originates from and whether those sources are verifiable and accurate. Suffice to say, to better understand and gauge the overall quality level of the data you are working with, you should focus on the properties that are most important to the marketing programs leveraging the data.  Accuracy, timeliness, completeness, reliability, relevance and clarity are good measures when assessing data quality.

The journey is the destination. Teams embracing data quality at a systemic level from day one and maintaining it throughout the lifecycle of the system will make a greater overall impact on the efficacy of the solutions they are building. This is based on the premise that data sources, rules and uses will shift over time.  As such, data quality cannot be a static measure and must be revisited regularly. In contrast, organizations who engage in data quality initiatives as one-time side projects, are more likely to experience limited benefits with a short lifespan. After you understand which aspects of data quality are relevant to your marketing strategy, do not limit yourself to just initial data quality analysis. Instead establish measurable baselines of quality and track progress in a way that identifies gaps and facilitates defect prevention.

People, process and technology. You need the right balance of skills, technology and processes in order to be able to implement a sound data quality framework; a weakness in any of these areas will prevent your team from achieving sustainable success. Some companies naively believe that investing in best-of breed tools alone is the key to solve data quality issues, failing to understand that a tool by itself does not represent a solution. As you plan your data quality efforts, be sure to create the balance between all three focus areas; people, process and technology. 

A core value of customer engagement is to market based on thorough understanding of customer segments and how they differ from one another. In theory, this makes sense, but in actual marketing practice, carrying on communication with customers is always a challenge. In our daily lives, we have many different channels to communicate with a friend when we want to find out his/her opinion about something. But, how can we reach out to half a million people and get to know how they think about a 'bigger' concept - a company product, an innovative service, a marketing promotion plan, or a company recruiting tactic?

In today's world, technology changes so quickly that it is impossible for us as users to keep up sometimes. Interestingly, the next great product or technological innovation has likely existed for a few years already, but hasn't been released because we simply aren't ready for it (and the company correctly figured they could release it in several iterations and make 10X more money... but that is a different story). For as slow as we may be to adopt to the digital revolution, however, our legislation is naturally much further behind. As more and more content providers pop up all over the web, traditional media industries are faced with the challenge of protecting their intellectual property. As Lance Ulanoff reflects, "The internet almost immediately became the transport mechanism for a steady flow of pirated content - first images, then music, and when the pipe got fat enough, movies. Major media companies, which once upon a time had sole control of the creation and distribution of popular entertainment, were appalled - and also powerless to stop it." (Read Ulanoff's full reflection on Mashable).

Earlier this month, AdAge published an article suggesting QR codes have not taken off with consumers, claiming that only 5% of Americans have actually used them. And why the latter statistic may be true, the assumption that the technology is a waste of time would certainly be a misstep. Not only should marketers not throw in the towel on using QR codes, they have many reasons to be optimistic, proactive, and innovative as they think about using them as part of their marketing strategies in 2012.

Now that the New Year is upon us it is time to review analytics in 2011 and look ahead to 2012.

2011 in review:

• Analytics became a Sport: Several analytic competition sites became highly visible in 2011, the most prominent being Kaggle.com.  These sites host analytic competitions that anyone can enter and provide a rich learning environment for both new and seasoned analytic professionals.  The winners are not just those who place in the money - the winners are everyone who participates and learns within the community environment.   

• Moneyball and Analytics Hype:  Speaking of sports, I'm a baseball fan so I naturally enjoyed the movie Moneyball.  Analytics hype continued to climb in 2011 with the help of that movie.  See this recent post for more on my thoughts on the state of analytics hype in 2011.   

• 2011 was the year of R (an open sourced analytic solution widely regarded as one of the most powerful analytic tools available): Corporate adoption gained momentum in 2011, as the corporate analytic community continued to understand the power of the solution and myths such as it is not a tool for production environments were quickly debunked.
  • 50% of the Kaggle.com winners used R

Here at Quaero, it's a magical time of the year. Using up last vacation days, attending company holiday parties, and of course, planning for 2012 marketing efforts. A whole new collection of events, webinars, eBooks, etc. that we will be rolling out in the coming year. As we plan, however, we don't want to forget the success of 2011, because we were fortunate to work with some fantastic people, and create a good deal of content that we trust will live far beyond the new year. For this reason, I thought it would be nice to recap some of our 2011 webinars, and the lessons that we learned from them. Thank you to our friends at Neolane, who gave us the idea with a recap of their own.

Hiring talent for digital strategy and search engine optimization/management is tough. Not only has the demand for professionals that have these skills skyrocketed far beyond supply, but the relative newness of the industry poses many unique challenges when it comes to recruiting.  First, unlike other professions, there are few if any recognized university degrees specializing in this field. So hiring managers can't gauge potential candidates by the level of their education or institution they may have attended, something they rely heavily on for other job types.

How comfortable are you with the idea of never having to handle cash to make a purchase? Instead, you would be able to use a digital wallet to give money to others or pay for items when shopping. I would rather carry a mobile phone to make a payment than a pocket full of change, no doubt. But I would be rather anxious about my security and protection as a consumer. Whatever the case is with you, the digitized future of money is almost here, so you should be informed about the cashless initiatives that major players like Google and MasterCard will actively roll out in 2012. After all, if you are reading our blog, you are a trend setter, aren't you?

For many online retailers, the holiday season comprises a sizeable chunk of their annual sales. But in 2010, sales numbers proved just how much a strapped economy affects holiday shopping budgets. With this year's holiday season following another difficult year for Americans, value is ever-important to the customer. But even in tough times, retailers boast record sales by increasing marketing share. With the right e-commerce strategy, online retailers can guide the customer's purchase path, attracting holiday shoppers and maximizing their shopping cart values. Here are the top 6 e-commerce tactics for the holidays:  

Customer Data Management (CDM), also known as Customer Data Integration (CDI), is foundational for a Customer Intelligence (CI) or Customer Engagement (CE) system.  CDM is rooted in the principles of Master Data Management (MDM), which includes the following:

• Acquisition and ingestion of multiple, disparate sources, both online and offline, of customer and prospect data
• Change Data Capture (CDC)
• Data cleansing, parsing and standardization
• Entity Modeling
• Entity relationship & hierarchy management

At recent events like AdTech and in conversations with clients, I've heard a staggering number of statistics that would make even the most sane marketer's head spin: 

• There are 800 million people on Facebook.
• Human beings generate 200 EXABYTES (read: 18 zeros!) of information each year.(1)
• 42 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube...  Every minute.
• 178.5 million people will browse online before they ever make a purchase.(2)

Are you scared yet?  I certainly am.  These numbers tell us a great deal about how consumers - people - get, consume, and utilize information.

Customer Analytics seems to be one of the hottest topics in business today, with the newly coined 'Data Scientist' role in high demand.  And with all hot topics there is hype and reality.   The reality is that analytics can provide a big impact on bottom line profits.  The hype is that it can provide a significant ROI in all environments.  In most environments, you need three critical components for customer analytics to provide a significant impact:

If you are in a client facing role in a professional services organization, sometimes it can be difficult to provide value if you don't fully understand the scope of your clients' business. The key to achieving a long-term client relationship is to become viewed as an indispensible extension of their marketing team, rather than as a vendor of services. Here are 10 tips that you can use to get to know your client better so that you can succeed in delivering the most value to their business: 

Customers are raising the bar for service experience across channels -- are marketers doing the same?

We know that today's customers want many things, among them - complete control over the relationship they have with brands and companies; the improved ability to communicate with friends and other consumers on their brand experiences; and the expressed ability to control their privacy fiercely.

Given these new demands by customers, marketers need to take a hard look at the customer experience across channels and be sure they are raising the bar to meet customer expectations, or they will be left behind.

With so much discussion about the importance of an effective online interaction strategy, it's surprising how many companies have yet to fully embrace the power of digital strategies and tactics.  Many are "digital capable", meaning that they have the ability to plan and execute isolated digital tactics.  However comparatively few have yet been able to fully integrate and leverage the power of digital customer interaction, that is, the ability to market, sell, fulfill, service and support customers via a mixture of offline and online methods.  At Quaero we have developed a six-dimensional framework for planning and executing an effective digital interaction strategy which combines all of the key elements you will need to make this critical shift:

As online activities continue to embed themselves deeper into the consumers' everyday lives, companies' efforts to capitalize on the latest online trends has literally become a high-speed chase. The online terrain often transforms quicker than a company can execute a strategy, but digital leaders still find a way to be nimble and alert enough to adapt (and profit from) the latest online climate.      

With the final quarter of 2011 setting in, lofty corporate ambitions for the next year are in motion. But planning for 2012 based on 2011 fads will likely mean toppling right into the biggest caveat of the web: surefire transformation. Decisions must be based on insights looking forward in addition to data looking backward (A great way to blend both approaches is through the use of predictive analytics). As you begin shaping next years' strategies and formulating projections, look out for the following trends in 2012:

There has been a lot of chatter in the analytics circles about the need for a Chief Analytics Officer (CAO). Increased focus on data driving insights that drive corporate revenue has brought this to the surface. However, the case for CAO highlights the need for End to End Enterprise Analytics. Organizations that have not been focused on analytics in the past see analytics as a system that spans operations to finance to marketing.

In a previous post I laid out the process to create the collections database and initial collections analytics during acquisition.  This post will focus on how to utilize the database and analytics within proactive communications in order to optimize collection efforts then the ongoing tracking and enhancements required. 

1.       Treatment Strategies: Analytics alone will not enhance collections efforts.  The predictive analytics and segmentation systems must be converted into actionable treatment strategies which will 1)reduce the cost of collections and 2)ultimately, minimize the outstanding debt through increased collection payments.  Treatment examples which need to be setup and tied to each individual collections customers include (again, these are examples)

Social media has become a line item on virtually every agenda for marketing strategy meetings. There's no denying that. But the questions reverberating from CMO's and senior executive come down to ROI-a concern that is particularly bristly during tight economic times, as marketing budgets have in many cases been slashed the hardest. Yet, despite the fact that the ROI questions remain largely unanswered, many marketing departments have conceded to the indisputable impact of social media in consumer lives-and are shifting a larger chunk of their budgets toward social media, whether they can neatly analyze the return or not. 

Marketing strategies to survive and thrive in today’s highly dynamic business environment.

By Jim Lewis

Part 1: Today’s Environment

In order to be successful selling to businesses, it is important to recognize the role of the individual. It is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that organizations – from small businesses to global corporations – are comprised of groups of people with not much more in common than the shared enterprise called “work” that brings them together 40 or so hours each week. Allowing for 8 hours of sleep each night, there remains 112 waking hours each week to devote to things other than work. How we fill our non-working waking hours provides important clues to what motivates, inspires, and defines us as people.

Whereas the workplace used to be the primary location that cutting edge technology was encountered, decades of increasing power and miniaturization and decreasing cost have driven highly sophisticated technologies into every facet of life – extending far beyond the workplace, to virtually every place an individual spends their time. Experiences online and increasingly offline include an information-driven component that is tailored to an individual’s preferences. As a result, we expect a level of customization commensurate with our history of visiting and interacting with people, places and things of interest. 

What are the implications of this pervasive, highly personalized world of information in the context of business-to-business marketing?

When doing an upgrade of Neolane, specifically running the postupgrade command (image given below), Neolane will detect differences between the new software version and the local customized version that cannot be automatically merged.  These are identified as conflicts.  Each conflict is stored in Administration/Package management/Edit conflicts and Neolane will leave the local version on the server until the conflict is resolved.

Recently, there has been a flurry of articles in serious forums about the promise of BIG DATA. The Aspen Institute  authored a report on the Promise and Perils of Big Data and McKinsey Quarterly ran an article on the Challenge and Opportunity of Big Data.   There is even a conference for data scientists, a newly found species.  The most recent issue of Fortune calls data science the "hottest new gig in tech".    

Although mobile commerce is expected to reach some $31 billion by 2016, at a compounded annual growth rate of 39%¹, the channel remains a huge missed opportunity for most brands. Even traditionally marketing-savvy brands are struggling to leverage the space-partially because the slow internal procedures of the biggest corporations can hardly keep up with the pace at which mobile capabilities are evolving. The core issue however, is that most companies simply don't know how to enter or lead the new mobile-commerce space: the channel is unproven, customer data is sparse, and ROI is difficult to prove. But with Google reporting that 79% of consumers now say they use a smart­phone to help with shopping², the mobile space has become a tremendous customer influencer that can no longer be ignored.

An integral step in executing an email marketing campaign for a leading marketing provider is sending out email lists to email vendors, like Cheetahmail, on a day to day basis. As a marketer, it is very typical of us to pull lists for our clients, sometimes adhoc. In many cases, we send files via SFTP to the email vendor who then sends the email out to the target audience. Now, this is a two-step process:

The media world has been and continues to undergo dramatic shifts as content continues to be delivered and consumed in myriad ways.   A recent McKinsey Quarterly paper highlights the dramatic increase in the intensity with which people use digital devices and platforms. Approximately 50% of online consumers are now advanced users of smart phones, social networks and other tools such as tablets, up from 32% just two years ago.