Blog Posts By: John Strabley

In a previous post I discussed the need to purge customer data stores with customer data we are not using.  Even after this de-cluttering exercise you may still find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of data that you have at your disposal.  As a result you may find yourself in an ongoing cycle of analyzing and reporting out on the same data in an attempt to derive new insights, but to no avail.  Rather than taking an open-ended approach hoping to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, I suggest you borrow a page from science and take a more hypothesis driven approach.

OK, so it’s not quite as catchy as the line from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner but it describes a problem many of us marketers are facing these days.  With the proliferation of interactive technology and a significant decrease in the costs of storage, many marketers have become customer data hoarders.  As such, many of us are having a hard time finding that favorite “customer insight sweater” in a closet overflowing with customer data.  I suggest we all embark on some spring cleaning of our customer data to make sure we are deriving as much value from it as we should be.

What comes to mind when you think of loyalty programs?  I'm guessing it's not S&H Green Stamps or the Gold Bond Stamps program.  However, the prevailing loyalty programs in today's marketplace are nothing more than more automated versions of these early vanguards.  We've traded in stamps for points and books for online statements.  But the underlying structure of the loyalty program has remained the same.  It's high time we wipe the slate clean and re-think loyalty program objectives and design.