Blog: customer data management
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Avoiding Analysis Paralysis
5/10/10Continue ReadingIn 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.
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Data, Data, Everywhere Nor Any Drop of Insight
4/23/10Continue ReadingOK, 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.
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A terabyte is not what it used to be...
3/8/09Continue ReadingMultiple times within the past couple of years I have walked into clients who have built marketing data marts that for all practical purposes can be considered failures. Users were unhappy primarily because reports took too long to execute, and because the IT folks could not keep the data mart up to date.
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To append or not to append...that is the question.
2/5/09Continue ReadingI've been helping customers maximize their marketing database solutions for over 10 years and often see marketers struggle with the decision whether to or not to enhance their customer data. Ideally, additional information that could be used to build customer insights would be collected directly from the source (the customer!), but doing so may not be realistic. Just the other day, I got a Facebook request from a friend to register to a website. I started to fill out the form and backed out about half way through because they were "asking me too many questions". I really didn't "know this website" and wasn't comfortable providing more than some basic information. Something tells me that a lot of people might feel that way...
