9 ways to boost customer loyalty with Marketing Automation

I'm not a big fan of the lists, but it makes it convenient to talk about a few of the concepts.  Marketing automation is a very important tool for the digital marketer.  I will even go as far as saying it should be the center of the digital marketing universe.  Because digital marketing grew up as being web, this is not a popular view among digital marketers, but that doesn't mean it's not true.  

Gathering knowledge allows to build relationship: the more you know about customers, the more relevant offers you can address. Personalization is impossible without advanced behavioral and transactional analytics.

Marketing automation starts and ends with data.  Data is the basis for running any marketing automation tool.  Without a good data collection and architecture strategy, marketing automation will be hampered to a degree.  It also ends with data because the capturing of the behavior driven informs the next decision.  It is cyclical as far as data collection is concerned.

1:1 Marketing. Dynamic content and e-mails are the base of long-lasting bond with customer, because they show that you treat him individually and adjust offers to his/her particular needs. Also find opportunities to say thank you to them, ask for opinions and suggest complementary products

1-to-1 marketing is the dream.  To cost effectively do this is still farther out, but we are getting close.  The problem becomes content.  To effectively market to each person in the database is unrealistic, but start at the top.  What would it take to market to the top 10% of the database on a 1-to-1 basis.  Start from there and then try to go farther into the customer base.  

Use analytics to improve content quality: with content marketing you can not only educate your customers, but also discuss values you share, what is crucial for establishing loyalty. 30% of customers say that shared values are one of 3 top reasons for being loyal to a brand. Hence invest in content and optimize it. Read more about content marketing and marketing automation synergy.

Good content can be scary for marketers.  The time and effort to create such content is time consuming and costly, especially in the form of man hours.  It is also hard to quantify the results, which normally don't start to materialize for many months.  However, great content builds a relationship with the brand.  Storytelling and guides for customers help them relate to the brand better than most advertising.  Let the analytics guide the decision.  If customers are buying bathroom products from Home Depot, don't send them content about building a fence.  A great timed "how to" on bathroom design could go a long way to loyalty and upsell opportunities.

Measure: don’t just repeat common knowledge that making actual user buy is 7 times cheaper that bringing new one. Use advanced analytics offered by Marketing Automation Systems to measure ROI of your loyalty improving actions, and optimize them.

The crucial part to any marketing automation strategy, how are you going to measure the results?  This thought process usually comes at the end, but it should start at the beginning of your marketing automation journey.  The first thing your boss will ask after the marketing automation system goes live is "how are we doing"?  You need to not only be able to answer his questions, but you need to answer that question for yourself.  Marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities.  They are never finished and they need to continually evolve.  The only way to determine the evolution is by understanding the results.  

How To Win Customers Without Data-Driven Marketing

The human element – even for online businesses – always shapes the final judgment on customer retention and acquisition.

This is the exact reason why becoming a customer-driven organization is so important, even in the age of data-driven marketing.  In most cases a human interaction will determine whether customers remain loyal or churn.  This is part of the customer experience, just as much as delivering the right content to individuals to drive the desired behavior.  While data-driven marketing can handle most customer experience, for offline businesses and even online businesses, the human interaction is critical to handling the cases where things don't quite go as well as you hoped.  

The morale of this story is: make sure that your employees are your strongest, most amazing asset because the most sophisticated technology or data-driven marketing can’t replace what your employees can deliver – caring, thoughtful, on-the-spot customer happiness.

Period. Full stop.

here is so much talk about who owns the customer experience and why CMO's are reluctant to own the entire experience.  In this article the letter describes the interaction with Terry from the call-center.  Now this interaction is as much part of the brand as an advertisement driving a customer to a website or in-store.  This experience defines the brand, yet the overall person in charge of this is not the CMO, it is more than likely an callcenter manager that reports up through an operations division.  

This is where the customer-driven organization has to be a culture, not an individual.  It doesn't matter what the position title is, there is no one person that can be the customer advocate throughout large organizations.  The customer advocate has to be all employees, period.  There could be a person leading the charge, but until an organization has changed its culture to be truly customer-centric, data-driven marketing and great advertisement will never drive the most ROI possible because the organization is not focusing on the customer experience as a whole.  

For data-driven marketing to succeed doesn't need a customer-centric organization, there is a lot of value and areas to increase revenue.  My belief is all organizations should be customer-centric, this enhances all aspects of the business, not just the data-driven marketing side.

The State and Drivers of Data Marketing

What matters most is the optimization of the customer experience, relevance and (perceived) customer value as a driver of business value. Data-driven marketing certainly is not (just) about advertising and programmatic ad buying as some believe. Nor is it just about campaigns. On the contrary: if done well, data-driven marketing is part of digital marketing transformations whereby connecting around the customer across the customer life cycle is key.

Very succinct vision of what data-driven marketing is, it's all about the customer experience.  The advent of "big data" was nothing more than gathering extra data about the customers.  Gathering data is only the first step of the process, albeit a time-consuming one.  The good news is after the hard work of gathering the data has been completed, the harder part starts.  Once you have data, making sense of the data and creating actionable outcomes to enhance the customer experience becomes the goal.  This is very hard work.  It takes plenty of analysis and insight to reach this goal.  But the companies who will do this the best will be the ones that succeed in the digital age.

Among the key takeaways of the data-driven marketing report by the GlobalDMA:

• 77% of marketers are confident in the data-driven approach and 74% expect to increase data marketing budgets this year.

• Data efforts by far focus on offers, messages and content (marketing) first (69% of respondents). Second ranks a data-driven strategy or data-driven product development. Customer experience optimization unfortunately only ranks third with 49% of respondents.

• Among the key drivers of increased data marketing: first of all a need to be more customer-centric (reported by 53% of respondents). Maximizing efficiency and return ranks second followed by gaining more knowledge of customers and prospects.

I believe the first step in the process is understanding where the puck is going to be and skate in that direction.  Marketers are understanding this data revolution is coming and they are saying the right things in surveys.  The real question will be how to get there.  It's easy to identify problems, it's hard to implement solutions.  The marketers who will show they are adept at change will thrive in this new paradigm.  

Customer analytics is something I have focused my entire career.  In the casino industry we have had the optimal opt-in mechanism for many years and have collected amazing amounts of data about our customers behavior.  We have used this to create targeted marketing campaigns to our customers, so I believe in the direction the entire industry is taking.  Always start with the customer.  It will lead to creating better experiences and more profitable results.

 

Why CEOs Say Yes to Marketing Automation

Ten short years ago, it was rare for a company to have a marketing automation platform in place. Since then, it’s become ever more clear that acquiring marketing automation (and applying the expertise to make it hum) is a huge competitive differentiator. SiriusDecisions research indicates that 80% of the organizations with the highest-performing demand waterfalls (based on the number of won deals per 1,000 inquiries) have implemented marketing automation platforms. This tallies with other research; the 2015 report “Rethinking the Role of Marketing” from Gleanster and Act-On found that Top Performers were 20% more likely than the average organization to use marketing automation technology..

I think it is still rare for most organizations to have a marketing automation platform, but what is even more rare are companies who are taking advantage of their platform.  The promise of marketing automation is very enticing as this article articulates.  The benefits of a well-run marketing automation program is an extreme competitive advantage.

1. Marketing Automation Lets You Put the Customer in the Center of Your World.

List management. Marketing automation lets makes it easier to segment your lists by field values (explicit data such as title, department, industry, company size) and by implicit, inferred factors (often actions) such as web pages visited, eBooks downloaded, emails clicked on. It also lets you sync chosen data back and forth with a CRM system.

Well beyond the realm of salespeople, marketing automation lets you manage your customer base on a level of personalization that is not possible otherwise.  Some say these platforms make the relationships with customers less personal, but that is a fallacy.  With the amount of personalization and targeting capable with these platforms, the customer gets a more personalized experience with marketing automation.  

The amount of time manual processes take to manage the customer, it is impossible for these processes to really give the best experience to the customer.  There is just not enough time in the day.  However, a marketing automation platform can create customized communications based on all of the data described above, including behavioral information, geo aware messaging and preferences of communication channels.

Campaign management. Automated programs can save time (which is money, yes) and take a little human error out of your programs. You can set them up to replicate successful lead nurturing or onboarding programs, for example, and they will run exactly as programmed, no matter who misses work on Tuesday. You can add prospects as they enter your world (perhaps through a form) and exit them (perhaps to another program, or to sales) as you learn more about them, or as they become increasingly qualified. You can set up trigger emails (thank-yous, congratulations, expiring trials) and landing pages that make offers or fulfill requests, showing how responsive you are.

Campaign management is a difficult process if you have different programs pulling lists, then fulfilling communications and measuring results.  The amount of time saved by having a platform where everything is integrated and can trigger off the behavior of the customer is very powerful.

6. Marketing Automation Takes Care of the Established Customer

The platform gives you a structure you can scale in your retention strategy. Start with using a nurturing educational strategy to support onboarding. Move on to keeping your customers in the loop, educating them about new features, showing them new plays with old features, and keeping them abreast of changes in the industry that affect them. Take the same techniques you use to notice when a lead is warming up and apply them to noticing when a customer is looking at an upsell … or needs attention to prevent churn.

Retention is the most important part of the database.  The greater the number of sales coming from your established customer base allows for the greatest growth in your business.  Marketing automation at its heart is best for the established customers.  The platform is designed to drive more business from this segment.  Since the majority of most companies revenue comes from loyal customers, having the ability to grow this groups sales is essential to a longterm stable business model.  The marketing automation platform should be at the center of this model.

7. Marketing Automation Spurs Revenue and Growth

These benefits are all pieces of a puzzle that every company using marketing automation puts together in its own unique way. The common denominator is that most companies that apply marketing automation – whether they use every feature or just the basics – will see faster growth and post more top-line revenue.

Well who doesn't want that?

How CMOs Can Make Sure Their Companies Are Customer-Obsessed

CMOs are charged with making their companies customer-obsessed — so they can win in an age where customers are highly empowered. But the irony is that many marketing shops themselves are not customer-obsessed.

I am continually thinking about the customer-centric approach and who should own it in the organization.  The CMO is the obvious choice, however are they the best choice?  I have seen where organizations have a C-level position, something to the tune of Chief Customer Officer.  This is also thought because it ends up being another level in the organization, another potential touchpoint in the organization that has to bring different groups in the organization together around one common goal.  I think it comes down to having the right person.

Marketers are predisposed to think about the market first. So why are marketers not naturally predisposed to be customer-obsessed? The answer lies in gravity — the gravity of the P&L and the associated product, solution or service performance.

It's always about the customer.  Everything should come back to customer analytics.  I think Finance departments have too much power in some organizations where high-level KPI's are all about a product or a service.  The problem with these KPI's is they don't go far enough down to the "people" who are driving those metrics.  It is similar to fixing a symptom instead of the actual source of the problem.

For example, the company sells 1,000,000 widgets and they want to grow this by 3% in the next quarter.  This is the entire wrong approach to the problem.  Widgets don't grow by 3%.  3% more customers buy widgets in the quarter.  It is imperative to start with the customer because they are the ones that are purchasing these widgets.  So to grow those numbers, marketers need to embrace the customers to grow their numbers.

I have spoken with many CMOs — across industries and geographies — and this common theme has emerged: Marketing’s relevance and performance is now predicated on putting the customer at the center of the universe. This is neither elective nor minor surgery. Most believe an overhaul — not a simple refinement — is needed to make marketing customer-obsessed and truly able to drive growth.

Changing to a customer-centric organization is a complete change in culture.  This does not happen overnight.  It takes a dedicated team with a singular focus many months to accomplish.  I once read to change a culture, a great organization with amazing focus will take 18 months.  There are not that many of these organizations out there.  The average is 4 years.  So organizations need to start their culture change today.  There is no time to waste.  The customer-obsessed organization will be the most successful in the new customer empowered buying dynamic.  

Becoming Customer Centric is a Journey not a Destination

A very insightful article from Timothy Smith of Tahzoo.  Becoming a customer centric organization is not achieved through initiatives, it is achieved through a culture change.  

From my perspective, too many of the current efforts in financial services are internally focused, and are being solely thought about as technology projects. As I pointed out in my webinar, technology is only one part of the solution. Companies need to be thinking about transforming their business and marketing approaches in addition to their technology infrastructure. If companies don’t invest in these other transformations, they may not ever deliver on their customer centricity goals. Time and money needs to be spent on creating organizational alignment, understanding the customer journey, and deploying marketing strategies that reward, recognize and respect customers.

Companies tend to look at their technology in terms of deficiencies instead of what a technology will allow.  Technology should never be purchased until there is a specific business need the technology will solve.  If your company isn't ready to evolve beyond their current technology platform, a better tool will not help your company evolve.  To become a customer centric organization, the culture needs to evolve first and then technology can support the organization as the needs arise.  It should never be the other way around.  Customer centricity does not happen through more data about a customer, it happens when all decisions are focused on the customer.

Brands Don’t Know Their Customers As Well As They Think They Do

Chris Crum writes for webpronews.com:

IBM and Econsultancy have some new research out suggesting a “massive perception gap” between how well brands think they are marketing to their customers and how well customers actually think brands know them. Businesses think they’re doing a pretty good job. Consumers, not so much.

The study, which surveyed businesses and customers specifically in the United States, found that about 90% of marketers do agree that personalization of marketing campaigns is critical to their success. Even still, 80% of consumers polled don’t think the average brand understands them as individuals. This is despite consumers sharing more personal details with businesses than ever before. Some how, brands are still failing to make the most of it.

In my experience, marketers can be their own worst PR agents.  For the most part, they understand what their customers want, but they can't deliver.  However, they are constantly spinning what they are doing as to seem as though they are meeting the customers demands.  So this survey doesn't surprise me.  I'm surprised that 80% of customers don't feel like they are individuals.  It's hard to create great customer experiences with this stat.

The IBM/Econsultancy research found that 80% of marketers “strongly” believe they have a holistic view of individual customers and segments across interactions and channels. They also strongly believe in their ability to deliver “superior experiences” offline (75%), online (69%), and on mobile devices (57%). Yet just 47% of marketers say they’re able to deliver relevant communications.

Worse yet, customers don’t think they’re getting personalized experiences. Only 37% said their preferred retailer understands them as an individual. And that’s the preferred one. Only 22% said the average retailer understands them. 21% said communications from their average retailer are “usually relevant”. 35% said communications from their preferred retailers are “usually relevant”.

The biggest disconnect with marketers is in implementation.  In the survey they state they believe they can deliver "superior experiences", yet just 47% say they are "able".  So marketers believe they have the strategy to be great in the area of customer experience, the technology or knowhow to deliver these great strategies is lacking.  A lot of that comes down to the relationship with the CIO.  As I wrote in Across The Board, CMOs Struggling To Deliver An Integrated Customer Experience, until the CIO and CMO speak the same language and the CMO embraces technology, this will continue to be an issue for marketers in the future.  When only 37% of customers believe their preferred retailer knows them at all, there is an issue.

“One explanation for relevancy void may be a lack of innovation for the multi-channel lives we all lead,” IBM said. “According to the study, only 34 percent of marketers said they do a good job of linking their online and offline customer experiences. With the vast majority of dollars spent offline and the majority of product research happening on the Internet, the two are already linked for consumers but this gulf must close for marketers if they are to advance. One issue is the technology of integration, with only 37 percent of marketers saying they have the tools to deliver exceptional customer experiences.”

The technology exists today, marketers just have to embrace it.  The technology is nascent, so it is harder to implement, but this can be done today with hard work.  The results will be well worth the effort.

“The customer is in control but this is not the threat many marketers perceive it to be. It’s an opportunity to engage and serve the customer’s needs like never before,” said Deepak Advani, GM at IBM Commerce. “By increasing investments in marketing innovations, teams can examine consumers at unimaginable depths including specific behavior patterns from one channel to the next. With this level of insight brands can become of customer’s trusted partner rather than an unwanted intrusion.”  

Advani is correct in labeling this an opportunity.  For the marketers who dare to embrace the new realities of digital marketing, they will reap the benefits that come from delivering targeted content creating exceptional customer experiences.  For the marketers that don't embrace this sea-change, their companies will become less relevant in the digital age.  

Keeping Up With Today’s Loyalty Demands

Originally posted on IBM’s Smarter Commerce blog:

Loyalty marketing is more and more prominent in today’s retail landscape. It is becoming common knowledge that customer acquisition costs are increasingly rising, and data-driven customer retention is a key area filled with untapped growth potential. But loyalty marketing is evolving and is more intricate than just offering discounts to existing customers. As many marketers realize, there are three common problems that they run into when trying to implement an effective loyalty program:

1. They often feel stuck offering dollars-off discounts and are losing their margins without sustainably changing their customer behavior.

2. Personalization is not going further than using much more than a first and last name, and is not connecting to the customer and building customer relationships.

3. Their loyalty members are not actively participating and being engaged, and consequently not influencing long term results.

It is a buyers market as they would say in the real-estate business.  Customers have the ability to buy from a multitude of companies with fairly frictionless transactions.  Years ago, a customer would be limited to their location to buy many of the items they can now purchase online, which makes loyalty marketing a much harder task today.  If the customer does not like an experience they have with your company, the friction to switch providers is much easier than in the past.

This has led to a race to the bottom with most companies.  Instead of competing on differentiation, companies rely on sales and discounting to compete in this new world.  Relying on discounts is not differentiated at all.  Any competitor can match a price or beat the price if they are willing to decrease their margins for the business.  As I wrote in Busy is Not a Strategy, many of your competitors will look at metrics like volume as their key metric which will force them to decrease margins and hurt your business.  

Increasing Self-Identification

Loyalty incentivizes customers to provide more information about themselves and engage across channels, which leads to a richer understanding of your customers and how they interact with your brand. You may be surprised how many of them are open to providing information about themselves in order to receive more relevant communications and offers.

Spending most of my time in the casino industry has shown me that consumers willingly give away information in return for a richer experience.  In the case of the casinos this comes in the form of comps, but in other industries this does not have to be a giveaway.  This could be access to sales, in the case of grocery stores.  Find out what your version of the comp is to increase customer self-identification.  It may start off as a giveaway, but don't let it drive the future customer experiences with that customer.  

Taking Personalization to the Next Level

In addition to increasing customer self-identification, you should track and analyze metrics such as order frequency, average order value, and from which channels customers are purchasing. Modern loyalty programs gather this customer data and provide a centralized hub which is used to personalize meaningful incentives and rewards for higher customer redemption and satisfaction, and also to send personalized messages. These messages can be targeted towards specific actions and customer segments, and are used to maintain relevance and build upon customer-brand relationships by making customers feel like you are paying attention to what they want.

If you aren't tracking the purchases of your customers then you aren't going to be successful in loyalty marketing.  Creating meaningful customer experiences relies on gaining insight to the behavior of the customer.  By getting the customer to opt-in, it allows the business to create the true value from the loyalty program as I wrote here.  Targeted content will create meaningful customer experiences and this rich data is at the core.  

Cohesive Omni-Channel Capabilities

With today’s consumer having the ability to interact with your brand across all channels, it is essential to have cohesive communication, connectivity of data, and customer access to your program and rewards at all touch points. Different consumers like to interact with brands through different channels – whether in-store, social media, or email – and your program should be available in their preferred channel.

Providing the same experience for the customer, no matter what channel they are using, is the key to creating meaningful customer experiences.  This is the hard part of the new customer experience paradigm.  Keeping the content and messaging across channels in an online and offline world can be complex, but is very rewarding.  Customers don't care that different divisions in the company have different responsibilities and the online team doesn't communicate effectively with the operations team.  Customers expect their experience to be seamless across channels and it is imperative that businesses adjust to create this seamless customer experience. 

Agile is the Key to Digital Marketing Success

Another key topic coming out of the Adobe Summit 2015 is this idea of structuring the organization properly.  Now this is an age old problem and doesn't necessarily just revolve around digital marketing, many organizations fight the structure issue.  I had a mentor that preached to be a successful organization its 80% structure, 10% people and 10% process.  Now that made the people really mad when he said this, because people always want it to be about them.  In reality, it is about them, what he was trying to say is without the proper structure, it doesn't matter how good your people and processes are, they can't thrive if they are always being stifled.

So a day in the life of a digital marketer is too reliant on other individuals for them to be a success, they are stifled by the system.  Now they may produce content and delivering good results, but if the structure of the organization is not optimal, it is preventing these outstanding individuals from being great.  Once the marketer has to jump through so many hoops to achieve the end goal, they are already making compromises.  It may be they are making compromises on the content because they know the content creators will give them push back, or have too long of a timeline, so the request becomes watered down.  The landing page may need a little extra something to up conversion, however that may need a new set of requirements for the web team to build, so to keep things moving the marketer doesn't add that piece.

To be great a digital marketing organization needs to be agile.  Things are changing constantly and the digital marketer needs to move at the same pace, if not faster, than the consumer.  Today the digital marketer is 10 steps behind the pace of the consumer.  The organization tends to be divided into marketer, technical and creative.  These all need to live under the same umbrella.  The second a marketer is waiting on IT or a creative agency, the marketer is not fast enough.

The marketer needs to have those departments set them up for success.  So IT needs to set up the hardware and get the marketer the tools to be self reliant.  IT should not try to control the content being moved and updates that need to be made to websites, landing pages or apps.  Creative agencies need to set up multiple templates and ensure there is enough creative content to fill those templates, but they should not be a roadblock to any content that is released.  If a new email and landing page needs to be created for a real-time need, the agency or brand should not be involved in slowing this process down, the digital marketer should have all the tools and messaging already at their disposal.

If the organization is set up so the digital marketer can see the opportunity (data), glean insight from the data (analysts), create an audience (technical), create a new email marketing campaign (database marketer), create a landing page for the email (creative and technical), create a cross channel ad campaign for that audience (media and creative) and then measure the results (data and analysis), then the organization is set up correctly.  The digital marketer should be enabled to go through this entire process without needing IT tickets, agency or brand approvals or pro-forms to be created and approved from the executive team.  Allow your digital marketing team the freedom to be successful.  Measure their success, give them a budget and guidelines, but empower the digital marketer to drive revenue and jump on opportunities.  The results will speak for themselves.  

How to Make Big Data Work for You

This article is the problem with Big Data.  Everyone wants to jump so many steps on their way to true 1-to-1 marketing using data as the cornerstone.  Great marketing is always an evolution.  One step forward using data brings results and different behavior is gleaned from that data.  Then that data is taken and different questions are asked of the data based on the results using the previous data set.  This is how marketing problems are solved using data.

Marketers can't take a dataset that is fairly large, one they are already struggling to make the most of anyway, and then be given a much larger dataset and told to "go make magic".  Marketing with data is a disciplined venture.  As a marketer, make sure you are making the most out of the data you already have before worrying about what keystrokes the customer is making or the "Internet of Things".  

Always make sure the next step in the data is one that will bring you value today.  Have a long term understanding of where the data can take you, but be disciplined in getting there or you just might miss a lot of insight on the way. 

Big Data Demands Big Context

When we entered the age of big data, many of us assumed we had left the age of big risk. We didn’t have to guess anymore. We didn’t have to go out on a limb. We’d follow the numbers, the “truths.”

But time and time again we’re finding that it’s not that simple. No matter how good the research is, big data is nothing without big context.

The promise of big data is a complicated one.  When I hear most non-statistical people talk about big data, they believe it will answer all the questions they have about their business.  Big data is just making sense out of larger data sets that may not be historically the data everyone has focused on in the past.  

Once you break down what big data is and what it isn't, the question then becomes how to use it.  Context is extremely important.  Not just in the form of survey or research, but in the form of humans that have been working in the business.  The human intuition and psychology of consumers is just as important as ever.  Just as before there was big data, organizations combined data with business acumen to make the best decisions.  Nothing has changed with big data.  There has to be business acumen to combine with the big data finding to build the best product and have the best marketing strategies.

This article looks at Microsoft and Windows 8 to put this into context.  

Microsoft’s engineers discovered that people were doing less of the time-consuming writing and creating that had once been the norm. Increasingly, users were socializing for short bursts.

The research also showed that people loved having “touch” functionality and were avidly consuming small pieces of live information.

Consequently, Microsoft decided that Windows 8 should feature navigation that enabled multitasking and quick interactions, and that it should also have touch and live tiles.

People love touch.  I love to touch on my iPad and iPhone all the time.  However, those devices are more intimate than a computer.  They don't have the bulk of a computer and they can sit on my lap or I can hold them up.  

It turns out touching a screen on a computer is very hard over time.  While little touches here and there will work, overall it is literally a pain to touch on a computer.  After time your arm will become tired and a trackpad can solve many of the problems.  While I believe at some point there will be a touch interface that makes sense in a computer, to have the whole interface built around touch does not make too much sense.  

But what people say and what they do are two very different animals.

This is so important to understand when doing any research.  It goes back to the famous Henry Ford quote of "If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse."  

Context is important, but so is psychology.  Customers don't think beyond using the devises or tools they have when answering questions.  They want a computer to solve a problem that another device should solve, but thats just because they don't know about the other device.

Also, doing research on what a customer would do if they were given a choice of the following is very deceptive.  I never believe what a customer says they will do, I always rely on what they do in combination of what they say.  When you combine the two, you get the truth which is always somewhere in the middle.  Remember to never change an entire strategy based on customer surveys of "what they will do if" questions.

Nate Silver on Finding a Mentor, Teaching Yourself Statistics, and Not Settling in Your Career

I had the pleasure to sit through a keynote at the Tableau Conference in Washington DC and the speaker was none other than Nate Silver.  It was a very good keynote and his book it a great read.  

I find it very interesting what he says about education and working with data.  I find the same thing.  I don't have a background in Stats or Math, however I feel I have a good intuition with data.  I have always loved numbers and working with them, but have never liked the mechanics of math or stats.  I think in todays age of technology, it is more important to have the intuition than the mechanical knowledge.

Again, I think the applied experience is a lot more important than the academic experience. It probably can’t hurt to take a stats class in college.

But it really is something that requires a lot of different parts of your brain. I mean the thing that’s toughest to teach is the intuition for what are big questions to ask. That intellectual curiosity. That bullshit detector for lack of a better term, where you see a data set and you have at least a first approach on how much signal there is there. That can help to make you a lot more efficient.

That stuff is kind of hard to teach through book learning. So it’s by experience. I would be an advocate if you’re going to have an education, then have it be a pretty diverse education so you’re flexing lots of different muscles.

You can learn the technical skills later on, and you’ll be more motivated to learn more of the technical skills when you have some problem you’re trying to solve or some financial incentive to do so. So, I think not specializing too early is important.

When I look for new hires i tend to find people who are smart and try to figure out their critical thinking.  The tools and the mechanical portion of data analysis and modeling can be taught, but it takes special people to have critical thoughts.  

I always say that an analysts job is not to report on the data, but to find the money.  The analyst that can take a dataset, find actionable insight and are able to articulate the findings are worth their weight in greenbacks.   

Very cool article from a great thinker. 

IBM Watson, the Ultimate Marketeer?

When a computer can figure out whether a movie trailer is going to positively affect an audience or not – it makes you wonder how close we are to computer generated predictions on everything else in life.

Computers make our lives as marketeers so much easier in the past, however with social media and instant access to data, our jobs become much tougher to stay ahead of the curve.  IBM's Watson could be the way we all look at marketing in the future

Predict new trends and shifting tastes

Watson is a voracious consumer of data, and it doesn’t forget anything. You can feed it data from credit cards, sales databases, social networks, location data, web pages and it can compile and categorize that information to make high probability predictions.

IBM Watson is the ultimate in big data.  The ability to analyze sentiment and understand how tastes are changing in the marketplace is invaluable.  Most marketers don't know this until well after the shift takes place.   

Analyze social conversations – generate leads

Most social listening solutions on the market today do an adequate job of giving the marketer signals and reports about their industry, competitors, partners and current customers. But it’s up to the marketer to analyze the information and take action.

What if someone could tell you what to do, not just tell you something happened?  In this age of social media it takes teams of people to keep up on the never-ending conversations happening about the brand.  Taking complexity out of tasks is what technology should do and this sounds like the perfect use of Watson.

Computer calculated and automated growth hacking

If you’re a marketer and not familiar with growth hacking, please study up fast. Growth hackers focus on innovative A/B testing techniques to maximize conversions on emails, websites, social media, online content or just about any digital media available to them. It’s a low cost but more effective alternative to traditional media.

A/B testing is nothing compared to what Watson can do.  Imagine A/B testing on steroids, using predictive analytics and much more information than just clicks on a webpage.  The ultimate in design and the right offer/message to the right person at the right time. 

Keep Up with Your Quants - Harvard Business Review

Very good article about using data to make decisions and communicate results.  

having big data—and even people who can manipulate it successfully—is not enough. Companies need general managers who can partner effectively with “quants” to ensure that their work yields better strategic and tactical decisions.

Often times analysts struggle to communicate their findings in a way the organization understands.  Finding a common ground makes for a great combination. 

We all know how easily “figures lie and liars figure.” Analytics consumers should never pressure their producers with comments like “See if you can find some evidence in the data to support my idea.” Instead, your explicit goal should be to find the truth.

How many times I have heard this in my career?  Quite a few times.  As data consumers, we can't be afraid of being wrong or showing that a decision we have made lost money.  That happens.  Always strive for the truth.  It is much better to improve results then to take a hit to your ego.

The rest of the article is a great read on how to better receive analytics.   Being someone who can take analytics and turn data into money is what separates the men from the boys.    

Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and IT

...IT organization has been transitioning from the traditional development approach of (1) define functional requirements, then (2) design, then (3) build (the "waterfall" approach) to making quick, small changes to systems ("Agile Scrum").

The waterfall approach kills companies that are not in the software business.  Since internal products are not sold, nor measured by sales, its easier for IT departments to hide behind process.  Process and requirements kill companies.  Companies in this current age need to be faster to market.  

Agile and Scrum have allowed ING to respond quickly to signals from customers. But moving to continuous delivery is a struggle. Some business people who are used to the traditional waterfall method can fall into an unfortunate cycle: taking months to develop requirements, then waiting for IT to respond, then telling IT that's not what they wanted. Now instead at ING they say, "Here's your team. You need to be in every daily or weekly Scrum cycle or sprint to decide if the work is meeting your needs." It demands more time from the business people, but they are engaged and own it.

The Agile method is so much more effective to engage the business.  The business moves at the speed of sound compared to IT and if the IT department gets buried into process, the business loses faith in IT and finds another way.  This doesn't make sense for the business, but it happens to get things done. 

While Scrum has been employed primarily in software development, ING shows that it has broader management applications. They have used Agile Scrum as a key tool for collaboration across functions in processes such as developing new products and in marketing campaigns. And the frequent (daily or weekly) meetings accelerate decision-making.

This is very interesting and I have never thought about all decision making changing to an Agile Scrum.  In my business, I deploy an "unofficial" Agile Scrum, just have never thought about it from that point of view.  I believe it works so much better, to be engaged daily in your business and with your team.   

 

How to Keep Your Customers by Thinking Ahead of Them

...more important to deepen your connection to your existing customers than to spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out why certain customers left.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t care about losing customers. Customer attrition and churn can kill your bottom line. But once customers are gone, they’re gone. The best way to hang on to them is with a process I call “closing the backdoor.”

Great points in this article.  So many people focus on bringing a customer back, instead of focusing on keeping the customers you have.  The most profits to be made is by increasing the frequency of your current customers.  By striving to satisfy and get out in front of your current customers needs, you will have more current customers (because new customers will outnumber your churned) and they will be more frequent purchasers.

​

There are many lifecycle charts, this one is more transactional with each purchase.  For instance, in selling hotel rooms we have a much better shot at getting a guest to return if they are ready to return.  Any communication preceding that will usually be met with indifference.  It won't hurt the cause, but you likely won't get a booking either.  If you can send, i know this is going to be cliche, the right offer at the right time, you will increase frequency and redemption percentages.  ​

The Four Basic Forms of Customer Loyalty →

Great article about the types of loyalty you can achieve as a business.  It really shows there is only one form of loyalty, because the other forms are not lasting and don't represent a sustainable business.​

Purchased Loyalty

The best example of purchased loyalty is a customer rewards program. Other examples include memberships, coupons, and rebates.

Basically, purchased loyalty pays customers to be loyal, and there is nothing wrong with that practice. In many industries and market sectors the purchased loyalty strategy works extremely well.

The main problem with it is that purchased loyalty can be easily stolen because the customer is loyal to the program, not the company.

Purchased loyalty is a portion of the loyalty program, but can't be the basis for the business.  Someone can always come over the top and create a richer loyalty program and forces you to squeeze your margins even more to compete.​

Convenience Loyalty

The local market, the corner dry cleaner, the coffee shop on your way to work. You might be loyal to those businesses simply because they're convenient. You're likely to remain loyal unless competitors come along who are equally or even more convenient.

Location, location, location.  This loyalty is a great advantage as a business, but doesn't mean the guest will be truly loyal because of it.  When you have a convenience advantage, it takes a lot more for a customer to defect, but don't give your guest a reason and this advantage can be sustained for a long period of time. ​

Restricted Loyalty

Restricted loyalty exists when there is no other game in town. Your cable company may enjoy restricted loyalty, especially if you live in a rural setting and there is no competition. (Although it is easy to argue that other options do exist, like online services.)

Utilities tend to enjoy restricted loyalty. Most cities do not have multiple electricity providers.

Monopoly's are a wonderful thing if you find yourself in one.  They make life very easy as a business.  However, they rarely last for any period

of time because once someone else sees they can steal your market share, they will.​

Also, businesses tend to get lazy when they have a monopoly.  They don't take care of the customer and deploy strategies that are more bottom line ​driven, instead of customer focused.

True Loyalty

True loyalty is earned loyalty. True loyalty is undying allegiance to a brand or product based on an incredible level of satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction breeds true loyalty. When you are highly satisfied, when your needs are completely met and your expectations are consistently met and even exceeded, you simply cannot imagine using another product or service.

True loyalty is the holy grail of customer satisfaction and is something every business should aspire to create.

If you take care of your customer and provide a high level of satisfaction, you can overcome any of the other loyalty forms.  Customers will travel and accept less from you than your competitors if they truly feel cared for.  Always strive to build an organization around true loyalty, it's the only form of loyalty that is sustainable.​

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver Explains Why We Suck At Predictions (And How To Improve) | Fast Company

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen. On the one hand, we get access to more and more information that ought to help us make better decisions. On the other hand, the more information you have, the more selective you can be in which information you pick out to tell the narrative that might not be the true or accurate, or the one that helps your business, but the one that makes you feel good or that your friends agree with.

This is a great article on using data and predictions.  I just bought this book as a good friend of mine suggested it is a great read.  I always hear "You can make numbers tell whatever story you want."  Ain't that the truth?  So many times colleagues of mine hold on to a certain part of the data that tells the story they want to tell and soon it becomes truth, however this only helps them look good instead of moving the business forward.  

The Presentation Mistake You Don't Know You're Making - Heidi Grant Halvorson - Harvard Business Review

More is actually not better, if what you are adding is of lesser quality than the rest of your offerings. Highly favorable or positive things are diminished or diluted in the eye of the beholder when they are presented in the company of only moderately favorable or positive things.

This is an intriguing article on add-ons.  It is based on an interview, but there are interesting tidbits later in the article on consumer behavior.

Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter's Paradox in an elegant series of studies. For example, they showed that when buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65! Perhaps most troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more attractive to buyers, 92% of them chose the package with the free download.

As marketers we tend to find more and more to throw in, we call them soft or no-cost add-ons.  This is intriguing to see that may be negatively impacting the offer.  I guess when I look at it as the consumer, the more stuff there is doesn't necessarily make it worth more in my eyes.  Something to test for sure.

Seth's Blog: Waiting for all the facts

All the facts are never in.  

The real question isn't whether you have all the facts. The real question is, "do I know enough to make a useful decision?" (and no decision is still a decision).

Seth is brilliant.  There is a quote by Colin Powell

Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probably of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired."  Part II: "Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut."

You never have all the facts and there is not amount of data that will lead to 100% certainty of making the right choices.  If you wait for 100% of the facts, you waited to long.