This is a great article on making data actionable in marketing. This is the toughest part of Customer Intelligence. Creating reports is so much easier.

On average, marketers depend on data for just 11% of all customer-related decisions.

This is a disturbingly low number, but one that does not surprise me.

But in today's volatile business environment, judgment built from past experience is increasingly unreliable. With consumer behaviors in flux, once-valid assumptions (e.g., "older consumers don't use Facebook or send text messages") can quickly become outdated.

In my industry what worked 10 years ago has no bearing on what works today. Even what worked before the recession does not translate. What your customers are doing today is more relevant than what they used to do.

When we tested marketers' statistical aptitude with five questions ranging from basic to intermediate, almost half (44%) got four or more questions wrong and a mere 6% got all five right. So it didn't surprise us that just 5% of marketers own a statistics text book.

Marketing analysts don't even have statistics backgrounds. Analysts who have SQL background and can get data are usually the ones that shine, however they usually don't make the best analyst. Analysts are supposed to analyze data, not pull data.

...dashboards often capture response-based metrics such as clicks and open rates that aren't tied to more important measures such as customer loyalty or lifetime value — and yet, marketers are rewarded for improving the response metrics.

Defining the right metrics are so important. Marketers have to look at the long-term value of guests and resist the temptation to micromanage individual campaigns.