This is how data makes money

June 5, 2013

This is a presentation that McKinsey consultant, Tim McGuire, made at the recent Direct Marketing Association conference. It is very thought-provoking and inspiring one, because it is about practical value and applications of data. In direct marketing scoring models and regression analytics have been an approach any seriously result oriented marketing responsible has already tested. However, the availability of data and applications in the rich and influential online environment has exploded the value to completely new level.


http://futurecmo.org/2013/02/15/this-is-how-data-makes-money/

Big Data and advanced analytics from McKinsey Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum

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Where Seconds Matter: Mobile Marketing for Quick-Serve Restaurants

May 10, 2013

Large retailers are used to dealing with big problems. Thousands of stores, millions of customers and billions of transactions. Dealing with that kind of order flow can be a logistics nightmare. How do I staff my stores? When are my peak hours? Do I have to add personnel at the store level to support my new marketing campaign? The problem is exacerbated exponentially when it applies to quick service restaurants (QSR). Not only do you have to manage an influx of customers, they are expecting to be served in less then 5 minutes.

The most forward thinking QSRs are using mobile to manage their transactions. Starbucks is currently handling over 2.1 million mobile payments each week. They added over 1.4 million new members to their loyalty program in the first quarter of 2013. Further, by combining loyalty with tender Starbucks has outpaced their competitors by miles. Customers rewarded Starbucks for making life easier, and loaded over $1B onto gift cards in the most recent holiday quarter.

History has told us that once a bar has been set, consumers expect the competition to rise to the occasion. Coupling location data with mobile payments allows QSRs to do just this.

Integrating location-based marketing and analytics into their mobile application gives QSRs a leg up on managing order flow. Timing is everything in the restaurant world. Make an order too soon and it sits, giving customers a cold experience. Custom orders create more work, creating even longer lines.

Location-based marketing allows QSRs to understand where a customer is in relation to the store. Thus, a customer places an order on a mobile device. Once the patron breaches a 1-mile radius geofence, the order is prepared. Within 5 minutes the customer is in the store, picks up the order and is acknowledged with a “Thank You for Your Business” notification on the way out. In today’s time compressed society, a customer who knows they can patronize a certain store and have their custom order waiting for them, is a repeat customer.

Time saving is just the beginning. QSRs are constantly looking for innovative ways to drive store traffic in off-peak hours. Why not target customers within a 5-mile radius of the store to come in for a 3 p.m. treat on a hot day? Location-based marketing allows QSRs to understand who received the offer, who opened it and what store they went to.

Streamlining order flow, maximizing off-peak hours revenue and tracking marketing campaigns are just a few of the benefits QSRs can receive with Location-based marketing. Get a leg up on the competition, start marketing today.

Thanks to the mobile retail blog

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Using Varonis: Involving Data Owners (Part I)

January 2, 2013

(This one entry in a series of posts about the Varonis Operational Plan – a clear path to data governance.  You can find the whole series here.)

Almost every organization is now data driven. With all the talk about data growth and big data analytics over the past couple of years, people have started to ask: “How do we maximize the value of our data? How can we make sure we’re deriving real business benefit?”

The keys to maximizing the value of our data are to gather the right intelligence about it, and then give the right people the ability to take action using the intelligence you’ve gathered.

Now that we know who our Data Owners are, it’s time to start getting them involved. Remember that it’s the owners—not IT—that have adequate context to make decisions about who should and shouldn’t have access to their assets.

The next step in operationalizing Varonis is to provide owners intelligence about their data assets.  DatAdvantage can deliver data-driven reports that shed light on what is happening with their data: who can access it, what they’re doing with it, which data is stale, etc. These reports greatly simplify and optimize reporting by delivering reports to all owners which contain information aboutonly the data they own.

An Example

Say you’ve spent a few weeks identifying and confirming business owners for all of the top-level folders on a large NAS (or two, or three…). Depending on the size of the company, this might be a few dozen or a few thousand people. One of the most common next steps is to provide permissions reports on all of these data sets to the relevant owners. So the HR owner gets a report on all of the users who have access to the HR folder, for instance. It’s the same with Finance, Marketing, R&D, etc. In the past, you would have to create and deliver a separate report for each owner, which depending on the complexity of your reporting process might be an onerous undertaking all by itself. DatAdvantage gives you a far better alternative.

In DatAdvantage, to accomplish the same thing, you’d only need to create a single report, and all owners would get permissions reports once a quarter (or however often you like). Create the report, include the proper filters and formatting, and then set up a data-driven subscription to be delivered on the first day of the first month of the quarter. That’s it you’re done.

Every quarter, every data owner is going to get that report in their inbox, and the report will contain information about only the data that they own—they won’t see anything that doesn’t belong to them. As you add and change owners over time, the subscription will continue to work without intervention. If my job role changes and suddenly I’m the owner of additional folders, my permissions report will show those as well. If I’m no longer an owner, my report won’t contain information about what I no longer own.

Permissions reporting is a great use case for data driven reports, and it’s not the only one. Reports that show actual access can be useful, too.  What if every data owner could see exactly who on their team was accessing data most? What about those people who weren’t accessing any? Or people from outside their team bumbling around?  Who creates content? Showing owners what data is stale or which folders are growing the fastest can help give them understanding of how their using resources. Providing owners intelligence about where their sensitive data is, where it’s exposed, and who has been accessing it lead to informed decisions about how they can reduce risk.

Once you’ve started putting intelligence into the hands of your owners, the next step is to give them the power to take action without bugging IT. We’ll cover that next.

Related articles

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The Sneaky Psychology of Advertising

October 15, 2012

This is a great infographic that highlights some of the elements of advertising….

Click to visit the original post

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What’s happening in retail & with brands – trends for week ending 5th October 2012

October 8, 2012

Company Results

- Abel & Cole have reported a 32% increase in sales to £46.5m for the year to August 2012. EBITDA increased to £4.6m from £2.9m for the same period. (Source: Retail Week) – Arnold Clarke have reported a 1% decrease in sales to £2.25bn for the year 2011. Pre-tax profit increased to £51.7m from £50.5m for the same period. (Source: BBC) – Bargain Booze have reported a 3.9% increase in sales to £395.3m for the year to 30 April 2012. Pre-tax profit decreased by 7.7% to £11.5m for the same period. (Source: The Grocer) – Dunelm have reported a 13.8% increase in total sales to £151.8m for the 13 weeks to 29 September 2012. Like-for-like sales increased by 3% for the same period. – Findel have reported a 7.9% increase in Group sales for the 26 weeks to 28 September 2012. – Halfords have reported a 6.2% increase in Group sales for the 26 weeks to 28 September 2012. Retail sales and like-for-like sales increased by 4.3% and 4.6% respectively for the same period.

- John Lewis have reported a 26.5% increase in sales (including VAT) for the week to 29 September 2012. Fashion, Electricals & Home Technology and Home sales increased by 36%, 31.8% and 13% respectively. Sales at johnlewis.com increased by 48.4%. – New Look have reported a 30% increase in like-for-like EBITDA to £61.1m for the year to August 2012. (Source: The Telegraph) – Sainsbury’s have reported a 4.3% increase in total sales for the 16 weeks to 29 September 2012. Like-for-like sales increased by 1.9% for the same period. – Ted Baker have reported a 15.4% increase in Group sales to £118.6m for the 28 weeks to 11 August 2012. UK and European retail sales increased by 7.9% to £74.7m, ecommerce sales by 82.4% to £6.2m and profit before tax and exceptional costs increased by 10.4% to £9.4m for the same period. – Tesco have reported a 1.4% increase in Group sales (including VAT) to £36bn for the 26 weeks to 25 August 2012. Group pre-tax profit decreased by 11.6% to £1.7bn while UK sales increased by 2.2% to £23.9bn for the same period. – Waitrose have reported a 6.9% increase in sales (including petrol) for the week to 29 September 2012.

Higher sales were reported in many non-fashion categories helped by the weak comparisons. Gifting and leisure were the best performing categories, while beauty and luxury also performed strongly.

Fashion had its best week this year with elevated growth reported by the vast majority of stores. Weak comparisons aside, seasonal ranges continued to sell well with formalwear and footwear the best performing categories.

Homewares registered a marginal fall in trade undoing last week’s gains. Mixed trading patterns occurred with textiles and lighting outperforming, while furniture and accessories struggled.

The recent good run across non-store channels continued with the vast majority of stores recording double-digit growth.

 

Clothing, Footwear & Accessories

- Asos have appointed Brian McBride as their new Chairman, replacing Lord Waheed Alli at the beginning of November 2012. (Source: The Telegraph) – Jacques Vert have appointed Sarah Morris as their Group Trading Director, effective 08 October 2012. (Source: Drapers Online) – Celebrities and fashionistas are getting all strung up this season with the latest pair of killer heels from renowned footwear designer Jimmy Choo. As part of the Cruise 13 collection, Jimmy Choo introduces the Taste sandal worn by Azealia Banks, Elizabeth Banks, Ginnifer Goodwin and Kristin Stewart.

- Joe Brown have appointed Michael Bates as their new Managing Director and have appointed former Managing Director, Simon Brown, as their Brand Director. (Source: Retail Week) – Matalan have announced that they are to create 5,000 temporary jobs across their stores in the run up to Christmas. (Source: Retail Gazette) – It is reported that Mint Velvet have opened their 12th standalone store in Reigate, Surrey. (Source: Retail Bulletin) – Clothes Show Live has teamed up with legendary brand UCLA to sponsor ‘The Varsity Project: Emerging Designer Award in association with Clothes Show Live‘. The award is aimed specifically at emerging student designers to give the iconic American style varsity jacket their own unique stamp.

- Ted Baker have opened their first store in Beijing, China. (Source: Express)

Electrical & Entertainment

- Amazon have announced that they are to recruit 10,000 temporary staff over the Christmas period to support high demand at their fulfilment centres in the UK. (Source: The Telegraph) – Dixons Retail Plc have appointed Jaan Ivar Semlitsh as their new Managing Director for Northern Europe.

Food & Drink

- Aldi have announced plans to invest £181m to open 40 new stores and create 4,500 jobs in the UK by the end of 2013. (Source: Financial Times) – It is reported that Morrisons have appointed Gordon Mowat to the newly created role of Managing Director at their M Local business. (Source: Retail Week) – Sainsbury’s have announced that they are to relax their rules on the cosmetic appearance on fresh produce following one of the worst growing seasons British farmers have experienced for decades. (Source: Retail Week)

Household

- Argos have launched a new gifting service for businesses, allowing them to select from 15,000 products to give to their employees and customers for instant redemption. (Source: Retail Bulletin) – Jeff Fagan has joined Go Outdoors as their new Retail Director, effective 01 October 2012. (Source: Retail Week) – Harvey Nichols have announced that they are to open their first Christmas pop-up store in Westfield Merry Hill, West Midlands, effective 06 October 2012. (Source: Retail Bulletin)

- It is reported that Mothercare have appointed Philippe Dayraud as their Global Product & Sourcing Director. (Source: Retail Week) – Optical Express have announced that they are to close 40 stores of their subsidiary business while buying-back the remaining 40 as part of the administration process. (Source: Retail Week) – It is reported that Poundland have opened their new 200,000 square foot distribution centre in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, creating 250 new jobs. (Source: The Grocer) – Sports Direct have acquired 20 stores of JJB Sports from administrator KPMG for £23.7m, saving 550 jobs. (Source: Reuters) – Wiggle have appointed Peter Williams, Dilys Maltby and John Crosby to their newly created advisory board. (Source: Retail Week)

Courtesy of ‘The Thinker‘

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Why Predictive Analytics Will Transform B2B Sales & Marketing Execution

September 12, 2012

Consumer marketers have become adept at driving revenue based on predictive analytics. Potential customers are routinely scored on a wide variety of attributes from lifestyle to promotion receptiveness.  These scores allow consumers to be  segmented into groups based on shared interests, purchase likelihood, and total buying power. By starting with highly differentiated segments, marketers can design programs that are highly relevant and effective.

This is not the way that B2B sales and marketing works in most organizations today.

Yet, B2B is a ripe environment for predictive analytics: selling costs are high, sales probability is low, and resources are very expensive. While the language of B2B marketing and sales is full of references to probability — customer funnels, response rates, conversion rates, close rates, call-to-close ratios — it’s rare to see B2B organizations leverage prospect and customer data to score customer attributes, build discrete segments, and allocate resources to maximize the conversion and revenue.

But all of this is about to change. Over the next five years, common consumer marketing techniques will find a happy home in many B2B marketing and sales organizations.

Here are 6 reasons why:

  • Electronic sales processes are creating massive amounts of useful data: Today, B2B buyers spend more time interacting with companies online than they do with sales people in person or over the phone. For every successful sales call they attend, a typical prospect may spend hours interacting with content, reading forums and blogs, and testing sample products. In today’s world, every buyer action leaves a trail of digital clues that signal their context, needs, purpose, and intent.
  • Prospect attributes can be easily deduced from observable data:Most B2B organizations with CRM and content marketing capabilities have enough data to score prospects on purchase probability, likely problems or interests, and potential solution needs.
  • Relevancy matters: Even as the typical portfolio of products and solutions becomes more varied and complex, B2B sales and marketing messages tend to be narrow and simplistic. The patterns that work most consistently are destined to be forever repeated. For prospects, this means that they are often hit with messages and a pitch that ignore the nuance of their particular needs and segmentation. For many prospects, this is a turn-off that is difficult to reverse.
  • Sales & marketing funnels are based on probability: Typically, 2% of targets respond to a marketing campaign, 60% of leads are accepted by sales, 50% of accepted leads become opportunities, and 25% of opportunities close. When you look at the full marketing and sales funnel, a pathetic 1:667 targets becomes a closed deal. Using predictive analytics to improve any stage of the funnel has the potential to create incredible value.
  • Sales resources are expensive and easily tiered: It’s not uncommon to see a three-tier sales model with tele-prospecting/demand generation representatives, inside sales, and field sales. Typically, these teams are divided with the goal of aligning the highest cost resources to the highest value opportunities. Unfortunately, the allocation of accounts is typically very crude with simplistic measures like revenue or employee count determining which accounts go to a particular team. By using predictive analytics to allocate resources based on real-world potential, sales teams could increase revenues while reducing the cost of sales.
  • Marketing programs vary greatly in expense and effectiveness:If you have a stalled prospect that you want to move, a marketer has many choices. They could send an email, send a direct mail, invite them to an educational seminar, or bring them to a hospitality event. The continuum of marketing costs ranges from pennies to hundreds of dollars with corresponding variations in conversion rates. To maximize impact, marketers should save the big dollar investments for the highest probability and highest value segments. To do this, however, marketers need to use predictive analytics to score prospects based on their probability of purchase, their potential buying power, and the likely impact of a particular program or technique.

While smart organizations are beginning to put the foundation in place to better leverage data in the marketing and sales process, real obstacles still exist to efficient use of predictive science in most B2B organizations. First of all, one legacy of sales-sourced CRM data is a mess of information that is inconsistent and difficult to leverage. Second, the new art of data-driven marketing and sales requires a new set of skills that are hard to find in most B2B organizations.

But most critically, it’s hard to change both structure and behavior. The better use of data in the sales and marketing process requires changes to the way that people sell, the way that leads and accounts are allocated to sales people and territories, and the way that performance is measured. These type of changes can take a long time.

But with the current B2B shotgun marketing and sales techniques working just 1 out 667 times, the upside of change is immense.

Thanks to Paul J. D’Arcy is a CMO, entrepreneur, and writer based in Austin, Texas

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Interesting findings by Columbia Business School and NYAMA study in 2012

August 1, 2012

Sample findings:

• 91% of senior corporate marketers believe that successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions

• Yet, 39% say their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not real-time enough

• And 51% say that a lack of sharing customer data within their own organization is a barrier to effectively measuring their marketing ROI

• Large firms are much less likely to collect new forms of digital data like mobile data (19%), than they are to collect traditional customer survey data such as on demographics (74%) and attitude (54%)

• 85% of large corporations are now using social network accounts (e.g. brand accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Foursquare) as a marketing tool

• 65% of marketers said that comparing the effectiveness of marketing across different digital media is “a major challenge” for their business

• 37% of respondents did not include any mention of financial outcomes when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization

• 57% are not basing their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis

• 22% are using brand awareness as their sole measure to evaluate their marketing spend

 

In order to leverage the opportunities of big data, marketers need to improve their ability to:

• Collect meaningful customer data from a variety of sources, including real-time data

• Link that data to metrics developed for measuring marketing ROI

• Share data across the organization, linking datasets together at the customer level

• Utilize this shared data to effectively target and personalize marketing efforts to customers

In order to effectively harness the capabilities of new digital tools, marketers need to:

• Set clear business objectives for any digital marketing effort

• Develop a variety of metrics for new digital tools—from audience metrics, to engagement metrics, to financial metrics

• Develop models that link channel-specific digital metrics (like retweets or Facebook interactions) to universal metrics, including your key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Continuously innovate new measurement models, as new digital tools and marketing rapidly evolve

Above all, get started. Start with the basics of determining marketing ROI so you will create the largest impact on your organization:

• Make sure you’re using some kind of metrics on most of your marketing.

• Be ready to invest in getting some kind of data relevant to your measures.

• Make coordinating your traditional and digital media campaigns a goal.

• Set specific measurable objectives for all your campaigns.

• Put ROI in stated objectives for all your vendors (so they know your expectations to retain them or to cut them loose).

• Link marketing ROI to employee compensation, perhaps a bonus.

• Start today… as the pay off and learning curve will likely take a few years.

Then, move on to ROI best practices:

• Make sure your marketing metrics are accepted by finance.

• Make sure your data is: timely, actionable, linked at the customer-level, used to personalize marketing and target customers.

• Share your data across your organization.

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Gartner predicts that by 2017 the Chief Marketing Officer will control the technology spend

July 18, 2012

The Wall Street Journal just posted this article in advance of IBM’s 2Q earnings announcement tomorrow, leading with this sentence: “Technology companies have found a new customer—the marketing department.”

The story goes on to highlight the fact that marketing organizations are increasingly taking the lead in technology acquisition, and that “Companies are de-emphasising traditional productivity tools like PCs and standard business software in favor of advanced programs that help them boost revenue, for example by tracking customers across channels and better targeting offers and advertising.”

In the Journal article, author Spencer Ante points out that Gartner recently predicted by 2017, the chief marketing officer will control more technology spending than the company CIO. Gartner estimates that around a third of marketing department expense budgets is devoted to purchases such as systems to manage customer relationships, predict customer behavior, and run online storefronts, and that the global spend on marketing software already rose from $20 billion to $25 billion over the past year.

Anyway interesting video below:

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Video: Local Search Strategies are Key for Large Brands

June 29, 2012

A recent post we did on 6 Keyword Misconceptions spoke to the misconception that national or international businesses should avoid local search. It’s not only a misconception, it’s a huge mistake. Developing an SEO strategy that ranks you regionally can be less competitive, require less resources, and increase your overall returns. And it doesn’t discount you ranking on non-geographic keywords or phrases. Quite the opposite, ranking well locally can drive your rank nationally and internationally.

VideoInfographs produced this fantastic video infographic for Balihoo, a provider of local marketing automation technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs.

Read more: http://www.marketingtechblog.com/video-local-search/#ixzz1zAodaSOF

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How to Retain Your Best Customers

May 1, 2012

Just spotted this blog reference retaining your best customers and thought it provided some good insight.
 
Most CPG marketing budgets allocate spending between  three “buckets”: Trade Marketing, Advertising (TV and  Print), and Consumer Promotion. But Michael Schiff, a loyalty marketing consultant, proposes an alternative viewpoint using just two categories: Acquisition and Retention. Acquisition is spending directly aimed at gaining trial of your brand by consumers who have never tried it before. Retention is spending directly aimed at stemming the inevitable attrition of current buyers.

“The simple act of recasting a budget can be a real eye-opener,” said Schiff, managing director of Partners In Loyalty Marketing (www.PartnersILM.com). “For most brands, it shows that upwards of 85% of their marketing spending is focused on Acquisition.”

Parsing retention spending into dollars focused against Heavy Buyers vs. Mediums and Lights also reveals valuable lessons. For most brands, Heavies (that is, the top 25% of buyers) control 60-75% of sales. In fact, the top 5% or the SuperHeavies can control 20-30% of dollars. In contrast, the bottom 50% of buyers typically account for 6-12% of sales. Many of these Lights are one-time buyers. Most brands spend just a tiny fraction, if at all, of their total budget on Heavy Buyer retention; the vast majority of retention spending is aimed at trying to “up-sell” Mediums and Lights, typically a very inefficient use of limited marketing dollars.

“For most brands, fully half of the franchise (that is, Lights) is MIA for most of the year,” says Schiff. “It makes us feel good to count them in the franchise, but the reality is they’re a distraction from the business of meeting the needs of consumers that count. Spending against retaining or up-selling Lights (and even Mediums) is generally very ineffective. When it does work, you’ve essentially ‘rented a share point’ and in many cases eroded brand equity by excessive dealing. Yet, almost every brand we’ve looked at is chasing new buyers and giving short-shrift to the Heavies that truly are the core of its business.”

While Schiff believes the balance between Retention and Acquisition spending can be narrowed, he doesn’t believe it should ever be 50/50. “Acquisition is an investment spend. It will always cost more to capture a new buyer than retain an existing one. Ignoring one comes at the expense of the other.”

According to Schiff, 10-20% of Heavy buyers of a brand on a year-over-year basis leave the franchise altogether. Another 15-30% “downsize” their buy-rate. Hence, rather than having a “lock” on its Heavy Buyers, most brands have a major retention issue.

“The reason brands give short-shrift to spending against Heavy buyer retention,” he explains, “is because they mistakenly believe their buyers – especially Heavies – are way more loyal than they really are. The truth is you’re in a daily hand-to-hand battle to hold on to the 25% of buyers that drive your business. Except in a few categories, even the SuperHeavies do not translate into SuperLoyals.”

Retention marketing is not easy. The skew of most budgets toward acquisition spending means that brand managers are primarily taught acquisition skills. Most “relationship marketing” programs fail because they try to build a closer relationship with the Heavies using the same messaging, offers and creative that the brand uses to acquire totally new consumers.

Schiff recommends employing some simple and effective strategies for building relationships. It’s key to understand that Heavies understand your brand benefits, point of difference and effectiveness. You have equity with them, so speaking to them in “acquisition mode” is both condescending and a waste of time. Instead, effective relationship communication focuses on allowing Heavy buyers to discover information that validates their pre-existing beliefs about the efficacy and good qualities of the brand.

“When you look at brand marketing budgets through the lens of Acquisition and Retention, what you see is that most brand spending is focused on the lowest yielding activities and consumer segments,” he says. “Brands winning in today’s marketplace are increasingly making Heavy Buyer retention an important and consistent part of their marketing mix, and growing their expertise at creating true relationship-building communications.”

This essay was written by Michael Schiff, managing partner of Partners In Loyalty Marketing, a Chicago-based consultancy that specializes in program strategy, optimization, and evaluation for CPG, Rx, and OTC companies. For more information: www.PartnersILM.com.

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