by David Baker, Monday, February 8, 2010
Three numbers: 90; 10; 0. 90 is the percent of total time spent on an email campaign during which email marketers work on getting that campaign out the door. 10 is the percent of time spent in reporting and analysis. And zero is the amount of time most marketers spend figuring out how to optimize a program.
The key to optimization is understanding what is maneuverable, and weighing this against the expected return. If the return is too small, you'll never build continuity over time. If the effort is far too complex or time-consuming, it will compete with day-to-day operations and ultimately drive your business down.
Here are three ways to create actionable insights.
Simplify the cockpit instruments. If you've ever looked inside an aircraft cockpit, you'll see it looks like analytics and the business process: confusing if you try to take it all in at once. Marketers, much like the pilot, may know all the panels and instruments and the outputs of each. Yet it becomes increasingly difficult for marketers to know which instruments to monitor, which to tweak, and in what order. To simplify, you have to strip it down by what insights each variable or output informs.
Think RFM. While it's directional in theory, you do want to index high-frequency purchase segments and keep a pulse on these campaign over campaign, program over program. You want to know the high cart value transactors and index them to understand timing and how offers/pricing impacts these behaviors. You want to understand how these segments interact with your site and model this against other front-of-the-funnel behaviors. All in all, you want an instrument panel that helps you understand transactional behaviors and how this channel influences this.
Shake the "Magic 8 Ball." As I've said many times, marketing is a process of hedging bets on what you think will work. In the eCRM space, the same tactics have been used over and over again for years, so there really isn't some magic bullet that works for everyone.
I think you should create your own "Magic 8 Ball" for marketing decisions. Just ask a question, shake the 8-Ball and the following options will come forth: "Go with your first instinct." "Ask your best engineer." "Reference your benchmark guide." "Do what you did last year." "Ask someone that knows nothing about email." And "Shake it again."
The magic of great marketing is making decisions faster than someone else, so you can maximize in-market. You can't do this unless you have strong hypotheses about the outcomes. Many wait for data before they make decisions - a tactic that works only in a really fluid organization. If your reports take two weeks to produce, then your data supply chain or outputs are too complex and need revisiting. But that shouldn't preclude you from making in-market decisions. Just shake the 8-Ball when in doubt.
Become a finance and risk manager for a day. In finance, actionable analytics are a vital forensic and forecasting tool that helps assess the implications of past performance and model future implications. Take a day each month, run analysis of performance, costs, process assessment, and vendor analysis, and pull these variables together.
By removing your marketing hat, you can take a clearer picture of the finances of your business unit and the marketing function, and assess which attributes are most important. What is your real cost to send an email? If you wanted to modify the conversion process on your site, what is the potential risk? What if you wanted to hold out a group for testing? What is the impact of that hold-out? What costs would apply to putting some of your hypotheses in action? What is the cost /benefit of outsourcing some of these activities?
Actionable insights can be realized -- but only if you understand the gaps in your data supply chain, you are willing to take "action" on your hypothesis, you have a financial foundation to support your logic, and you have an understanding of the risk involved.
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