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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS





The heat is on when it comes to


measuring and analyzing

marketing data for strategic




The purpose of data evaluation is to identify customers’ Accordingly, the results of a study conducted by Vi-
behavior and reactions to marketing campaigns in order sionEdge Marketing and ITSMA (April 2014) revealed
to grow sales revenues. Business Intelligence helps here that 85% of marketers worldwide said the pressure to
to obtain the necessary information to customers and the measure marketing’s business value and contribution
market, as well as to understand, analyze and evaluate had increased. Just 14% said the level of pressure
the data to optimize decision-making processes and to had stayed the same, and 1% thought it had de-
develop a competitive advantage from the data analysis. creased.
Meaningful trends can be identified and cause-effect rela-
tionships determined to maximize the value of operational Besides these facts, the study found that marketers
-strategic actions that ultimately optimize business suc- worldwide felt they were doing a good job at proving
cess. their effect on business to their leadership teams,
with nearly two-thirds agreeing or strongly agreeing
Business Intelligence for digital direct marketing opti- with this statement.
mization
Of course, hurdles remain with data-related issues
The most challenging part is generally the development being the biggest concern: For instance, 40% of re-
of carefully planned marketing campaigns which imply spondents said that applying formal processes to
that customized strategies are in place to increase sales gathering, handling and analyzing, and reporting data
and customer satisfaction. was a top challenge for measuring the business con-
tribution of marketing. Besides that, issues with ac-
First step is the determination and measurement of key cess to the right data as well as using data and ana-
performance indicators (KPI), before defining the clus- lytics to actually link marketing’s impact to business
ters/segments that are meaningful for purchases and results were each cited by 39% of respondents.
email interactions. Only then does it make sense to con-
tinue with the elaboration of appropriate email marketing From marketing data analysis to sales strategy
strategies for each cluster, which ultimately serve as a
marketing tool that can (a) contribute to changes in cor- To better understand, for instance, how data analysis
porate sales (up-sell and cross-sell), (b) optimize the can contribute to the optimization of email marketing
product mix sold to each customer (maximizing the band- activities, it can be useful to analyze practical exam-
width), and last but not least of course, (c) lead to demon- ples of major international luxury fashion companies,
strable increase in customer satisfaction. all of which are active worldwide and are running in
the background sophisticated email marketing sys-
tems: on an average one email per week is sent to
each customer, whereby the communication with the
customer is more or less personally well suited to
each individual. In fact, for each individual campaign,
analysis to determine the influence of just this cam-
paign on purchase transactions there performed.
To obtain a meaningful view of data in these cases,
usually both e-commerce and in-store purchases are
taken into account over a period of seven days after
opening the email (influence window). In the luxury
segment, this influence extends from seven to ten
days for online purchases and to twenty to thirty days
for in-store purchases. Anyway, results show that
more than 50% of all offline purchases are made
within seven days after opening the email.

Incredible sales figures and an amazing success sto-
ry we can learn from. ◊

By Daniela La Marca


MediaBUZZ Pte Ltd - Independant ePublisher for Asia
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