If you're among a growing number of marketers faced with expanding customer data housed in a marketing database that can't keep pace, deliver insightful data analysis, or provide you the intelligence you need to make confident decisions, it's time for a marketing database check-up.
As companies become customer-centric, the marketing database must become the nucleus of business operations. And technology providers have delivered significant gains in recent years to help marketers achieve greater ROI and sharpen their competitive edge.
Do you have what it takes to compete today? Here are four critical questions that will help you determine whether your marketing database is a relic of the past or an engine for future growth.
1. Who Calls the Shots: Marketing or IT? The first question is the most important. Who's in control of database marketing? The likely answer is the IT department. Typically, IT staff own the data, crunch the numbers and make strategic planning decisions.
Marketers are stuck in response mode. They lack tools to conduct their own analysis and instead must wait up to weeks for results to come from an IT report. This stymies analysis and discourages marketers from tackling sophisticated marketing issues.
Fortunately, the tide is turning. Database marketing technology has become dramatically easier to use as it has evolved in performance sophistication. And new tools have surfaced that place control for analytics and campaign management squarely in the hands of marketers.
Today's smarter database marketing tools are built around friendly, intuitive graphical user interfaces driven by wizards and experts. These provide step-by-step guidance through the campaign management, data analysis and reporting process.
Marketers can now complete common marketing activities from the desktop, such as:
__ Customer profitability analysis
__ Purchase analysis across products and channels
__ Identification of characteristics of customers who lapse/switch or respond to a specific promotion
__ Customer segment migration analysis
__ Creation of new marketing metrics
__ Train-of-thought analysis on large volumes of data
The ability to take greater ownership of database marketing comes just as more is being asked of marketers. These growing expectations can be met with meaningful access to marketing data by the marketing department, not the IT department. If your current database does not provide direct access and control, you're not taking full responsibility for your own success.
2. Can You See Your Data?
Marketers need access to data on their desktops, and they need to view this data on their own terms. Typically creative, rightbrain creatures, marketers prefer working with images rather than technical structures. And they view marketing as continual investigation of how they are satisfying customers.
Thankfully, new visual methods for capturing and displaying data are available. These include GIS mapping, charting, crosstabulation, Venn diagrams, and other visual tools.
Visualization simplifies the increasingly complex discipline of database marketing. It enables marketers to them perceive trends more quickly and clearly and broadcast the results of their analysis to a wide business audience.
Visualization transforms not only how marketers view and manipulate their data, but how they design, execute and review the impact of marketing spend on customer behavior. Visualization also improves campaign management. Highly graphical, drag-and-drop user interfaces provide an easy to use yet highly functional method for defining and executing even the most complex campaigns.
Is database marketing a visual experience at your company? If not, look for a new solution.
3. Do You Catch Up on Sleep Between Queries?
Today, there's no excuse for marketers to wait hours for the results of complex database queries. While industry analysts report sky-rocketing volumes of data, database technology has been keeping pace.
Many companies that grapple with large volumes of data have begun to use a new form of analytical technology called columnbased analytical technology, or CBAT.
Don't let the acronym scare you. The concept is simple: Data is analyzed by column, rather than by row. The result is powerful: CBAT enables ad-hoc, train of thought analysis on large volumes of data with results returned in mere seconds.
Through CBAT, marketers can establish a direct dialogue with data. They can value, rank and compare hundreds of millions of transactions, without needing to pre-define the questions for IT staff. They can query away without the fear of wasting valuable time, resource and budget.
