The world has changed around us….
Customer are connected…they have wearable devices that track health movements,
Cars are now connected to monitor speedmusic/audio playing, smartphone apps, navigation, roadside assistance, voice commands, contextual help/offers, parking apps, engine controls and car diagnosis.
And even connected…doughnuts. That’s right, Krispy Cream and other places like Starbucks allows you to located the nearest KK to get a hot and tasty doughnut.
At this point in time, our lives have become digital, and customers are generating more and more data for marketers and CI pros to analyze. For CI pros that need to measure and analyze behavior, this task can be overwhelming…(CLICK)
Mobile itself accelerated customers life being more digital and more tractable. Though our 2013 mobile online survey, we found that customers expect brands to have a mobile strategy—as indicated by 62% expect a mobile friendly website. Further, we’ve seen an acceleration of growth of mobile apps to make customers lives easier. In response, companies will spend 130 BILLION to engineer platforms to encourage mobile engagement.
This solidifies the fact that (CLICK)
The age of the customer is here. Forrester defines the age of the customer as a A 20-year business cycle in which the most successful enterprises will reinvent themselves to systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful customers.
We found that customers are now more mobile, consume more reviews, and buy more online than ever before. Companies must respond by becoming customer-obsessed and adopting four mutually reinforcing market imperatives: 1) Get a quick start by embracing the mobile mind shift, 2) attain maximum customer intelligence by turning big data into business insights, 3) seek a broad impact by transforming their customer experience, and 4) become more effective by accelerating their digital business. This transformation happens locally, from the bottom up, and globally, with the backing of the CEO, CIO, and CMO.
In this age of the customer, individuals are always addressable…they have access to information at any given point in time.
Delta Air Lines enhances its customer experience by improving systems and focusing strategy. Delta recognized that improving the customer experience — with a focus on eliminating cancelled flights — could make a world of difference in its business. Mobile apps for customers, flight attendants, and pilots streamline the experience for everyone. Making these applications sing required retooling back-end systems and led Delta to acquire staff and technology from travel technology firm Travelport. The result of this focus was a 13-point jump in its Customer ExperienceIndex score.
Because of this systematic shift in the age of the customer, marketers must use analytics to measure, analyze, and act upon what they know matters to a customer. In my previous example, if the Gap KNEW I was going to make the purchase ANYWAY, they could have saved marketing costs by eliminating the 27 emails they sent me. Sure, the incremental cost of sending an email is extremely low. However, there is lasting damage of how I see the Gap brand now. As a discount brand. And I’m not sure that’s the impression they want to give to their customers.
More accurate measurement of incremental performance. Increasing marketing performance is the top driver of analytics adoption, but many CI pros rely on shaky numbers to know if they are accomplishing that task. Only leaders regularly hit that mark with high confidence in their metrics by accurately measuring performance across channels and return on marketing investments. This allows analytics leaders to focus on building solid recommendations rather than hedging rickety approaches.
Analytics across the entire customer life cycle, not just acquisition and retention. CI pros must generate insights across all stages of the customer life cycle. (see endnote 9) You can't be satisfied building retention models, while ignoring engagement opportunities in the "use" and "ask" stages. (see endnote 10) While analytics usage improved across life-cycle stages since 2012, the overall rate of usage remains flat at 34%, revealing too much focus on analysis that detects symptoms rather than addressing root causes of customer action (see Figure 3).
The most sophiscated marketers moved to advanced, statistically driven revenue attribution, where firms are using advanced approaches, like regression analysis and game theory, to model out the contributed revenue value of marketing and media, across all interactions. But even still-this approach has it’s downside
It’s complex to understand-not every one is a data scientist and can’t understand advanced approaches that allocated credit. You need your analytics pro to guide you through that.
2. Does not account for motivation—revenue attribution modeling analyzes the behavior but fails to capture the motivating as a contributing factor.
Hard to manage data-data sourcing and management is the biggest pinpoint for measurement and analytics today. So, user level attribution makes it incredible hard for firms to process, load and manage all cookie level data to measure a singular activities.
Allocates appropriate credit to each marketing interaction. What if you knew the real value resulting from your search or display ads? Or whether serving up a dynamic banner ad and sending an email with a personalized URL drove more conversions than a direct mail offer and email campaign? Attribution measures the relative impact of each potential interaction a brand has with a customer, and it assigns the appropriate value to each marketing interaction that leads to a desired customer action. As a result, CI pros can determine how much an email is truly worth or how much value a display ad really generates.
Calculates more accurate customer valuation metrics. Twenty-nine percent of CI pros use attribution to recalculate customer-based metrics — including customer value and customer profitability — resulting in more accurate customer metrics. (see endnote 7) One retail marketer told us, "By understanding the true cost of my marketing efforts, I can fine-tune my customer value metrics and understand who is more profitable."
Empowers marketers to spend more wisely. Over 90% of CI pros and marketers use attribution to better allocate marketing dollars to ensure future marketing effort. (see endnote 5) CMOs are demanding that their teams stretch the existing media and marketing budgets while still meeting their acquisition and retention goals. By understanding how an actual channel, campaign, or marketing tactic performs, you can spend more of your budget on tactics that are working — and divest yourself of tactics that are failing.
Point 1 and 2: Messy internal data that is difficult to manage. A wide array of operational systems houses B2B data, making data management challenging and consolidation infeasible. Long sales cycles marked by buyers taking nonlinear paths to explore solutions and the need to engage multiple decision-makers further complicate the customer data hygiene problem. Without the services of a B2B data management specialist, like Extraprise or Infogroup, the process of merging, de-duplicating, standardizing, and augmenting data spins out of control and can cost a large enterprise hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it back on track. (see endnote 1)
Point 3: For B2B Marketers, Marketing teams lack analytical skills. Analytics is not a historical skill set of marketing departments. So many CMOs don't come with analytics backgrounds, especially those who rose through the ranks of marketing communications and branding. In research we conducted on how marketers manage performance, we were dismayed to find that only 10% of respondents felt that their marketing teams were effective at using data analytics to make decisions (see Figure 1-1). (see endnote 1) When we looked for an explanation, we found that more than half (61%) admitted that most of their data work went into reporting on how they did, not showing how marketing drives better business results (see Figure 1-2).
We also found that
Leverage vendors to help manage attribution efforts. Respondents want vendors that will work with their internal teams and with additional partners when developing a cross-channel attribution strategy. Only 18% of the respondents manage their cross-channel attribution strategies in-house (this is up from 12% in 2012) (see Figure 3). Marketers should look for vendors that have flexible services and a demonstrated ability to work with their existing partners to successfully execute an attribution strategy.
Like 2012, cross-channel attribution methodology and thought leadership are rated highest in terms of importance, with Flexibility of cross-channel attribution metrics, reporting, and analysis options and ability to measure a wide range of channels remaining consistent among responders.
Far more powerful analytics. Firms don't want just data anymore — they want the power to uncover actionable insights in the moment. Features that supply analytics across the customer life cycle are growing rapidly. (see endnote 4) Respondents want capabilities such as channel correlations analysis, scenario-based marketing investment recommendations, and predictive consumer and prospect analytics (see Figure 10). A marketer at a large technology company told us that it uses attribution insights to shift marketing budgets, benchmark channel performance, and connect insights with brand-based metrics such as brand awareness and perception.