Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started
September 10th, 2008 by Doug Bright(Read the entire Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started series)
More and more companies are looking to implement customer analytics as a way to better understand purchasing behavior and squeeze more revenue out of their customers. And why not? Over the past few years, companies have been investing in collecting tons of data about their customers through their CRM, web analytics, and transactional systems. But how do you get started in customer analytics?
Step 1. What’s the goal?
I know. You have visions of charts and graphs dancing in your head. You want to find out if you should buy Omniture or Coremetrics, SAS or SPSS, hire analysts or bring in an outside consulting firm. But these choices are easy to make as long as you have a well defined goal. So what is your goal? There are generally only three goals in all of marketing, and customer analytics is no exception:
- Acquire new customers more cost effectively
- Increase revenue from your existing customer base
- Keep customers from defecting to competitors
Now, there isn’t a company worth its salt that wouldn’t want to do all of these things, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. Pick one clear goal and and plan around it. The tools you end up buying in support of that goal will likely work for the other goals as well.
By choosing one clear goal you eliminate the analysis paralysis that goes with tackling an immense problem by breaking it down into a more digestible chunk. By trying to do too much at once, you can make a real contribution to the business while still maintaining your sanity.
Read Part 2
Tags: Customer Analytics, getting started
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