eCommerce Analytics

The other day I was flipping through the channels and landed on an episode of CSI.  I forget which flavor, it looked sunny and beachy so it was probably not the one in New York City.   Anyway, in this episode a murder took place and the only evidence seemed to be a passerby’s recollection of a license plate and hair color of the driver.  Not much to start with but as we all know that is enough for the CSI team.  

Read Marketing CSI »

(Read the entire Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started series)

The situation so far: We have a glut of women’s sweater inventory that we need to unload. We decided to identify the customers who are most likely interested in purchasing women’s sweaters so that we can send full priced offers to them while offering deep discounts to the rest of the customer base.

In part 4 we produced the relevant data and had our data modeler (or software solution) produce a list of customers and their relative probabilities of responding to a sweater offer.

Read Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started (part 6) »

You know my favorite commercial right now? Cash4Gold. Not sure if you’ve seen it , but for some reason it always seems to pop up when I’m watching TV at the gym.  The premise is straight-forward: Cash4Gold sends you an envelope, you stuff all that gold just laying around the house into this envelope (old wedding rings? Stuff it in. Great grandma’s necklace? Stuff it in. Gold rope you used to wear in high school? Stuff it in). You then send that envelope to the folks at Cash4Gold, they assess the value, and in return, you get - you guessed it - cash. Wow, great, huh? Yeah, just a few questions on this side, like:

Read Customer Lifetime Value: The Best Value For Your Marketing Dollars »

Though Kevin Hillstrom believes that the low variable cost is the real factor in the “killer ROI” that email affords multi-channel retailers, I would also mention that it’s low variable cost also contributes to the low amount of effort that retailers put into their email marketing. That is, retailers don’t put the money they should behind email because they view the low variable cost - and low marginal cost - as a license to spam. The way this manifests itself in the marketplace is that spending on email optimization technology trudges behind other technological spending like, say, search engine optimization (SE0).

Read Targeted Email Campaigns Only Way to Recapture Email ROI »

I will be the first to admit that our industry, predictive analytics to support retail marketing strategies, is dense with technical words, phrases and methodologies all wrapped up into various umbrella groups or plans such as “Market Segmentation Analysis”, “Customer Analysis”, “Predictive Marketing”, “Retail Pricing Strategy” etc. Although each sounds a bit different all of these approaches strive to reach the same outcome:

• Use available data to describe customers and understand their needs, wants and actions

and each takes a different approach but all the approaches are based on well established principles of computer science and statistics.

Read Market Segmentation Research: Science Fiction or Non-Fiction »

Earlier this month Tim Parry argued the merits of micro-segmentation in a Multichannel Merchant article called Divide and Conquer.  The gist is that the more you can sub-divide your segments, the better you can target your message to each group resulting in higher response rates.

Read How many Customer Segments are Too Many? »

Last week, I presented some recent survey results compiled by InternetRetailer.com and eMarketer (Better than average?) that may help online retailers gauge how they compare to the “typical” online retailer. As part of my blog entry, I talked about increased competition in email marketing and the challenge of staying in front of customers as the inbox gets more crowded. InternetRetailer.com just followed up on their survey with an article detailing the steps email marketers should take to better reach their customers. I think they make some really good points, so wanted to share the article (Survey: Too much and not enough) and talk about their findings.

Read Segmentation Analysis: The First Step To Surviving Increased Competition »

With the holiday season upon us, and with the specter of economic downturn no longer looming but now in full unfurling, the hue and cry for free shipping to draw customers has never been greater. Almost everyone insists that drastic price cuts and coupon-like free shipping are necessary evils to keep your customers from the competition. But I would urge smaller retailers to resist giving up margin and making deal-seekers of their entire housefile. Instead they should get more personal.

Read Retail Marketing Strategy Should Rely More on Personalization, Less on Free Shipping »

Over the last month or so I have been busy assessing various hosting providers for our product. The host is a technical partner who is responsible for ensuring our products are always running and safe from illegitimate access.

In the past, and even today, a hosting company managed hundreds to thousands of servers and when a new customer wanted to go online the customer deduce what size server is needed or whether they can share a server with other customers. That arrangement works well but it can be expensive and it does not scale very well so what else is there? The alternative is a new type of hosting environment: Cloud computing.

Read Putting the Cloud to Work for our Customers »

(Read the entire Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started series)

Now that we’ve explored a couple of possible customer analytics goals and developed plans to achieve them, we can now start thinking about execution.  Before we do that, however, I want to touch on what is probably the biggest challenge in executing a customer analytics initiative: organizational behavior.

Read Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started (Part 5) »