The Istobe eCommerce Analytics Blog

I’ve somehow ended up with a copy of Men’s Health in my house as a result of my holiday travels. It’s been a few years since I last picked up a copy and now having checked out the most recent issue I can confidently say that Men’s Health stinks at statistics.

Read Which X-Axis is the Right One? »

The one thing that any consultant will tell you is to start with the notion that profit = revenue - cost, and then go from there. The idea is that profit is the goal and that minimizing cost and/or maximizing revenue is the way to the goal. Typically, a firm must concentrate on one or another at a time to really be effective. What I’ve heard recently, however, with the economy in doubt, is a desperation-type chatter where firms want to concentrate on both at once and be effective at both. Well, the best action that I know that gets close to doing both, is database-based price discrimination.

Read How to Make Variable Pricing Work with Email Marketing »

We pontificated Monday on what we perceived as the reluctance of the big Email Service Providers to hop aboard the SMS marketing train.  We pointed to ExactTarget as a prime example.  Boy, are our faces red.

Read Our Bad: ExactTarget in the SMS Biz After All »

Not sure how many of you followed the online discussion this weekend about how Kmart (and therefore parent company Sears) used paid incentives to get bloggers to write about and tweet about their shopping excursions to the store. While we’ve talked quite a bit on our blog about using Twitter as a tool for getting messages out about products or services, in most instances, we were referring to company sponsored tweets or blogs. In this instance, well-known bloggers with an established follower network were given a $500 shopping spree to Kmart and were also supplied with a $500 give-away card that they could then give away to one of their readers – the catch was they had to post about their experiences in the store. So how did the experiment work?

Read A Brave New World: Kmart Uses Paid Twitter Posts in Its New Campaign »

One of the questions that we ponder daily at the Istobe HQ is why oh why email service providers (ESPs) like ExactTarget haven’t really jumped on the SMS marketing bandwagon. After all, it seems as though SMS marketing would logically be the next email and that the ESPs would be uniquely positioned to capitalize on this new market by leveraging their customer base to help establish the new marketing channel. Alas, it still hasn’t happened for major players like ExactTarget. Just the opposite. It seems that ExactTarget is actually trying to downplay the effectiveness of newer technologies (witness their new white paper that claims “Email Works Better than Social Networks”). But there are other ESPs out there that aren’t just trying to milk their lead in the email space and are instead embracing technological changes that are already afoot. Let’s take a look at two companies who are taking the ESP model and moving it into SMS marketing.
Read The Beginning of SSPs: SMS Finally Getting the Email Treatment »

Today one of our twitter peers asked us how she could find people of influence for a given region. As I researched the question and solution I found that there is actually a name for what is probably the end-game for this exercise:

Influencer marketing- is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

As I will demonstrate it is possible, using some freely available analytics tools, to narrow the list of influencers. However, as our own Social Network sage Matt Thomson pointed out, the analytics tools fall short in becoming truly useful and further click-based research is really needed to establish credible, influencers who may become evangelists. Read Find your ideal customer evangelists »

We all agreed long ago that the advantage of pay per click ads over more traditional advertising was that we could use conversion rates to measure ROI accurately. As a result, we amped up spending on ads that were paying off and ruthlessly eliminated those that failed to reach breakeven.  

What we didn’t consider, however, is that many of us have been calculating breakeven wrong.

Read Measuring PPC ROI: Ur Doin It Wrong »

With the news that Twitter is focusing on revenue in 2009, we shouldn’t be so surprised to hear CEO Evan Williams embracing the now-undeniable corporate presence on Twitter as a potential revenue stream. If you remember, Craig’s List followed a similar model years ago, charging for job postings and little else. One thing is certain. For businesses to wholly embrace Twitter, they will need robust analytics that they can rely on to track marketing effectiveness and ROI. Let’s talk about two ways that businesses can use the data generated by Twitter to help their marketing campaigns.

Read Have Businesses Embraced Twitter Analytics Yet? »

Lets face it, the barrage of emails during the holiday season ends up developing an impenetrable amount of noise for most email users.  According to my quick sentiment analysis (Twitter and Facebook) I would say that increased, non-targeted emailing has developed a new season that is not being taken too favorably. Being opportunistic I would like to offer a new term for the season: Spamidays.   Following suit with economists I would declare that Spamidays has already begun and, unlike our recession, has a definable end date, probably the second week of January.

What data supports my thoughts?  Your inbox is probably the biggest indicator but here are a couple of supportive tweets (selected out of about 2,000 from the last 2 days):

Have other Gmail user noticed an increase in SPAM in the last few days? 153 in a day is way more than what I usually get! Holiday SPAMMING?
CrazyKinux [Reply] [Profile] - 20:31

Holiday catalog spam & junk mail is piling up. You can practically feel the desperation of the retailers this year…so much paper & email.
crystallyn [Reply] [Profile] - 10:12

Ah, the holiday season. Filling everyone’s electronic in box with extra-special spam.
textualdeviant [Reply] [Profile] - 10:30

Interesting sentiment.   Last year year’s Spam Report also confirms an ever increasing tidal wave of email over the holiday season:

‘Tis the season to be jolly, but this month’s spam levels brought little cheer to anti-spam analysts.  Overall spam levels continued to increase, accounting for nearly three out of four emails in November. To put that growth trend into perspective, in May 2007 spam accounted for approximately 64 percent of all email traffic.  Symantect 2007 Spam Report

So I have labeled the obvious but how can you ensure your email campaigns are construed as valuable and assistive and not viewed as a contributor to Spamidays?: Read Spamidays are here. Don’t be a contributor. »

As the economy turns ever uglier, it might be a good time to take a long hard look at your business to accurately assess the health of your customer base. Businesses with strong healthy customers are in prime position to weather the economic storm and take market share from flailing compeititors. But if you work for a company with a growing share of weak, low value, high cost customers, it might be time to start getting that resume togther.

Here are the three signposts that indicate your customer base is weakening:

Read How Healthy is Your Customer Base? Here are 3 Metrics to Find Out »