The Istobe eCommerce Analytics Blog

eMarketer has an interview up with Bill Nussey of Silverpop in which he warns against badgering customers with email marketing that is too frequent or irrelevant to their interests.  The phrase he used is to describe this more tailored, moderate approach to email marketing is “keeping it in the green zone”.

The phrase resonated with me — perhaps because the “green zone” is how we visually depict customers who are likely to respond favorably to given email content in our new product.  

Read The Email Marketing Green Zone »

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been watching the fallout from two important conferences taking place on the West Coast (where I would much rather be right now given the latest round of snow in Boston.)  The first annual Predicitive Analytics World ’09 was staged in San Francisco on Feb 18th and 19th and eTail West 2009 took place last week and drew in a host of e-Marketers from around the country. One common theme that I seem to be hearing from the blogs and articles I’ve read from both: make sure you’re using your customer data effectively and, most importantly, keep it simple.
Read Simplicity is Key for Marketing Analytics »

Last week in Weather Marketing we talked about ways to use freely available temperature and precipitation data to make sure you’re not marketing parkas to your customers in Texas. The rub was that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dosn’t exactly make the data available in the friendliest of formats. 

We’ve put our data manipulation skills to work and reworked the data in a way that will make it easy to import into a database table or append to your customer file. The following files provide the average annual and seasonal temperature (in Fahrenheit) and precipitation (in inches) for each state and for the US as a whole. It also lists standard deviation for each value in case you want to go super-nerdy on your analysis.

Have at it in the format of your choice!

Comma separated value: temp_and_precip_by_state.csv

Excel 2007: temp_and_precip_by_state.xlsx

It is a wintry, slushy mess in Boston today. Rivers of ice cold water line every street and each passing car sprays pedestrians unfortunate enough to have to walk to work.

I am one of these pedestrians. Worse, as a Boston transplant, I am woefully ill-equipped to stay dry. At this moment my feet and legs are soaked and I have never been more willing to part with money for a good pair of boots.  Really, I’m ready to buy right now. It’s urgent.

Read Weather Marketing »

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 had planned to write about new businesses and business concepts that I observed at the unConference last week. But given the economic meltdown that only seems to be accelerating, I thought that I’d better continue along the lines of Chris and Doug the last two days and address how multi-channel retail businesses can profit from customer analytics in an economy where consumers are wary of spending money. The truth: customer analytics will better help you protect your customer base from larger retailers who dangle lower prices.

Read Protecting Your Customer Base in Bad Economic Times »

This economy thing looks bad.

As we all prepare ourselves for diminished consumer spending in the months ahead we can expect to see price play a pivotal role in buyer decisions.  Is there any way retailers can avoid engaging in price wars and destroying margins this holiday season?

Read Avoiding Price Competition this Holiday Season »