Marketing departments are drowning in data, but the majority have yet to use it to understand their customers. To change this, the next generation of chief marketing officers needs to come from the customer intelligence discipline. That is the conclusion of David Frankland, analyst at Forrester Research and author of a new survey across 300 senior marketers.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has started consultations over the Data Protection Directive, just as the European Commission has stepped up its legal action against the UK over privacy. While the ICO has given the data industry until 31st December to provide its views, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, has moved the Phorm-related law suit to the second phase.
Data Professional of the Year John Belchamber is at the heart of the telco’s CRM programme. As he explains to David Reed, it requires a combination of strategic thinking and operational effort to keep the mobile business agile.
With its acquisition of The Customer Parnership, Greenstone Data Solutions is adding to its technology footprint without losing sight of its service proposition. David Reed talks to its principals about how the bureau with a subtle difference.
A new enterprise-wide customer data integration solution claims to be able to deliver cost and resource savings of up to 90 per cent. Commnicator Corp’s new platform integrates all online customer data into a single view, including email, CRM, transactional messaging, servicing, billing and purchase confirmation. Email marketing managers are expected to be major users, reflecting their frustrations at dealing with fragmented data.
The UK’s leading parenting club is working to increase its online sales through enhanced management of its customer data. Bounty, which has over 90 per cent coverage of new families and families-to-be, is implementing a data warehouse and analytics solution from Webtrends to allow it to monitor online customer behaviour against previous purchasing patterns and target appropriate offers and products.
While consumers are happy to be sent mobile marketing messages, advertisers need to do more to win trust and be clear about their use of data. According to a study carried out by txt4ever, in association with the Direct Marketing Association, over half of respondents said that the opt-in process is not clear enough and the majority said they did not know who had contacted them.
There is little doubt that data has now conquered the world of marketing. There is an acceptance in boardrooms that data can empower marketers and that, used properly, it drives business success, especially in the context of a move away from acquisition and towards retention.
Sentiment analysis can be automated and may not only save time and resources, but may also yield a more objective and clearlydefined indication of customer feedback than human analysis. That is the finding from a detailed study carried out by Warwick Business School. It pitched the abilities of three individuals assessing three sets of unstructured texts against the Rant & Rave application from Rapide Communication.
Consumers may appear to be more disloyal, but are the models used to drive retention just out of date? From NPS to RFM, the raft of techniques used to understand churn and defection may need to be reviewed for the recession, David Reed discovers.
If you have ever judged any marketing awards, you will have seen plenty of examples of acquisition campaigns where clever insights were developed, only to be ignored. David Reed has and asks why so few marketers listen to what data has to say to them.
Creating value for clients through the way they use their data is the essence of the online data service. So what happens if, for some reason or other, the lights go out? David Reed wonders whether clients have read the small print closely enough