Analytics-blog

Alright friends,

I’ve been speaking again with my co-worker, “The Mayor,” about list pulls.  He has a lot of experience in this realm and thought it would be worth mentioning on this analytics blog because analytics are essential to understanding what list to “pull.”

The approach we were discussing is based on a prospect showing great interest in making a purchase via their behavior.  You just simply remind them of their one-time intentions in a very “soft” manner.

Here are a few examples:

• Abandoned Shopping Cart – The potential customer added a product to their cart, but never completed checkout.
• Inquiring Prospect  - The potential customer called your team and gave them all the required info, but for some reason backed out of the transaction.

Obviously, you should be storing this data inside your analytics or business intelligence system.  And, obviously, your call center analytics or business intelligence system should be hooked up to your email and outbound call systems.

Assuming you are technically solvent…if you sent the customer either an email or called them with a special offer regarding the specific product they “almost bought,” there’s a good chance they will not be mortally offended and threaten, or abuse your team members with legal action.   And, there’s a decent chance they will finish the purchase.

Now we can take it a step further.

• Unidentified Interest – In this case someone contacts your call center team, shows a lot of interest in a product, but doesn’t give out much info.  Much like the author of this post, they are paranoid.

In this case hopefully you can understand why they are refusing to buy the item.  Then you can segment these folks out and decide which ones are worth calling back.  Now obviously…you don’t have much information beyond their phone number.

However, you can take that phone number and contract a firm to provide you with the name and address of the owner.  Then you can send some follow-up snail mail to them with an offer about that same product.

It’s a little sneaky for sure, but The Mayor tells me it works quite well.

After having this discussion, I wondered if some of my “deja vu” experiences can be attributed to the Mayor.  ”I know I’ve seen this product before…know I wanted it…did I dream this?….I think that I did!”

And if you are barely clinging to reality- like myself- you will take it as a signal from God that you are meant to purchase that item and will happily shell out the cash.  It was destiny.

And if you can get a customer to fulfill their destiny 10% of the time it was probably worth the effort.

So it’s not quite like Spy vs. Spy.  In fact, to some extent it’s a complimentary relationship.

For example, I’m a big fan of Omniture and their SaaS online marketing analytics system.  While at Sony I did my best to push adoption across multiple marketing and website groups…and in the end they were adopted across most (if not all) Sony divisions.  They have a great user interface and their support system was excellent.  They are the best in online marketing & analytics tools in my opinion.

At AnalytixOnDemand we also talk about marketing analytics.  However, when we talk about it, online marketing analytics are just a subset of a much larger picture.  We also support statistics such as sales per square foot and return on equity that have very little to do with online marketing.

So the real difference between an Omniture and an AnalytixOnDemand is pedigree.

Omniture has a pedigree in online marketing analytics.

AnalytixOnDemand has a pedigree in business intelligence.

Business Intelligence encompasses online marketing analytics + call center + finance + logistics etc.

This means AOD must be conversant in hundreds of reports and KPI’s across industries.  This is not easily attained.  It requires years of experience.

In addition, companies with a business intelligence pedigree like AnalytixOnDemand expect data to appear from MANY sources.  Not just a browser.  As such, our systems and processes are built around the concept that we will be dealing with messy data.  We’ve built tools and processes specifically to identify and report these issues.  And it’s just not for online data…it’s ANY data.

If you read this blog you probably are thinking…well why in the heck would I even consider Omniture?  Well…they have a great system as pertains to anything you are doing online.  And also, Omniture combines those analytics with various optimization tools that help folks real-time organize and organize their website, campaigns etc.

Our application helps you look at performance across all channels or even across your entire enterprise….and also drill down to figure out why a given trend or pattern exists.

There is certainly some overlap between the two systems.

If you are a Director of Online Marketing, I would not advise you to drop Omniture in favor of AOD.  However, if you are VP of Marketing with a multi-channel marketing effort and managing the call center, I would advise you to hire AOD in addition to retaining Omniture.

Hope that makes sense.