A few weeks ago, I presented at the Internet Retailing Jumpstart conference in London. The event's theme was customer experience -- how emarketers need to optimize channels, but also consider how to bridge the experience over time and across channels.
In my presentation (recording is here) I spoke about the use of analytics which, if an emarketer is serious about improving customer experience, are critical for optimizing content for different e-channels, includng email, mobile and social channels.
More and more emarketers are recognizing the value of using analytics and are beginning to roll out products like Emailvision's Customer Intelligence (CI). In this context, the presentation covers some important pitfalls to avoid and some best practices to embrace.
If you don't have the time (20 minutes or so) to review the video, here's a summary for your convenience:
- Train holistically. Training on new analytic tools should always involve three aspects -- the workflows in the tool itself (the how), data specific to the users (the what) and how to think analytically (the why). There are no shortcuts. Happily, during the onboarding process for deploying CI, my Emailvision colleagues take great care to cover all three aspects.
- Know your users. Don't roll out Customer Intelligence the same way to a data-savvy marketing analyst as the time-starved campaign marketer. They have different learning and use needs.
- Reward good uses of analytics. When someone uses CI to identify a new and interesting segments, this should be held up and even rewarded in ways which signal to the emarketing team that metric-based decision-making is the desired behavior.
- Don't let qualitative judgements get an easy ride. The use of marketing metrics co-exist with intuition and anecdote. While intuition and anecdote are often a necessary shortcuts, emarketers should be encouraged to challenge qualitative judgements whenever they occur.
- Analytics training is never finished. As your company and the markets it serves both evolve, so will your data. As such, yesterday's metrics may not make sense tomorrow. But don't expect your emarketing team to take the initiative. As such, new training and refresher courses should always enable the team to learn new ways to think analytically about their emarketing efforts
[3-D pie chart shown as candidate for the worst chart type in the history of mankind and as an "anti-best practice" for anyone with serious intentions of using analytics effectively.]
