The Daily Igniter Customer Analytics Blog

By now, direct marketers need to acknowledge that Twitter is here to stay and constitutes a new marketing channel altogether. However, that doesn’t mean that every company needs to go out and establish a Twitter strategy. After all, not all of the companies in the world have a customer demographic that overlays nicely onto Twitter’s. But as a business tool for retailers, the protracted success of Dell and Woot, to name two, proves that when harnessed well, Twitter is a great way to educate potential and current customers about your company and your products.

Read Twitter for Business - A Starter Kit of Links for Would-Be Twitter Marketers »

Ad Age reports on a Shop.org study that shows 45% of online retailers are significantly increasing their budget for free shipping this holiday season.  It appears that, this holiday season, everyone is a defector in the prisoner’s dilemma that is free shipping.  

We’ve always advocated holding firm on shipping charges but the tide is simply too strong to resist this holiday season.  Instead, consider a way to minimize the damage.

Read 45% of Online Retailers Increasing Free Shipping Budget for Holidays »

With today’s news peppered with articles about the possible demise of Circuit City, the sinking Dow, and the continued decline in consumer spending, many companies are concerned about how their customers are going to respond to the tough times ahead. Several online retailers are already going down the discount path to try and get customers to spend their money early– well before their credit dries up. I’m sure many of you have already been hit up like I have with numerous discounts from shops that don’t typically give discounts – I’ve been surprised by the recent emails I’ve received from the likes of JCrew, a company that never seems to discount their merchandise.

Read Finding Customers Who Will Weather This Storm: Customer Segmentation in a Down Economy »

We write a lot about email on this blog and that’s largely because our clients tell us that the product predictions that come out of our customer prediction database makes the most monetary difference when used for email relevance. (It’s hard to argue with the 64% increase in revenue per email that we get with those predictions.) But the email-centricity is also indicative of the Baby Boomer and Gen X markets that our clients serve. And now that we’ve started to engage with companies that cater to younger markets (namely Millennials), we’ve gotten a chance to deal with newer communication channels (namely SMS text). SMS text marketing is arriving sooner than we’d ever imagined. And I have four numbers that prove it.

Read Four Numbers that Tell Me Why SMS Marketing Is About to Blow Up »

I was reading up on analytics technology today and ran across an interesting article at TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) which surprised me.  It was surprising due to the fact that it was a year old but was reporting the same results as today:  predicitve analytics solutions are still novel to many companies and unknown to even more.  Even after dozens, if not hundreds, of successful case studies show how predictive analytics are a low-effort, high ROI solution to help a company achieve strategic goals:

[P]redictive analytics can yield a substantial ROI. Predictive analytics can help companies optimize existing processes, better understand customer behavior, identify unexpected opportunities, and anticipate problems before they happen,” Eckerson writes. For six years running, he points out, a majority of TDWI’s annual Leadership Award winners have used predictive analytic solutions to achieve noteworthy business results.

Before we created our predictive analytics solution for email marketing we knew the benefits of predictive analytics solutions and we realized that marketing has many metrics and data points as well as a very strong set of historical data which we can and do use to build solid, accurate models of customer behavior and desire.   Why are users of predictive analytics still considered Early Adopters?

Read Predictive Analytics Provide Big Payouts For Early Adopters »

Have we really dissected email marketing so thoroughly that we’re talking about best practices for “From” fields? In a word, yes.

Monday, Dharmesh Shah posted 8 email marketing tips distilled from an interview with Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman in The Boston Globe.  I agree wholeheartedly with 7/8ths of her tips, but #7 tripped me up a bit:

7. Two things that get your email opened: #1:  “From” and #2 “Subject”. 

Read Email “From” Field: Calling Card or Attention Grabber? »

First things first, no matter who you support, I hope all of you have either gone out to vote today, or are planning to go out to vote. Although I’m usually not this dedicated, I woke up at 6:30 this morning to try and make it to the polls by 7. I was hoping I might be able to get their before the crowds, but by the time I got there at 6:55, the line was already two blocks long. I’ve voted at the same polling station for over 10 years now, and I have to admit that I’ve never seen such an incredible turn out for any election thus far. It took me about an hour to make it through, which was actually less than what I originally thought, but glad I beat the long lines I know will be there later this evening.

Read Obama Leading in the Polls? Perhaps it’s Due to Better Marketing »

Being a Boston-area, MIT-based company, Ignite always pulls for other Boston-area, MIT-based companies. And this goes double for companies in the customer analytics and targeted email realms. Such is the case with Constant Contact, one of the email service provider (ESP) titans out there. And now we get a new survey from Constant Contact that echoes our ramblings at Ignite. email marketing is becoming more and more important for small businesses as the economy stumbles into the Christmas season.

Read Constant Contact Survey Shows Small Businesses Will Rely on Email Marketing this Holiday Season »

The other day I was flipping through the channels and landed on an episode of CSI.  I forget which flavor, it looked sunny and beachy so it was probably not the one in New York City.   Anyway, in this episode a murder took place and the only evidence seemed to be a passerby’s recollection of a license plate and hair color of the driver.  Not much to start with but as we all know that is enough for the CSI team.  

Read Marketing CSI »

(Read the entire Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started series)

The situation so far: We have a glut of women’s sweater inventory that we need to unload. We decided to identify the customers who are most likely interested in purchasing women’s sweaters so that we can send full priced offers to them while offering deep discounts to the rest of the customer base.

In part 4 we produced the relevant data and had our data modeler (or software solution) produce a list of customers and their relative probabilities of responding to a sweater offer.

Read Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started (part 6) »