If you haven’t budgeted for an increase in your database management or e-mail marketing expenditures, bear in mind that your competitors probably have. In “Target Marketing Priorities Analysis,” a report by Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer, the partners with research firm CSO Insights and underwritten by direct marketing services provider Harte-Hanks, a survey of 281 marketing executives showed that more 70% of respondents are boosting their database spending, and more than 60% are spending more on e-mail marketing.
Some of these companies may want to consider spending more on measurement and analysis. Twenty-nine percent of respondents admitted that they had no method for measuring customer profitability. “A common challenge,” Dickie and Trailer noted, “is that the data needed to do customer value calculations can be found only in various disparate systems. To leverage analytics software requires that the data be pulled from these systems and rationalized before any meaningful analysis can take place.”
And while most respondents use demographic (nearly 67%), geographic (61%), past purchase history (60%), and past contact history (60%) data in their target marketing program, other types of data are, according to Dickie and Trailer, “underutilized.” Given that only 27% of respondents use Web mining data, just 25% use primary research attitudinal information, and fewer than 23% use channel preference data, a company that that calls on such information when creating a marketing program may be at a competitive advantage.
“The ‘4 R’s’ of customer interaction history come to mind,” wrote Dickie and Trailer. “Past customers want firms to Recognize, Remember, Respect, and Respond to them in ways they prefer. To do this requires companies to leverage all the information they have gathered about previous dealings with customers.”
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