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Must Read Classic Articles (continued)

This is an archive; for latest see the Marketing Productivity Blog and Twitter: @jimnovo

These articles are keepers for customer retention oriented, Data-Driven marketers; they are selected primarily because they provide very short-in-supply case studies, metrics, or process models for relationship marketing, customer retention, or customer loyalty marketing on the Web.


Cooking a Good Segmentation
October 30, 2001  DM Review
This is a great article on the fine art of customer segmentation.  Just because you can subdivide your customer base into 100 segments doesn't mean you should.  This happens a lot at companies using data mining before they are ready for it - they find unique segments they were not aware of, and there's 14 people in a database of 1 million in the segment.  Over-segmentation is the root cause of the disease known as over-targeting.

Tall Women's Clothing Site
Proves Viable Niche
October 25, 2001   E-Commerce Guide.com
Niche, baby, niche.  This is the third story we've seen about the success of ultra-focused retailing on the 'Net.  Why are these businesses so successful?  Instead of trying to rework the medium, they take advantage of the very nature of it - the audience is searching for information on products they can't find.  Lots of benchmarking metrics in this one - orders, revenues, costs, customer counts.

Measurement Made Simple
October 22, 2001   ClickZ
Interesting.  The CEO of an analytics company saying people have made analyzing customers too complicated.  Of course, I agree.  Also interesting is he focuses on a technique my readers are familiar with - measuring change rather than focusing on absolute numbers.  If you're looking for a simple customer profiling and analysis method, try this one.

SAS chief: 'Analytics' an overused term
October 17, 2001  searchCRM.com
Oh man, is this guy a classic.  Kicked butt and took no prisoners.  And he's right.  Analytics should be about prediction, else they're just reports.  Like predicting the likelihood of a customer to remain a customer, which is what my book is all about - and you can do it with an Excel spreadsheet.  My method won't give you a "likelihood between 0 and 1 of remaining a customer" like Mr. Goodnight's software, but ranks the same likelihood on a 25 unit scale, most likely to least likely.  He says of investment bankers, "We're having to beat them off with a stick."  Hmmm...  I wonder...

Bigstep.com Takes Giant Step
in Improved Customer Targeting
October 16, 2001  iMarketing News
Gotta love it.  The folks at Bigstep.com read the Drilling Down book and have pulled off their first Latency-based targeting effort, bagging only a 33% increase in conversion versus the control group.  Classic use of the technique, finding a trip wire for their search engine listing services at 90 days after a site went up.  Also bagged a 500% - 800% increase in response rate on general campaigns by targeting customers most likely to respond.  Well done!!

Next-Wave Business Analytics
October 12, 2001  Information Week
And there it is, folks.  The next wave is here, and it's what I've been saying right here on this site for a year now.  "Change is the major concern in business...What's needed are business analytics tied to sensors and thresholds that can alert managers to the slightest nuance of change...(managers) want a tool to alert them that platinum customers are buying fewer goods, or that there's a hemorrhage of platinum customers dropping down to gold, silver, or bronze levels...to know if trends are showing danger signs.  I'd also like to know at an individual level who those people are."  Honestly!  A real chin scratcher, huh?  Did he read this on my home page?  Did You?  He's talking about Trip Wire Marketing.

Direct Marketing and CRM
October 11, 2001  CRMCommunity.com
Well, here the debate starts.  This is the first article I've seen that comes right out and says that the success of CRM depends on people who have spent their careers in direct marketing and understand the business of analyzing customer data.  Comments at the end of the article from the other side of the camp hang on to the "it's really different this time" mantra.  Right.  Check your definition of direct marketing, please - it means conducting business directly with customers, not "focusing on outbound selling and generating a response from the customer."  Experience matters.

Work With It
October 8, 2001  Direct Magazine
"At its core, customer relationship management is simply about increasing profits and sales by better understanding who your customers are, which ones are driving in the greatest profits, what your high-value customers want, and how to satisfy them."  
I love this!  Another CRM skunkworks article,  talking about doing CRM using existing or scaled back resources.  Folks, the 80/20 rule doesn't just apply to customers - you can usually get 80% of what you need with 20% of the resources - all the big expense is in getting to that last 20%.  The reason I get excited about articles like this is simple: I've been saying this same thing for 2 years.  If you are interested in this idea, try Simple CRM.

Number Crunching
for Customer Understanding
October 8, 2001  CRM Magazine
"The average Global 3000 firm spent in excess of $3 million building and maintaining their data warehouses.  Yet more than half were unable to link the spending with any distinct business benefit."  That's outrageous; what else is the warehouse for?  Sound like plenty of potential business out there for the High ROI Workshop.

Old-Economy Lessons for Web Marketers
October 4, 2001  DM News
This article states concisely the argument for "real" database marketing, as opposed to the version preached by the pundits and the trade mags for the past several years.  There is a science to this stuff and if you understand what you are doing, it can be very profitable - particularly in tough economic environments.  Plus a reinforcement of an idea few pay attention to - good customer retention starts with smart customer acquisition.  Learn who your best customers are and go get more like them; it's the easiest money there is.

Building a very simple data mart from
Call records in a Contact Centre
October 1, 2001   crm-forum.com
I love this!  Simple customer analysis looking at call center transactions using an Excel spreadsheet.  Sounds familiar.  If you don't know an ACD from your elbow, don't bother with this article.  It is really amazing how many companies don't pay attention to this kind of metric analysis when they could make more money by simply doing so.

What Makes E-Commerce Work
September 28, 2001  iMarketing News
If you didn't listen the first time ( 2 years ago), here it is again - not everybody is a remote shopper, and the behavior of a person is more highly predictive than any affinity.  The most demographically targeted prospect is less likely to buy online than just about anybody who has purchased online at least once.  You should be renting catalog lists, not magazine lists, if you are an online retailer.  Dig?  And don't forget to ask for a Recency select.

The Beauty of 80 Percent
September 27, 2001  iMarketing News
Great piece by one of the pillars of the DM community.  People continue to misapply and distort the meaning of the Pareto (80/20) and related Zipf Laws.  They do not mean to ignore or fire customers.  These laws quantify one of the cardinal rules of direct - value is unevenly  distributed in every population, and there are number of different ways to use this idea to drive higher revenues while reducing costs.

Customer Analytics:
Making the Difference in CRM
September 25, 2001   DM Review
Oh boy.  I thought the whole point of CRM was the analytics.  After all, how can you make any money implementing the CRM beast without them?  The whole idea is based on knowing your customers, but somehow along the way CRM became just a very expensive way to collect and store data.  Now we need the analytics, which in my opinion, is the place you start.  Face it, there are cheaper ways to collect the data than implementing a CRM suite.  It's all right there in your operational databases.  Ugh!  Put me out of my misery!

How Much Are Your Customers Worth?
September 24, 2001  1to1.com
Well folks, it appears there is such a thing as a proxies for LifeTime Value and the Peppers & Rodgers Group wanted you to know.  Of course they don't tell you how to use them for anything, so if you want to know that, check here, here, and here.  And here.

End the scourge of wasted data
September 21, 2001   crm-forum.com
This article is a great explanation of a problem many data-driven marketers face and a practical solution.  In fact, this is exactly what we did to set up the SportLine loyalty program tracking.  Learn how to create action-oriented reports with this data in the Metrics Workshop.

Segmentation Campaign 
Shapes Up As Success for Fitness Club
September 17, 2001   DM News
I get a lot of questions from people about using direct marketing to acquire offline customers in geographical segments.  This article is a good example of the smart way to do it, whether your business is an online or offline.  For low cost targeted acquisition, you can't beat a post card.  

Gartner glum on CRM success rates and costs
September 14, 2001  searchcrm.com
Well, they're not that glum.  Rather, they suggest you should go through a 2 step process - first understand the customer, then implement the CRM solution.  Now where have I heard that before?  If this idea makes sense to you, let me help you make it a reality.

Turning Customer Data Into Effective CRM
September 10, 2001   DM News
"Behavioral data is most effective in predictive modeling.  A customer's purchase and product usage data is much more likely than the customer's demographic data to predict that customer's likelihood to respond to a marketing offer."  Sounds familiar.

A Rewarding Conversation 
with BountySystems
September 10, 2001  eMarketer
This is a somewhat rambling conversation, and one wonders if grammar has taken a backseat to style in the New Old Economy.  Still, if these guys are really tracking all this stuff, there's a lot of valuable stat comps here.  ROI is not specifically mentioned anywhere as a metric, but the implication is the stats are so good, ROI must be happening.  One is then left to wonder if the clients know how to measure ROI.  Let's hope they do, but I have rarely seen a "bounty" program that actually makes money if you know how to measure it.  Mark me as suspiciously optimistic.  Particularly interesting is the claim text e-mail outperforms HTML, which has always made sense to me, but runs contrary to current thought.

Churn Models and Customer Reincarnation
September 6, 2001   CRM-Forum.com
This article is a little deep, but I'm sure you folks can handle it.  Some good material on ways to think about LifeTime Value.  The idea of "2nd LifeTime" is not one I embrace; in my work it's just part of the whole.  I'm also not a big fan of "win-back," since predicting defection using "trip wires" is much more profitable than trying to win them back after they split.  Think about it.  But in this article, these terms serve to illustrate a point and I think it is well made, regardless of the terminology used.

Re-evaluating CRM cliches No 4: 
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

September 4, 2001   CRM-Forum.com
Richard Forsyth is back with the last (say it isn't so!) in a series debunking and generally poking around CRM-speak.  In this wrap on the topic, Richard explores why CRM may be just another word for "good business sense."

DIRTY SECRET OF CRM: 
IT'S 20% STRATEGY, 80% GRUNT WORK
August 30, 2001   BI.ITtoolbox.com
I love this kind of article, especially when it comes from the Business Intelligence community.  Many might think they would support complexity as a way of life.  Not true.  They're more interested in results, and flashy CRM implementations have them pi**ed off.  I could do without an ALL CAPS title though, or is this just a (needed) sign of rebellion?

Re-evaluating CRM cliches No 3: 
Customer Lifetime Value
August 27, 2001   CRM-Forum.com
Richard Forsyth once again delivers value in his honest assessment of a key metric, and if you've read any of my writings, some of it will seem pretty familiar.  Nevertheless, a strong contribution to the debate and a great read.

Borders' E-Mail Promotions Hook Readers
August 24, 2001  DM News
Double Trouble, Folks.  Using e-mail to drive offline sales is working for Borders, and they provide some (limited) stats on the success of the program.  Between this article and the one below, perhaps retail is finally beginning to understand how to do "real time."

Loyalty Site Will End Cash Rewards Program
August 22, 2001   DM News
Repeat after me: Simple cash rebates do not build loyalty or increase profitability.  Period.  If you retailers out there could measure subsidy costs, you would be shocked at how much money you are losing.  In every environment where these costs can be measured, simple rebate programs lose money.  How?  You give up more in margins to best customers than you ever make back on incremental purchases from other customers.  Trust me.  Oh, I know, I know, it's different for your business, right?

One-day Promotions 
Producing Major Lifts for eBags
August 22, 2001   Internet Retailer
Now we're getting somewhere!  You've heard of eBags, right?  The guys who have been tracking customer behavior using Recency from the beginning?  Now they're pulling an old TV Shopping trick - and in the process, really becoming an interactive retailer.  The significance of this tactic, particularly using this trick to goose year over year compares, can not be overlooked.  We are getting there!

Re-evaluating CRM cliches No 2:
 A 360 degree view of customer
August 21, 2001   CRM-Forum.com
Richard Forsyth is an interesting voice crying in the wilderness of CRM.  He suggests - gasp - you don't need a 360 degree view of the customer, because much of the information collected is irrelevant and not of business value.  I couldn't agree more.  What is most important is to collect the right data.

A Dotcom That's (Holy Discredited Business Paradigms!) Doing Things Right
August 20, 2001  Business 2.0
Yes, they're still alive, and the Red Envelope story is becoming a popular one to trot out as an example of "how to do it" in online retail.  Catalogs and direct mail, my friends.  Best targeted acquisition tool there is for driving new customer acquisition.  Provides stats.

LTV- Nice Idea or Critical Concept
August 17, 2001  Direct Magazine
OK, that makes two of us.  David Shepard, a mentor of mine, makes the really outrageous suggestion that product managers should manage by the source of the customer.  This would maximize the value of the customer to a company, instead of to a product manager, which can be a sub-optimal approach.  When I tried this about 5 years ago, I almost blew up the company.  Maybe times have changed.

Data Mining Enables Insights 
Competitors Can’t Easily Duplicate
August 13, 2001  iMarketing News
If you've been around here a while, you probably know I'm not a huge fan of "data mining," particularly if your company has not done any behavioral profiling before.  That said, this article strips away a lot of the dreck and talks about some simple approaches (including CHAID and CART) that can often be implemented at low cost.  The key here, as always folks, is to not spend a ton of money getting started.  Baby steps first, then grow the complexity of your effort after you have an ROI leg to stand on.

Why New-Move Mailing Lists Work
August 9, 2001  DM News
Continuing with the theme this month of offline direct marketing customer acquisition techniques that will work online, you have to check out this article.  One of the most comprehensive pieces I have ever seen on new mover lists, including psychographics.  These lists are not for every business, but the lifestyle changes created by a move open up a lot of opportunity to start new relationships.

Steps to Improve E-Mail Targeting
August 8, 2001  iMarketing News
A good primer on customer segmentation, folks.  Please note how important Recency and response models are to the segmentation efforts; if you only use demo / geo cuts, you are leaving out your most powerful variable - the elements of customer behavior.

Leaving the Shopping Cart Behind
August 6, 2001   eMarketing Magazine
There's been a lot written on shopping cart abandonment by the usual research hacks.  This piece is a little different because people who have actually studied the behavior are weighing in with stats.  Some of the usual suspects (hidden ship & handle charges) are covered, but there are more than few new tidbits in here for those selling products online.

J Crew’s personalization strategy- 
A tool to drive ROI

August 3, 2001   Internet Retailer Conference
I know some of the gang a J Crew and they are smart folks.  This article contains a point not well developed in much of the drivel on personalization - the explicit versus implicit approach.  Some would call implicit personalization "customization."  No matter.  If you are not thinking along these lines, your approach is probably sub-optimal.  Understand customer behavior first; then decide on your mix of explicit versus implicit marketing.

Must Read Classic Articles (continued)

 

 
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