By Cassie Lancellotti-Young, VP, Optimization & Analytics, Sailthru
Voltaire once said that “with great power comes great responsibility;” this old adage certainly holds true for the modern-day marketer. Big Data has left marketers with more information than ever before, but with Big Data come with very big silos. When it comes to data capture and marketing platforms, there are often all too many cooks in the kitchen — a vendor for email, another for the mobile app, another for site analytics, etc. To remain competitive in a world where consumer mindshare is increasingly fragmented, marketers bear a great responsibility to develop 360-degree customer profiles not only to drive the utmost relevance for each end user, but also to fully understand the impact of every marketing decision and to optimize accordingly.
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All 360-degree customer profiles enable what I like to call “situational” analytics, or understanding how a customer’s myriad experiences with a brand ultimately impact customer retention, lifetime value and ultimately, top-line revenue. (Yes, apologies to the quant haters out there, but it turns out marketing now requires quite a significant business intelligence flare to be all that effective.) Situational analytics may sound intuitive — brands have long thought about the downstream impact of a welcome discount, have they not? True, but the Big Data component introduces multidimensional facets that weren’t there previously.
Consider this example: Customer A and Customer B click on the exact same emails, view the exact same products, and today, they check out with the exact same baskets. A year from now, Customer A is 3x more valuable than Customer B. What happened? Perhaps Customer A also engaged with a stylist over a live chat session today. Or maybe she watched the curated videos that accompanied the products she explored. The realities of omnichannel marketing and “brick and click” retailers only further complicate things but regardless, we need to understand variances in the value of in-store visitors (and their various in-store experiences) versus online customers and of course, cross-channel customers.
Sure, top-of-funnel metrics like email opens, clicks and site visits are important from a volume perspective, but they are siloed numbers; they reveal little about true customer engagement and are often perilous to real customer understandings (unless, of course, you’re looking at which customers open the welcome series and ultimately go on to complete various actions or conversions).
With this all said, what are the right situational metrics to consider? Key performance measures will inevitably vary by company, but here are few quick tips to help guide you in the right direction:
- Just say “NO!” to elevator analysis, or simply assessing that a number has gone up or down. Seek to understand the why around the delta, and better yet, look to understand what contextual settings (think about the live chat example) may have driven that change.
- Just say “YES!” to multidimensional data analysis — cohort analysis is as valuable as ever, but layer in additional attributes like social media data, apps downloaded, return propensity, etc.
- Don’t limit situational understanding to your analysis; be sure to put your findings into action. Leveraging situational factors for personalization can be an extremely powerful retention tactic, and you can also use your analysis to drive key behaviors (maybe that live chat proved very valuable for average order value, so you push more buyers in that direction).
Looking forward, retail’s most powerful retention programs will be born from marketing teams that place a hefty emphasis on situational understanding, so in the name of the first-mover advantage, I recommend you get busy eliminating those data silos today!
Cassie Lancellotti-Young is VP Optimization and Analytics at Sailthru, where she works with top retail brands to strengthen customer retention and improve top-line revenue. Before joining Sailthru, Lancellotti spent a year leading “intrapreneurship” at Gerson Lehrman Group, where she shipped several products under the HighTable.com brand. Prior to GLG, she served as VP Marketing at Savored, where she managed customer acquisition, email and product marketing, and partnerships; Savored sold to Groupon in 2012. Previously, Lancellotti was an early employee at TheLadders.com, where she spent several years managing direct marketing and subscription analytics and was responsible for tremendous growth in readership and revenue. She began her career as a media/tech analyst at Citigroup Global Corporate & Investment Bank and has also held a variety of consulting roles with large digital brands such as AOL and SapientNitro.
