According to research findings from an Endeca Technologies August 2011 report, eBusiness organizations are evaluating numerous strategies in order to capture insight on the effectiveness of their marketing programs. The study, titled eBusiness Analytics Trends For 2011 And 2012: Online Businesses Make The Case For Actionable Insights,noted that today, 74% of e-Tailers are seeking to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns; 70% want to know how well their natural/SEO search rankings are functioning; 61% evaluate paid search/SEM, and 56% look at the success of customized landing pages.
Additionally, close to half (46%) of respondents said they were measuring the effectiveness of social channel customer feedback on a frequent basis. “While just a few years ago sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Facebook weren’t even close to mainstream, now they’re a leading data source filled with commentary for companies to measure their successfulness,” according to Endeca.
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Consolidating Disparate Data Sources
The primary problem for today’s retailers is that they have more data coming in from more sources, and they are not yet able to effectively analyze and use that data to create actionable insights with the Business Information (BI) tools at hand.
To that end, only 4% of survey respondents said they are effectively using 75% to 100% of their incoming data; and 61% reported using no more than 50% of available information.
Part of the growing dilemma for marketers and merchandisers is that they often must login to multiple sources to find the information they need when evaluating and formulating marketing programs. Half (50%) of the survey respondents said they need to access three or more sources, while just 20% of respondents said they were able to locate the necessary information through only one source. “The task of locating information across different sources makes it extremely difficult for marketers and merchandisers to quickly gain insight by seeing linkages between disparate data sets,” the report stated. “This delays their ability to quickly segment customers and serve up relevant offers to a more tailored customer and prospect base.”
Other key findings from the survey reveal:
- 39% of respondents said they are not currently incorporating unstructured data (such as customer reviews, blogs, news alerts and social media information) into their analyses, but it is something they would like to do;
- 35% said that they are not able to effectively analyze incoming unstructured information because it is delivered from a variety of sources and it takes too many manual hours combining the data into one single view;
- 48% of respondents said their analytics requirements (the need to access a new data source or new type of analysis) change at least monthly, and 20% change requirements daily or hourly; and
- Because traditional BI tools are set up to respond to predetermined questions, when a new question arises, the IT department is stunted. More than 40% of respondents cited that it often takes months to have their BI requests fulfilled, or they often cannot get their requests fulfilled at all.
The lack of IT responsiveness often creates challenges when retailers attempt to access new data information. Most respondents (41%) said they have waited months for IT requests to be fulfilled, and at times are never received. Requests which are fulfilled often only lead to a follow-up question. “The task of locating information across different sources makes it extremely difficult for marketers and merchandisers to quickly gain insight by seeing links between disparate data sets,” noted the report. “This delays their ability to quickly segment customers and serve up relevant offers to a more tailored customer and prospect base.”
To be poised for future success, today’s retailers must find ways to collect the data from many sources and present it in one cohesive view in order to effectively analyze the information. New systems need to reduce the amount of time retail merchandisers and marketers currently spend organizing the data. Additionally, IT departments will need to implement systems that enable them to locate real-time answers to new or follow-up questions.
