News & Opinions

If you’ve ever been asked to evaluate technologies for segmenting and analyzing customers, you’ll probably be shown beautiful visualizations or maybe enticed by highly useful metrics, such as customer buying predictions for different products, expected spending by customer, or risk of churn. At some point, you will ask the vendor how is it done, and… Read More

We’ve seen an explosion of new tools and techniques for predictive customer analytics in the retail sector. This is not surprising considering the advantages of using predictive customer data to plan, segment, target, and personalize marketing campaigns. Predictive analytics is proven to show measurable lift in conversion rate and margin dollars, but only works as… Read More

Customer loyalty – every retailer wants it, but what does it mean? Are the customers who spent the most last year or the customers who bought something during the last three months going be the most loyal over the next year? What if they made 3 purchases last year, but only around the holidays? And, what does… Read More

Instant delivery of marketing messages to customers triggered upon customer behaviors in real-time such as page views, clicks, social interactions, location, etc., is at the bleeding edge of today’s marketing tech. Watching all activity generates a lot of data that might indicate customer preferences and readiness to buy something.  But as many marketers have found… Read More

In this age of big data, big claims and big hopes about maximizing the value of data to create sales, marketing analytics plays a central role.  Despite all the attention it receives, there are some enduring misconceptions about what marketing analytics can and cannot do. Here are four top “urban legends” about how marketing analytics… Read More