News & Opinions

5 Ways to Keep It Real with Real-Time Marketing

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

Do You Want to Shop Where They Analyze Your Eye Movements?

I was reading a news item recently about another startup in the marketing analytics space. This startup analyzes eye movements as customers browse in a store and, based on that, tries to determine the customer’s interest in certain items, which triggers email offers to their mobile phones in real time. Wow. I hope that company… Read More

Getting to the Second Sale

It happens so often there’s even a catch phrase. “One and done” is what marketers call customers who make a single purchase and don’t return for more. If a substantial number of your customers are one-time buyers, you have a serious business problem. Very few companies make enough margin dollars from a first purchase to… Read More

Marketing Creativity: What it Looks Like in 2015

Marketing used to be a creative process, dominated by creative geniuses like Marshall Field, John Wanamaker, and Stanley Marcus; men who built great fortunes with their intuitive sense of what their customers wanted. Marketing isn’t like that anymore. Analytics have replaced intuition – a less volatile, more dependable kind of creativity. Get the analytics right,… Read More

The One-to-One Marketing Gap

The mantra of one-to-one marketers is “right offer, right person, right time.” But a great many marketers who think they’re fielding one-to-one campaigns are deluding themselves.  In reality they’re sending many customers the same communication under the mistaken assumption that those customers’ needs are identical to others getting that communication. Segmentation like that is a… Read More

Drowning in Data, Starved for Knowledge

“We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge.” John Naisbett, Megatrends, 1982 Things haven’t changed much since Mr. Naisbett wrote his run-away best- seller 33 years ago. In fact, they’ve gotten worse. Talking with Randy Giusto recently (V.P. & Practice Lead, Marketing & Media at Outsell) we asked about the big challenges he’s hearing… Read More