The “Personalization Promise” is a confusing, sometimes overblown assurance by a continually growing clump of marketing technologists struggling to differentiate their solution. The goal is to reach customers on their own individual, specific terms and do it well enough to make them buy. But while much of it sounds the same, there are actually big… Read More
In the Wall Street Journal recently, we read that IBM is about to invest $4 billion in “strategic imperatives,” including our favorite subject analytics. $4 billion is number that gets your attention (if you had the time and the patience to lay 4 billion dollar bills end-to-end, they’d go ‘round the earth approximately 16 times)!… Read More
Marketers have heard plenty about the tremendous promise of data-driven marketing, but when it’s time to make decisions about campaigns, budget, and offers, where do you start? Trends and statistics akin to a crystal ball reside within that massive pile of existing customer information that can predict the future, improve response rates of campaigns, and… Read More
If you like movies and love the old Westerns, you know that the bartender knows the name of everyone who walks into the saloon – even the bad guys. Today, we use technology to address people by name. We sometimes call it personalization. For a long time, it was considered the next big thing in… Read More
Twenty years ago, if you wanted a marketing piece to look good, you had to go to a professional graphics service to get it typeset, and then a printer to get it printed. Now everybody can do that on a PC. But then again, you can now use purpose-built templates to make your own just-about-anything:… Read More
There are several different names for relevant marketing: personalized marketing, individualized marketing, one-to-one marketing, micro marketing are some we’ve heard. Lots of companies want to do it, primarily for two reasons: customers are objecting to “one size fits all” spam, and vendors believe that relevance raises response rates. But whatever you call it, and regardless… Read More