News & Opinions

How Retail Marketers Can Keep the Personalization Promise

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

How good are you at keeping customers?

When we talk to customers and prospects about the challenges they face when marketing to their current customers, the issue that never fails to surface is customer retention.  Yet when we press for more details, we are confronted by a paucity of analysis, a struggle to even size the problem, and more often than not,… Read More

How big is your one-time buyer problem?

What’s your gross margin on a typical first purchase? Is it less than your acquisition cost for a new customer?  If your answer is yes (and that’s most companies), you have a one-time buyer problem. Getting the second sale and solidifying a buyer as a profitable customer is one of the toughest jobs in selling…. Read More

The four numbers every company needs to know and that most don’t

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) — The sum of the future money you will get from a customer. Too many companies make the mistake of thinking they can calculate one number for their entire customer population. It’s more useful and accurate to segment a population and then calculate a different CLTV for each segment. This is… Read More

A ‘must-read’ report for savvy marketers

Aberdeen Group has just released a new research report by David White, “Predictive Analytics – Driving Sales with Customer Insights”. I think this is a ‘must-read’ for any marketer struggling to improve revenue. Right off the top I’ll make full disclosure: White’s case study for existing customer marketing describes the work Loyalty Builders is doing… Read More

Recognizing the elephant in the room

How the best customer analytics solution can fail if you ignore what it’s telling you. Many marketers are ignoring the biggest problem with their existing customer analytics based marketing, their large number of one-time buyers. For most catalogers and online merchants, that number is often 50% or more. Are they the biggest segment in your… Read More