Your firm may have capability to produce many - or all of these metrics - but are you using them to improve customer experience and business value?  Several vendors we’ve talked to recently, who represent a cross-section of digital measurement technologies and services, described what they hear about this from prospects and clients. A (scary) summary:  the firms report that they now have boatloads of data and a growing number of digital measurement technologies, mostly in silos  – but don’t think they’re getting enough value from what they have.  It’s as if some firms are paralyzed.  This can’t continue.  Operating silos of separate digital measurement approaches is not good enough any more. You risk falling behind competitors who are successfully combiningg approaches and continuously maturing their digital intelligence. 

Mature digital intelligence requires identifying the business metrics that matter most and combining and aligning measurements that move the needle.   Use the digital intelligence framework to guide you in changing an outdated “measure in silos first, understand the total effect later” approach. The report lays out the business value and examples of each metric and gives examples of how to use them – and even more importantly, how to combine them.  Get started now with colleagues to work across the measurement silos - or more of them - to drive more value.

Beyond opens and clicks, click-to-open ratio indicates how engaging your email program is and how relevant your messages are to their recipients. This week we take a look at the reasons why click-to-open rates vary among industries and how marketers can increase their own email engagement rates. Discover the results of a recent study with 1831 global marketers across 16 industries about their email program click-to-open rates.

B2B companies are leveraging advanced analytics. Analytics can help companies to customize buying experiences through ecommerce channels and to provide sales reps with guidance about what customers are likely to purchase and what prices make sense to quote in the context of the deal. Customers want their buying experience to be finely tuned to their unique needs from a product perspective as well as from a pricing perspective. Across channels, whether on the web or in sales rep interactions, B2B customers expect companies to be able to anticipate their needs.

For B2B companies, transaction data holds a wealth of information about where and how to sell more for more, but much of this information goes undetected. Algorithms and predictive models are needed to do the heavy lifting to turn this data into actionable information about each customer for sales reps. This information, or prescriptive guidance, enables sales reps to have more strategic conversations with customers and, in turn, builds the sales team’s confidence in advanced analytics. This same actionable information also can easily be fed into ecommerce platforms to provide a personalized web buying experience for customers.

Let’s take a look at 3 practical ways to make advanced machine learning personalization work for everyday marketing:

1. Simplify your system
Take comfort in outsourcing this process to the data science professionals. There are tons of companies out there to meet your unique needs — from e-commerce product optimization, to predictive content for media and content companies, to B2B business intelligence systems. 

2. Simplify your integration
Look to leverage APIs and tools that help you forget all the noise behind the scenes, and allow you to implement predictive recommendations across channels seamlessly.

3. Simplify your data analytics
One thing we as society haven’t gotten quite used to is putting our full trust into the machines. That needs to change. In order to receive the best insights and best predictive content for users, we need to give over as much control as possible in this one area. 

Churn measures the ultimate failure in SaaS—all of the customers who tried out your product and decided it isn’t worth paying for.

Nobody’s dumb enough to ignore churn point-blank, but a lot of founders have a tendency to calculate churn in a way that makes their company look best. That way, when they get together in a room, they each can brag about how great their churn looks.

More often than not, these comparisons don’t actually mean anything—they confuse apples with oranges. They’re basically bullshit. Are we talking about net churn? Gross? Month-to-month subscription? There’s a lot of different ways to calculate churn, and they each tell a different story about your business.

Don’t approach churn by trying to put lipstick on a pig. Churn is one of the most serious, persistent problems that startups face, and the only way to deal with it is through brutal honesty. You need to narrow in on an understanding of churn that accurately portrays your company, ruthlessly sniff out your retention issues, and fix them before they become full-blown disasters.

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions. 

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.