The marketer has many analytic tools and strategies at disposal. However, regardless of what such tools promise to deliver, the effectiveness of the tool is only as good as the data it uses. Ensuring that the right data goes into the analytics engine is probably the most underestimated challenge of marketing.
A big challenge in marketing analytics is integrating data from various sources. Marketing data invariably spreads across over various systems and databases. A big chunk of it may actually be offline or even on paper. The marketer has to collect the data from various sources such as customer relationship management software, call center logs, email databases, order entry systems, point of sale terminal systems and sales databases. The marketer’s task becomes further complicated by the need to collect data from all possible sources without duplicating the data
Another challenge is ensuring data consistency. Raw data is usually messy. Clerical errors when entering text data may not make a major dent, but clerical errors with numbers can make the entire projection or modeling go awry. This crucial consideration apart, the marketer has to bring disparate data under the same format and make conversions using the same standards. For instance, online marketers selling across the world need to convert the sales revenue to a common currency, using the exchange value that the retailer actually secured from the individual transaction.
The ROI Customer Lifecycle Marketing solution enables marketers to connect all such dots. Its “click to connect” technology, for instance, allow integrating all sales and marketing systems used by the retailer, including popular third party systems such as ExactTarget, Google analytics Litmus, Salesforce.com and more. The solution then aggregates data and helps the marketer launch advanced behavioral and demographic-based campaigns. Wouldn’t that make your life easier?
