Do you feel like you can’t get anything completed before the next “corporate priority” derails the effort? If so, you are a victim of “corporate ADD” — the tendency of senior management to change priorities based on personal experience, something they read or in response to a business change that may or may not be a trend.
The problem that most marketers experience when attempting to intervene with customer analytics is the time lag. From the start of an initiative, marketers often have to wait months before receiving the performance metrics that will justify the work. In that time, marketers are at risk of another episode of Corporate ADD, taking them off of what they know to be important and moving their focus and resources to another of the CEO’s pet projects.
What’s a marketer to do, to keep focus on the most important initiatives in the face of the ever-changing corporate direction?
That is where “rapid-fire” customer analytics comes in.
Rapid-fire customer analytics is an approach that recognizes that there is no time to waste in reporting and analyzing the progress of marketing initiatives. Whether number of customers participating, total revenue driven, increased AOV, etc. — each of these metrics, while not telling the whole story, suggest positive results and keep executive attention until you can get a more complete picture of results.
The best companies using this approach employ the following strategies:
- Development of a list of 4-6 key metrics that will determine the success of the initiative
- Identify where that data must come from (source system)
- “Yank” sample data off the source system
- Calculate the necessary metrics using Excel or a similarly easy tool to use
- Create a “dashboard” worksheet to highlight the key metrics
- Determine necessary frequency, and pull the report 1-2 times before the program launches to make sure you get it right
This approach is the easiest if you have fewer than 1million rows of customer data. If you do not, then use a sampling approach to get you started, all in Excel.
Note: Do all of this before the initiative launches, in order to have things in place when time gets tight.
Repeat as necessary.
This approach is seldom used in marketing departments, where measurement is an afterthought, once the big push to get the initiative launched is completed. But following the “begin with the end in mind” approach, rapid-fire customer analytics will lay the groundwork for a successful program that keeps going, rather than one that falls by the wayside in the next reprioritization.
Not only will rapid-fire customer analytics feed management with performance metrics before the next onset of corporate ADD takes place, but this approach will also give you an early window into program performance, which can allow early course corrections to improve performance.
Rapid-firre customer analytics is one part of building marketing credibility. Read more about approaches to engaging the C-suite believeably in my e-book:
