Digital Analytics

From the point of view of individual efficiency, working in large batches makes sense. It also has other benefits: it promotes skill building, makes it easier to hold individual contributors accountable, and, most important, allows experts to work without interruption. At least that's the theory. Unfortunately, reality seldom works out that way. Consider our hypothetical example. After passing thirty design drawings to engineering, the designer is free to turn his or her attention to the next project. But remember the problems that came up during the envelope-stuffing exercise. What happens when engineering has questions about how the drawings are supposed to work? What if some of the drawings are unclear? What if something goes wrong when engineering attempts to use the drawings? These problems inevitably turn into interruptions for the designer, and now those interruptions are interfering with the next large batch the designer is supposed to be working on. If the drawings need ...

We've always had rising and falling markets, and we always will. When they continue to a significant extent, they're called bull markets and bear markets. Even further and they're called booms, manias an crazes; busts, crises and panics. The most popular terms today for describing extreme bull and bear markets are "bubble" and "crash" These latter terms have been around for a long time. The "South Sea Bubbles" a mania for investing in the company that supposedly would pay off the national debt by exploiting a monopoly to trade with South America, caught England by storm in 1720. And the market collapse that kicked off the Great Depression is called the great crash of 1929. But it was the "tech bubble" , "Internet bubble" and "Dot com bubble" of 1995 - 2000 - and the housing and mortgage bubbles that ended in 2007, bringing on significant crashes in markets around the world - that brought the word "Bubble...

The Battle Between the Customer and the Entrepreneur   Thoughts through the demographic research component of your business plan. Before we get into it, just understand that knowing demographics is really nothing more than thinking about your customers and every business must have customers. The Story of Gala’s Bookstore I would like to tell you a story about Gala, Kalina’s Foremost Bookstore. Kalina is a clustering (I do not think it can even be called a hamlet) of about 20-30 people and this bookstore proudly lays claim to being the "foremost" bookstore in Kalina! in fact it is the only thing in Kalina.(Kalina’s Foremost bookstore) Yes there really is one! Now the reason I bring up the Kalina book store is that its owner Gala, according to his bio on his webpage Gala, is a most unusual sort of character. Having spent a significant part of his youth working in rural areas, Gala loves country living, and he loves books. The road where his business is located...

Banks - multichannel customer experience As a first step, banks could design an integrated customer experience based on a streamlined multichannel approach and architecture. As banks activate new channels, customer inputs and customer knowledge can be expected to increase, which would then enable banks to create micro-segments. Micro-segments are the smallest set of customers with uniform demographics and social behaviors, and form the basis for defining strategic profit pools. The increased capture and application of customer data, properly managed and updated through an advanced CRM platform, can help enhance the value and return on product catalogues, commercial campaigns based on realtime propositions, as well as lower distribution costs by optimizing capacity by micro-segment preferences. A multichannel customer experience is based on the right combination of online and offline processes and can be enhanced by focusing on dedicated advisory services (remote or digital)...

Cohort Analysis Predict in the next 12 months, an analyst friendly cohort analysis tool that helps measure user engagement over time. It helps UX designers know whether user engagement is actually getting better over time or is only appearing to improve because of growth. Although cohort analysis is possible using any of the current crop of web analytics tools (including Google Analytics), defining cohorts is clunky and in general, cohorts have to be defined, then data collected before an analysis can be done. (Rather than giving the analyst freedom to define cohorts today and apply them to historic data.) For that reason, if you have all your data in SQL, you have maximum flexibility to define your cohorts any way you like, define the metric you're comparing between cohorts any way you like and then run your analysis. A cohort is a group of people who share a common characteristic over a period of time. In a user engagement cohort analysis, we group people based on...

Propensity Models to Improve Response and Revenue Predictive analytics is ambrosia for digital marketers who are trying to optimize "right offer, right person, right time" through their campaign management solution. To make it work, you need a combination of defined personas, a content management strategy, creative asset library, and technology (e.g., it's built into the segmentation tools of your campaign management or marketing automation software). The end goal is to automate the offer selection and placement based on analysis and predictive models for your particular customer base. However, every marketer can get started by using pattern analysis in your existing response data to identify factors that lead to purchase behavior. Use that data (even manually) to improve your personas, segmentations, and send more relevant offers. Recently, we worked with a major U.S. retailer to try to figure this out. The retailer includes propensity models in their analys...

A Pricing strategy for your Saas offering Pricing strategy is a major component of any business, whether brick-and-mortar or bits-and-bytes. In addition to being an important strategy to hash out, it is also generally quite tricky to do correctly. Should pricing be value based or cost based? Should it focus on maximizing income per unit or volume? For all of the things our beloved SaaS delivery model does for us,   it does not  ease pricing strategy pains. I’d even venture to say that it makes pricing strategy even more complicated. After all, SaaS providers pride themselves in allowing tenants to pay a periodic base cost and tack on optional (and potentially intricately priced) bells and whistles. So how should a SaaS offering be priced? Clearly, this is something that should be considered on a case-by-case basis, however, I do feel there is a good framework to work from that focuses on boosting adoption rate and deferring creation of income and healthy margins to...