How do you create a data-driven culture in your marketing team?

Becoming a data-driven organisation doesn’t just rely on the right technology, structure and processes. The human element is essential, and without the right skills, qualities and roles, any effort to be successful at data-driven marketing is destined to struggle.

And the kinds of skills that support a data-driven philosophy are rich and varied.

This is very true.  The "art" and "science" that requires actionable data lean more to the art side in most marketing departments.  The biggest change is to respect what data can bring to the equation.  Many marketers don't respect data, they respect their gut and soft metrics like awareness.  While data doesn't solve all problems, it helps inform direction.  It helps decide what is happening with the customers you are trying to target, plus the ones that you aren't targeting and whether you should.  

“The data-driven marketing team is knowledgeable enough to converse freely with technical and statistical resources while staying laser-focused on getting the right message to the right person at the right time. But the most important quality needed in a modern marketing team is curiosity. Without that, I may as well outsource all of my data related work to a third party. Curiosity stimulates creativity and conversation, and aids decision-making.” 

I like the statement of staying laser-focused on getting the right message to the right customer at the right time.  Too many times teams lose their focus and start drifting on to answers that are either easy or different from the most relevant topics.  Understanding what data is saying is more valuable than having the person who can put the report together.  Money is made by providing the insight to the data, that is what I look for in my team.  But don't forget to have the guy that can put all the data together.

Quintero adds: “Building a data-driven culture is not an overnight process. It takes time. To me, a data-driven culture means building a safe environment where experimentation is encouraged and mistakes are tolerated. It’s less about having all the right tools in place – although that’s a critical part of the process – and definitely more about cultivating excitement around discovery and objectivity. Being data-driven is exciting and people should be encouraged to enjoy the process as much as making things happen.”

Changing a culture is a journey.  Teaching the team about why decisions are made from looking at the data and what the thought process for coming to the conclusions is critical in building the data culture.  No matter how smart a person is, if they don't understand the thought processes of decisions they will never be able to take leaps with the data.  If they understand what to look for in data, they beginning asking the right questions and delivering recommendations along with their questions.

Why CEOs Say Yes to Marketing Automation

Ten short years ago, it was rare for a company to have a marketing automation platform in place. Since then, it’s become ever more clear that acquiring marketing automation (and applying the expertise to make it hum) is a huge competitive differentiator. SiriusDecisions research indicates that 80% of the organizations with the highest-performing demand waterfalls (based on the number of won deals per 1,000 inquiries) have implemented marketing automation platforms. This tallies with other research; the 2015 report “Rethinking the Role of Marketing” from Gleanster and Act-On found that Top Performers were 20% more likely than the average organization to use marketing automation technology..

I think it is still rare for most organizations to have a marketing automation platform, but what is even more rare are companies who are taking advantage of their platform.  The promise of marketing automation is very enticing as this article articulates.  The benefits of a well-run marketing automation program is an extreme competitive advantage.

1. Marketing Automation Lets You Put the Customer in the Center of Your World.

List management. Marketing automation lets makes it easier to segment your lists by field values (explicit data such as title, department, industry, company size) and by implicit, inferred factors (often actions) such as web pages visited, eBooks downloaded, emails clicked on. It also lets you sync chosen data back and forth with a CRM system.

Well beyond the realm of salespeople, marketing automation lets you manage your customer base on a level of personalization that is not possible otherwise.  Some say these platforms make the relationships with customers less personal, but that is a fallacy.  With the amount of personalization and targeting capable with these platforms, the customer gets a more personalized experience with marketing automation.  

The amount of time manual processes take to manage the customer, it is impossible for these processes to really give the best experience to the customer.  There is just not enough time in the day.  However, a marketing automation platform can create customized communications based on all of the data described above, including behavioral information, geo aware messaging and preferences of communication channels.

Campaign management. Automated programs can save time (which is money, yes) and take a little human error out of your programs. You can set them up to replicate successful lead nurturing or onboarding programs, for example, and they will run exactly as programmed, no matter who misses work on Tuesday. You can add prospects as they enter your world (perhaps through a form) and exit them (perhaps to another program, or to sales) as you learn more about them, or as they become increasingly qualified. You can set up trigger emails (thank-yous, congratulations, expiring trials) and landing pages that make offers or fulfill requests, showing how responsive you are.

Campaign management is a difficult process if you have different programs pulling lists, then fulfilling communications and measuring results.  The amount of time saved by having a platform where everything is integrated and can trigger off the behavior of the customer is very powerful.

6. Marketing Automation Takes Care of the Established Customer

The platform gives you a structure you can scale in your retention strategy. Start with using a nurturing educational strategy to support onboarding. Move on to keeping your customers in the loop, educating them about new features, showing them new plays with old features, and keeping them abreast of changes in the industry that affect them. Take the same techniques you use to notice when a lead is warming up and apply them to noticing when a customer is looking at an upsell … or needs attention to prevent churn.

Retention is the most important part of the database.  The greater the number of sales coming from your established customer base allows for the greatest growth in your business.  Marketing automation at its heart is best for the established customers.  The platform is designed to drive more business from this segment.  Since the majority of most companies revenue comes from loyal customers, having the ability to grow this groups sales is essential to a longterm stable business model.  The marketing automation platform should be at the center of this model.

7. Marketing Automation Spurs Revenue and Growth

These benefits are all pieces of a puzzle that every company using marketing automation puts together in its own unique way. The common denominator is that most companies that apply marketing automation – whether they use every feature or just the basics – will see faster growth and post more top-line revenue.

Well who doesn't want that?

Five Ways to Win with Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing has come to the forefront for companies that want to better engage their customers and prospects. With data-driven marketing, firms are able to gather, integrate, and assess data from a variety of internal and external sources to help enhance value.

Marketing automation starts with data.  In fact, in the digital age, almost all marketing initiatives start with data.  Companies who are data-driven have a distinct advantage over their competitors.  When a company is data-driven, they focus on their strengths, enhance their weaknesses and they don't obsess over their competition.  They have the data to understand how they can improve.

1. Determine what really makes customers tick. According to the DMA, data-driven marketing is about discerning what customers want and need and engineering the company to provide it: “The more firms can use data to develop a 360-degree, multi-channel view of what customers think and want, the more the customer will truly be king.” Through the use of both internal and external data, companies are learning how to “crown” their customers — truly understand what makes them tick, and then develop campaigns that engage them in the most effective manner possible.

This all comes with data analytics.  Understanding what drives your customers behaviors is step one to developing campaigns and offers.  Without an understanding of what your customers want, there is not an efficient way to determine what they would like from you.

2. Set baselines for campaign effectiveness. Data-driven marketing has effectively replaced the traditional “hit-or-miss” test component of the typical direct marketing campaign.

Baselines are a very important piece to understand when analyzing campaigns.  This is the beginning of the journey to understand the effectiveness of any changes that are made.  If an organization cannot answer what a particular program is bringing them, they should test the campaigns without the program and determine what, if any, the effectiveness of the program is bringing.  

3. Block out the “noise” and focus on what’s relevant. When assessing data over multi-year periods — and across different marketing channels — it’s not unusual for things to be extremely “busy” at the outset. There’s a lot of static and responses are all over the place. However, by using proven data-driven marketing techniques, you can start to pull out the relevant information, analyze it over time, pick up on traffic patterns, and drill down to specific marketing touch points (i.e., number of website hits that come in when a specific direct-response show airs).

This is a lot harder than it sounds.  Marketers are the kings of taking a piece of data and selling their story with it, even though it is just noise or a small sample of customers.  This is where the "art and science" approach is necessary.  Being able to combine data mining techniques with the business acumen is key to focusing on the relevance of the data.

4. Determine exactly how customers are responding.

Again, this is important to understand multi-channel marketing.  The ability to reach your customers on the right channel at the right time is only possible through data.  

5. Reach extremely targeted customer bases.

The promise of 1-to-1 marketing is arriving.  Be careful to shoot for this level of personalization, because it is very expensive and the pearl is not worth the dive for the majority of your database. However, being able to target your best customers in a very personal nature could help grow the business exponentially.  This takes extreme focus.  

6 Rules for Creating Killer Email Campaigns

Email marketing still reigns supreme for most businesses when it comes to ROI.  The funny part is how many businesses are not taking full advantage of the medium.  Email is a channel and should not be seen as a strategy unto itself, it is just another way to communicate to the customer.  But because of its low cost and effective targeting capabilities, it is a channel that should be at the top of most companies priority list.

1) Map out the customer flow

Once upon a time I worked on the growth engineering team at Twitter. We were tasked with building something that could turn new signup users into die-hard Tweeters. The secret sauce to user activation was…email! But before we knew when to use email, we had to map out the Twitter user journey.

This is key to a marketing automation.  The first step of a campaign is to identify the goals for the campaign.  After that, the visual mapping of the workflow will save hours of time and allow for better if/then scenario processes to take place within the campaign.  When done visually, it also is easier to see pitfalls and mistakes.  This may seem like double work, but it is an essential step.

2) Master the balance of building your list, while not asking for too much

You’re ready to begin building your email list and customer base. You’ve also heard that the more info you have on a customer, the better. Besides, how are you supposed to create highly personalized email campaigns without any data on a user? Before you start pushing sign up forms with 20 form fields to all of your website visitors, you must first understand that customer intelligence should be built over time.

I am a big fan of finding out 1 thing about your customer in every interaction.  Transactional data about what your customers are buying is the best information to have, but also asking your customers a question with each interaction is not time consuming for them and through time will build a plethora of information for you which then can be used to further segment your customers.  Be careful what you ask.  If you ask something specific about behaviors, your customer may expect you to use this information right away and if you don't, they may become disenfranchised.  

3) Embrace marketing automation 

People say marketing automation isn’t personal and ruins your brand reputation with robot-like communication. I’m going to argue that it actually makes your communication more personal because it can be used to send messages based on individual behavior. Marketing automation makes it so that no two people receive the same messages.

This is a must in my book.  There is no better way to have targeted, individualized communication with large sets of customers without it.  Marketing automation tools should be a fundamental piece of the marketing technology.  It allows for the management of the customer, regardless of the channel.  It makes multi-channel communication possible.  I believe this is the center for all outbound communication, regardless of the channel.

4) Offer value with every touch  (Eat24)

You don’t need a reason to call grandma, but you should have a reason for sending an email to your subscribers. Promotional blasts are the bread and butter of ecommerce companies, and I’m not saying they’re a bad practice, since they do generate revenue. But, before you send another marketing campaign, you should always ask yourself, “Will my customers care?” The answer of course should always be, “Yes!”.

I worked with a company that did an email blast every 2 weeks regardless of if there was anything new to communicate.  The offer that was sent was usually the same offer with a different twist.  

Not only does this approach start to feel the same, which will lead to customers ignoring the email, it also doesn't create a sense of urgency for the customer.  If there is always a timed offering and it is always the same offer, customers will not feel the need to reply to the call of action.  They will start to learn there will be this new offer next week so maybe I'll just wait until then.  This limits the effectiveness of your communications.

5) Recognize lapsed users and bring them back  (Memebox)

Customers sometimes leave. While some loss is inevitable, others are absolutely preventable. A bad marketer doesn’t know who has left or who is about to leave. A good marketer recognizes the signs of churning and targets those users with the perfect message to bring them back.

The best time to market to a customer is before they become inactive.  Once a customer is inactive or has left, it is usually too late and those customers are very hard to regain.  It is very important to identify customer that are about to churn or are changing their buying habits in a negative fashion.  

For instance, a customer may purchase from you with a frequency of once a month, however over the past 3 months they have not purchased anything.  Lets say in this instance your active customer database is purchases within 12 months.  If someone who consistently purchases every month, but has not in the last 3 months, you as a marketer have to change your communications with this customer.  This customer is in danger of churning and you can't wait for 9 more months before they become inactive to recognize this.  At that point it will be too late.

6) Perpetually tinker with A/B testing

Email campaigns, like fine art or software, is never finished. There will always be something else you can do to improve the performance of a campaign. When looking for an email platform, find one that allows you to A/B test any part of your email.

Marketing automation campaigns are never finished.  They are constantly evolving no matter what the situation is.  Testing should be a standard part of all your campaigns.  It is important to remember that a baseline needs to be established before the testing takes place.  Also, be careful not to overlap tests that may have influence on results at the same time.  You always want to make sure you understand what changes drove what results.  If there are too many tests and changes at once, there is no way to possibly understand the impact of the tests.

I would add a number 7, analysis

Find yourself a good, easy to use business intelligence tool and analyze the performance of these email campaigns.  Create many different attributes of your customer.  Slice and dice the data to look for opportunities.  Identify groups of customers that aren't performing up to the standards of others, these are the customers that become new segments to target with different communication and content strategies.  This also is a must in my book.

What does it mean to be a data-driven marketing success in 2015?

Ian Michiels writes for mycustomer.com:

Micro segmentation over 1:1 personalisation

Even when data is readily available to inform highly targeted engagement, someone actually has to produce the creative and copy to trigger the engagement.

I was on a panel at an Adobe event late last year when the topic of 1-to-1 marketing came up.  I have always been a huge advocate of trying to get as close as you can to 1-to-1 marketing, but that comes with a caveat.  The cost to get to the elusive everyone is individualized is massive.  When I say as close as you can, what I mean is start from the top of your customer list (not by alphabetical order, but by some worth and frequency or potential worth metric) and work as far down that list as you can to create 1-to-1 marketing for your best customers.  The other customers you want to have as many segments as makes sense, but always allow the data to drive those segmentation decisions,  

Automating up-sell and cross-sell campaigns

Marketing is the only function in the business that actively communicates across the entire spectrum of the customer lifecycle, from the inquiry to a loyal customer. That raises two very interesting questions that data-driven marketing has answers for:

• Should marketing own the customer lifecycle?

• How should marketing allocate time, budget, and effort across the customer lifecycle?

As I commented on recently in my article Retention is King, retention's the first place I start when implementing a marketing automation program.  The customer lifecycle should be owned by marketing.  Marketing has all the tools to automate the communications in the relationship and target based on behavioral and demographic data.  When it comes to the question of time allocation, make sure the retention programs are dialed in.  They will never be finished and you will always be tweaking, but then you can move on to acquisition and reactivation.  It is much easier to cross-sell or up-sell a loyal customer than it is to acquire a new one.

A/B testing on landing pages and email campaigns

According to the 2014 Gleanster Marketing Resource Management report, only 60% of small and mid-size firms conduct A/B tests on email, landing pages, and website properties. It’s actually shocking to learn how much you really don’t know about your customers when you run A/B tests on creative and copy.

In sales they say "ABC", Always Be Closing.  In marketing automation and data driven businesses we should say "ABT", Always Be Testing.  The caveat to this saying is there needs to be an understanding of a baseline first.  So if you are implementing a new program, let it run for a bit (unless it is a total disaster), use analytics to look for opportunities and test those opportunities.  Don't just test for the sake of testing, always let the data drive the opportunities and then test the hypothesis.

Machine learning is your best friend

One consistent theme that keeps coming up in our advisory sessions is that marketers want help in data analysis. Thanks to advances in computing power, data analysis that previously took days can now be done in seconds and often in the cloud. Machine learning applies rules to data sets and looks for correlations between data. Does this do the job of a marketer? Heck no! What machine learning does for marketing is help isolate trends that should be investigated further. Marketers still need the context about customers and products to translate those correlations in the data into action.

As I said just above, let the data drive your testing.  Machine learning and data mining techniques can uncover insights within your data that the human eye could never perceive just by looking.  Many marketers want a predictive modeling tool to spit out an answer as to what they should do and just go do it.  If that were the case, why do we need the marketer?  It is important to make sure to understand what the outputs of these tools provide and test their findings.  Without the business acumen, the output could be very flawed.  Don't jump to a conclusion, use the insight to form hypothesis about your customers and test away.  Remember as I wrote before, Data + Insight = Action.

5 Mistakes You're Making That Are Killing Your Marketing Campaigns

In a past article from Juntae DeLane, he brings up very good succinct points about pitfalls of marketing campaigns.

1. Lack of Audience Understanding

Having a greater understanding of your audience should be the first step when developing a campaign strategy. Some entrepreneurs will produce evergreen campaigns with no specific targets hoping that new targets will emerge. Some may see a practical benefit in doing so; however, why run two campaigns to accomplish one task? Your marketing campaign will be optimized by doing research beforehand so you can make an impactful and relevant introduction to your brand.

The key to digital marketing is knowing your audience.  The more information you have about your customer the better and when using marketing automation tools, it is important to utilize this knowledge.  It is easy to lump as many individuals together and call them segments, however the more individualized your campaigns can become, the better experience the customer will have interacting with your brand or product.  

2. No Strategy

Many marketers get confused when talking about strategies and tactics.  A tactic is how you are going to do something, the strategy is what you are going to do.  They must work in tandem.  Many times marketers start with the tactics, "we are going to send an email to all of our customers who abandon a cart".  Why are you doing this?  You have to start with the strategy of "increase our sales from all parts of the funnel" to reach the tactic.  Otherwise, how do you know the goal?  The goal may be simplified in this case, but so many times a marketing plan is not strategic, it is a list of tactics the company is going to employ.  

Having an overarching strategy will help guide decision making.  Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.  Focus is the key and understanding the strategy assists in that focus.  

3. Too Much Sales Pitch

I think another way to think about this is understand your customers are not stupid.  They know when they are seeing content from your company they are being sold something.  They want to understand why they need something, how will this make my life better, will I feel satisfaction with this purchase.  By trying to convince them to buy leads to buyers remorse.  The ultimate goal is to create loyal customers that will return again and again to purchase. 

4. No Tracking or Data

With all the tracking services out there, you should be able to easily track your campaign efficacy. From Google Analytics to KISS Metrics you can establish a tracking dashboard at virtually no cost.

However, what will kill your marketing campaign is if you identify the incorrect metrics.

I don't see this too much, most everyone is tracking some kind of performance.  I believe in the comment from above, what are the key metrics that drive the business.  If number of sales is your key metric, this can come at a loss because the amount of money invested to drive those increased sales is more than the revenue being generated.  Be careful to choose your metrics wisely.

5. Too Much Branding

I think everyone believes in increasing brand loyalty is key to a successful business, but this goes so much deeper than pushing the brand.  Brand loyalty comes from consistency, delivering the promise of the brand and always putting the customer first.  These don't come from a catchy slogan or advertising, this comes from hard work to deliver the best customer experiences.  The brand is all aspects of the transaction, from the customer service agent answering the phone to the ways in which a mobile app enhances the buying experience.  

Retention is King

There are too many companies asking, “How do we acquire more users?” that should instead be asking “How do we get better at keeping the users we already have?”.

Its easy when approaching the problem of growth to think that you just need to get more users, after all that seems to be the very definition of growth. However, if you take a step back though and think about growth as the maximization of user-weeks over time, it quickly becomes apparent that focusing on retention has a much larger effect than topline growth. This is also much more of a sustainable growth mindset. Rapid user growth followed by rapid user attrition is an indicator of unsustainable growth. Strong retention of users over time is a good indicator of product-market fit, something you’re hopefully looking to achieve anyway.

Retention is the place I start everywhere I go.  Building a strong retention program is the key to success for any business.  There's the old "It's much cheaper to keep a customer happy than find new ones" saying, but it goes beyond that.  If one thinks about it logically, the bigger base of loyalty business that is retained, the more money one will make.  Retained/loyal customers have many advantages over new or dormant ones.  

Customers in retention campaigns have a well-defined pattern of behavior

These customers are perfect for targeted promotions, cross-sells and upsells.  Because of the purchasing and communication interaction behavior stored from these customers, tailoring offers specific to the needs of customers is the easiest way to convert into sales.  The less that is known about a customer, the more shotgun approach is taken and less likely to obtain real revenue.

Customers in retention campaigns have less expensive communication channels

Because the customer is known, the communication with the customer is much cheaper on a converted basis.  Even through the direct mail channel, which can be as high as $3-4 per piece depending on how elaborate it may be, the conversion rate is much higher on this type of communication.  Most communication in this channel can be near free, with email and push notifications through apps.

On the other side, acquiring new customers is very expensive.  Even if going completely online, the conversion rates are so small compared to the cost per click or action, that it makes the customer acquisition cost upside down for 2 - 3 purchases for many companies.  If the business needs to go traditional advertising routes, now the cost becomes staggering.  

Retention customers bring in the most revenue

While this varies from business to business, I doubt you will find many longterm successful organizations that don't have this phenomena.  The loyal customer is the bread and butter for the business and can be relied upon to grow revenue.  Within retention campaigns there are customers of all different types and understanding the loyal customer that can spend more money is the best opportunity for profit growth.  

It may seem counterintuitive to look for growth in your loyal customer base, but I have always thought of it like this.  The more customers that I can have in the active customer base, the more opportunity I have for growth.  Acquisition rarely can go away and there should always be a plan to acquire more customers, but that cost should decrease as the business matures.  For a very mature business, this cost should be as low as possible.  

A simple way to illustrate this is 

New Customers + Retained Customers + Reactivated Customers = Active Customer Base.

So if the business can acquire at a consistent base, lets call this 1 million customers per year and retain the majority of their customers, lets call this 10 million customers, then they can grow their active customer base by close to 1 million per year.  Now if those customers are retained and a new million come in, the growth lies in increasing the retention customers.  Otherwise, it costs too much to try to double your acquired customers, especially the more mature the company is.  Try to focus on retention first, it is truly the King.

The True Purpose of a Loyalty Card Program

Loyalty card programs are now a way of life.  So many businesses in every vertical has a loyalty program based on dollars spent.  The programs range from miles in airlines, to how many stamps does a customer have on their stamp card before they get a free yogurt.  The belief is these programs will drive loyalty and incremental purchases because of the benefits offered for the spend.  But do they really drive incremental spend?  Or should the true purpose of the program not focus on the incremental spend, but something entirely different?

Airlines are the standard bearer for loyalty programs.  Frequent travelers swear by the loyalty programs and can tell you how many miles they have in their account.  With so many travelers being able to quote their miles, this must work correct?  In reality very few of the people traveling through the air really care about the loyalty programs.  Most will actually look for price or non-stops when making a decision on who to fly with.  So who are these travelers who care about the program?  They are the 2% that drive most of the revenue.  Well that's a good thing right?  The funny part about this model is most of these travelers are not actually paying for their flights.  They are frequent business travelers who are not paying out of their own pocket, their work or customers are paying for it.  The irony of these loyal customers is they would never spend that kind of money with the airline if it was their own.  They are loyal to the program because they would like the free travel when they want to go somewhere on personal time, with the family.  

So what happens with the remainder of the travelers?  Is the program enough to drive loyalty?  The answer is no.  But that is ok.  They shouldn't be designed to drive loyalty from these customers.  If they actually did, they would more than likely be too rich of a program.  So what happens to the 98%?  Should companies just not push their loyalty cards on the rest of this market?  

Loyalty program should only be rich enough for customers to want to be tracked.  Now this means many different things for each industry.  For airlines it might mean a free amenity if the customer is a member of the loyalty program.  For a yogurt shop it could be a free topping for a member.  For a casino it is the ability to receive a comp.  Grocery stores are masters, you don't get the sale price unless you are a member.  Of course I want to join for that $10 off of my grocery bill.  

Loyalty programs are an opt-in for tracking behavior.  For the majority of your customers, the loyalty rewards in your program will either be out of reach or not worth any incremental spend.  But, what you are getting is behavioral data.  How often is the customer engaging, how much is the customer spending, what are the customers patterns.  Do they only come for sales?  Do they come only when they have an incentive?  Do they come a certain day of the week?

This is the gold that comes from the loyalty program.  Mining that gold has unlimited opportunity.  Loyalty programs have 3 major flaws.

1. They are not targeted
2. They are not proactive
3. They are easily copied

Loyalty programs treat customers differently based on 1 metric, a total amount of something.  Whether that's miles flown, purchases made or points that equate to dollars spent, the one metric is dollars spent.  Well that is a good start for measuring a customer, but what if a Customer A spent $500 3 times and Customer B spent $10 150 times?  They will both be in the same loyalty tier because they spent a total of $1,500, but they are entirely different customers.  If the company can get Customer A to spend 1 more time, it is worth a lot more than if they can get Customer B to spend 1 more time.  So the loyalty program doesn't incentivize customers equally.

Loyalty programs rely on customers to want to interact.  They are reactive mechanisms, waiting for customers to spend enough to get whatever reward the customer may be wanting.  Of course good database marketers can send out reminders that someone is close to a reward or they might move up a tier, but the reward has to be enough of a carrot for that customer to change their behavior.  

All the great innovations a company can make in their program can be copied by anyone, because it is a documented program.  If the strategy is to own loyalty by having the best program, any competitor could easily come over the top and have a richer program.  This leads a race to the bottom mentality.  The company could always come back over the top, but the programs start becoming too rich, remember only be rich enough to track behavior.  If a competitor can negate your best selling points (loyalty program), then the program can never be a competitive advantage, nor do you want it to be.

This all leads to the true reason to have a loyalty program, tracking behavior.  With targeted direct marketing, companies can inventive the behavior they are looking for.  A company can give Customer A a much different communication and offer because they know that the customer will spend $500 the next time they can get the customer to engage.  The direct marketing can be proactive.  Direct marketing can take a customer from someone that rarely comes in, to someone that engages with the business on a regular basis.  Last, but certainly not least, companies can innovate without being copied. Because direct marketing is not a published benefit, there can be many different tactics for a range of different customers and the competition is blind to the strategies.  

There is so much more opportunity in direct marketing compared to the loyalty program.  By keeping expenses as small as possible in the loyalty program, it leaves much more money for direct marketing to drive the business.  When allowed to drive the business, direct marketing can target customers in many different ways, based on the customers individual behaviors, with incentives that will truly drive that particular customer.  A loyalty program will never be able to do that as effectively. 

How to Find, Assess, and Hire the Modern Marketer

Who is the modern marketer?

Regardless of the role in marketing, the expectations related to data and analytics need to be consistent. While there will always be more advanced analytical and technical positions, there is a new baseline for all marketers. The skill set includes a knowledge of data management principles and analytical strategies, and an understanding of the role of data quality, the importance of data governance, and the value of data in marketing disciplines. Today’s marketer needs to go well beyond reporting and metrics, and be more proficient in a full range of analytics, which may include optimization, text, sentiment, scoring, modeling, visualization, forecasting, and attribution.

Marketers need to have experience with the technology, tools, and design approaches that leverage data and analytics. Campaign design, multi-channel integration, content performance, personalization, and digital marketing can all be driven by fact-based decision-making, ideally with direct accountability to results and the ability to very quickly react and adjust to the demands of the customer and the market. The marketers I am referring to have a distinct blend of creativity and reasoning talents; they are inquisitive, inventive, and enthused by a culture that is advanced and agile.

Great article that really describes what marketers are becoming.  I believe this change in what a marketer is has been happening for quite a few years now.  A a marketer It is so important to understand the tools, data and how to analyze the data.