Filling a Blind Spot for Cross-Channel Marketing Intelligence

Before you can make sense of customer data, you've got to get it all in one place. Here's one suggestion for handling that challenge.

If you market via multiple channels, then you’re likely struggling with getting data from all the channels and integrating that data into a single view. Not until you have all the data can you even begin to approach having the information, and ultimately the intelligence, that you need to make informed decisions about where to put your marketing dollars. Until then, it’s all just a hunch.

Getting All the Marketing Data Into One Place

Of course, if your company predates the Web, then you probably already have most of that data in a separate system. Perhaps you have systems in place to populate SAS, SPSS, or Unica with data from multiple channels. After all, marketing analytics didn’t originate with the Web; the Web is simply the first channel for which conversion data is so readily available. Soon, of course, wireless phones, interactive television, and electronic paper will provide the same kind of metrics for other channels.

Coremetrics offers a reporting suite loaded with features for online marketing. Online marketing frequently represents part of a larger marketing initiative. Coremetrics provides the ability to configure a report and save it for future use (or use a pre-existing format). You can then download the results in a variety of formats for later upload into the multichannel marketing analytics software you’re already using. And all this can be done using a Web-based interface with no involvement by IT. Marketers can complete the picture of how their marketing investments are doing.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Coremetrics has realized that most companies don’t want entirely new solutions that reinvent the wheel with one more spoke for online data. They frequently already have made investments in powerful legacy systems, which are extensible enough to permit the addition of other channels. What these existing systems need is to be fed data about the online marketing scenario. Solutions that make it easy for multichannel marketing efforts to be tracked in one place provide visibility for “the black hole” that is online marketing in most organizations.

Allie Shaw, VP of worldwide marketing for Unicast, cleverly pointed out that for most companies “online marketing constitutes a rounding error in their budgets.” I believe that much of the reluctance to spend on online marketing is attributable to the complexity of online marketing metrics. Marketers often don’t have a way to compare apples to apples when trying to assess the effectiveness of their marketing dollars in online channels versus offline channels. For companies that are trying to quantify multiple channels, with offline channels already under control, Coremetrics is an excellent choice.

Of course, Coremetrics’ suite is also a strong contender for companies that are exclusively marketing in the online space. The reports are more configurable this year than last, but everything I wrote last year about Coremetrics in “Gutzman’s Best of 2000” for ECommerce-Guide.com still holds. Coremetrics is an impressive contender in a crowded field.

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