Drilling Down

Turning Customer Data into Profits

 with a Spreadsheet

Site and Book topic:

Maximizing marketing ROI with customer behavior analysis

Software Design, IT Assistance

Jim's Intro: I'm not a programmer.  That said, I have helped many IT people with functionality issues and requirements documentation because I know a lot about how customer databases are constructed, what goes in them, and what database marketers want to use them for.  In other words, just enough IT stuff to be dangerous, and to be able to bridge the gap between marketeers and the IT folks.  

The really interesting thing about my book is the number of IT people who just love it, and are using it as a roadmap for some of their in-house stuff.  How could this be?

Well, for one thing, I developed these methods in an interactive, 24 x 7 environment where nothing, and I mean nothing of any significance happened without IT support.  I had to learn the ropes, and as a young marketeer, ending up realizing that technology and marketing were converging, and that I would be better off knowing as much as I could about the way these machines worked.

So the Drilling Down method was developed right alongside the IT people who had to make it happen in the real world.

Another reason IT people like the book so much is the method is very logical, building upon itself as an iterative process.  It's a numbers-driven approach: everything gets a number or "score", and all decision-making is driven by the scores.  Very black and white stuff, with little marketing speak and the grasping at straws that accompanies it. 

So if you're and IT person looking for a little solid direction on customer behavior profiling, I think you'll like the book; these people did.  You can check out the specific chapter by chapter contents of the book right here.

If you are working on a software application that has anything to do with profiling customer behavior and you need a hand, perhaps I can help.  I know you know how to build it, the question is, do you really know what should be in it?  Where did the requirements come from?

Let me give you an example.  You undoubtedly spent a huge amount of time working on collecting survey data and "demographics" from customers.  If you had been reading this web site in 1998, you would have known that stuff is so 80's - been there done that.  Using demographics for customer profiling doesn't work very well for anything useful, unless you are a pure media play.  If you are selling products, it's almost worthless by itself, but becomes more important when linked to actual customer behavior.  But the marketers told you it was important, right?  Wrong.

Here's another example.  Are you interested in tracking the quality of customers generated by different ads?  Did you know you could track and compare the future value of the different customers who respond, and use this information to determine the true ROI of a campaign?  You can.  Find out how by taking this tutorial.

One more example.  Are you designing software to track the value of customers responding to pay-per-click engines like GoTo and search phrase placements like Google Adwords?  Did you know a customer who clicks on a paid search ad is often a higher value customer than one who clicks on a free search listing for the same keyword phrase on the very same page the paid ad is displayed?  You should probably read this article.

Anyway, my point is this.  I know a lot about this stuff, and I also know how to speak a language IT people understand.  So if you need help with a marketing software project - you want to know what kind of data you should collect, or the kinds of reports that will facilitate profitable decision making, or want to design a customer profiling application that will actually improve the profits of the business when implemented, let me know.  

And you might want to check out the book, if for nothing else, to use as a starting place for customer profiling requirements.  Before you end up strangling the marketing people who are unable to tell you what they need - in most cases because they just don't know.

What would you like to do now?

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