As long as Loyalty programs have existed, the corporate giants such as airlines, hotels, and departments stores have dominated this space due to the vast resources at their disposal to offer elaborate loyalty rewards, leaving small businesses with outdated solutions such as punch cards offering...Read More

I recently read an article that highlighted concerns many credit unions encounter –  spending a great deal of time and resources building and maintaining indirect relationships with local auto dealers only to have them finance your member through another lender even though your...Read More

REACTIVATION:  To Make Active Again If you are looking for the proverbial low hanging fruit, then look no further than your current customer data.  Within your data lies opportunities for immediate revenue.  Identify the customers who have not purchased from you in a time frame...Read More

Okay, so you have a loyalty program.  You are collecting contact information on many of your customers.  Your Point-of-Sale system tracks purchases which you can now tie back to an actual person.  You have some very cool offers like buy 5, get 1 free.  And, earn 500 points...Read More

Too often we think we know what our average customer looks like.  Many marketers will devise a direct mail campaign with a specific target audience in mind.  However, who they’re targeting doesn’t always align with what their average customer looks like.  ...Read More

Two years ago I had to learn what gamification meant.  It is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context to better engage users and employees to solve problems. In short, playing games helps us to connect to brands, learn, and earn rewards and/or status.  In...Read More

It’s no secret that poor data quality can have a negative impact on business performance.  However, most of us are so focused and isolated within in our own departments that it’s easy to overlook just how deep the rabbit hole goes.  Poor data can be cancerous and has the...Read More

I find it incredibly ironic that ad agencies are always on the cutting edge of creativity and innovation, yet seem to regularly fall short when it comes to utilizing the data they generate as a result of this ‘innovative thinking’ to produce meaningful insight they can then use to...Read More

In the current financial landscape, banks are struggling to adhere to new regulations, margins are being squeezed and customers are beginning to consider other alternatives. Free checking is becoming extinct or it has many more strings attached. Auto loans, mortgage loans and unsecured loans...Read More

What will 2013 bring? We all use the New Year as a fresh start.  Put the last year behind us and focus on the next is cleansing and dangerous at the same time.  I am in the process of setting personal and business goals as I write this.  I’ve got one eye in the rearview...Read More

As you can see from the figure above, we cannot have information without data and without information we cannot gain knowledge.  Ultimately data, information and knowledge combined with experience will hopefully lead to wisdom.  Wisdom in the context of big data means that you know...Read More

I like this article around improving marketing effectiveness, and a few things jumped out at me that are vital for the improvement process: 1 – Freshness of the contact list – how often are you updating your customer name and address file?  If not at least once a...Read More

Big life changes for consumers mean big opportunities for marketers, according to results from studies by Epsilon and Zillow, which show consumers to be open with their spending and loyalties while moving house. And transitional periods don’t only provide opportunities...Read More

For the past 12 plus years, companies have been striving for a single view of a customer.  Sure we’ve come up with cute buzzwords like CRM, 360 degree view, customer-centric, and omni-directional.   But, the fact remains, the number of companies with a true single view...Read More

Let’s play a little word association. I will say a phrase and you think of the first word that comes to mind. Ready… Business Intelligence. What was your word? Useful, productive, strategic, user-friendly, or expensive, unproductive, confusing, cumbersome, useless. We are seeing...Read More

Yes, the future is upon us. The convergence of smartphone technology, social‐media data and futuristic technology such as 3‐D printers is changing the face of retail in a way that experts across the industry say will upend the bricks‐and‐mortar model in a matter of a...Read More

Demographic data is tremendously useful for marketing.  Knowing the demographic profiles of your customers can improve your ability to market to them and allow you to prospect for new customers with similar profiles.  But demographics only give you a very general view of your customer...Read More

While watching The Godfather the other night (one of the greatest movies of all time, in my humble opinion), I couldn’t help but notice that one of the key philosophies throughout that movie (and most mafia related movies for that matter) is loyalty.  Now in The Godfather...Read More

Only 2 more punches for a Free Honeybaked Ham sandwich! Over the past year and a half, we have been focused on customer intelligence.  During this time, we’ve been helping companies determine how to motivate their customers to spend more money and become more loyal.  Through...Read More

What is the state of your data?  Does it bring value? The buzz in the industry is “Big Data”.  What do you do with it?  How do you manage it?  What is its value?  Whether you plan to use the data in a batch environment or real-time or both, you need to decide...Read More

As I drove my kids to school this morning, my 5th grade son was studying for a Science test today on Controlled Experiments.  His experiments had to do with flipping pennies and swinging washers on strings, but I found myself applying his methodology to measuring ROI in marketing and...Read More

I stumbled upon a website recently that has proven quite addictive.  It is called FindTheData (http://www.findthedata.org/) and is a database tool that compares all kinds of cool information, from the size of various college football stadiums to cell phone usage by country.  For...Read More

The brand of Lance Armstrong is complicated and among the most polarizing in the realm of loyalty.  It is complicated because his athletic career is intertwined with his foundation, Livestrong.  The polarization comes when you mesh the two and ask people to tell the difference. ...Read More

There is a thirst for knowledge spanning across industries.  Data is exploding with social, web, transactional and other data sets becoming more readily available.  To acquire the knowledge demanded by upper management, companies must have access to analytics.  But what kind of...Read More

In the past year I have been continuously looking for ways to save money.  One of the lifestyle changes that I made was not eating out for lunch every day.  I instantly saw an improvement in my bank account.  It wasn’t until my sister started receiving packages from Lean...Read More

As I went about my routine this morning I had the Today Show on in the background.  Everyone is gearing up for the Olympics in London so naturally they interview one of the top Olympians ever, Michael Phelps.  In the interview it he stated that he was looking for incremental gains...Read More

Customer engagement should be easier than ever with all the data available to the top corporations via their social media, email, and web presence.  Why don’t they use it? (This is a reprint of a post by Ginger Conlon at DMNews.) Like many customers, I don’t fit neatly into a...Read More

A few years ago, Financial Institutions were relying on ‘free checking’ programs to bring them new customers, which in turn usually provided more overdraft associated fees.  Well, those days are mostly over with the new laws and regulations in place. In those days some of the...Read More

In today’s economy, consumers are growing fonder of the coupon every day. From Groupon to Living Social, marketers and consumers alike have proven that no matter what may change in their world, everyone still loves a good deal. But what is the threshold for getting a customer in the door?...Read More

For anyone who loves NFL football, I’m sure you’re familiar with ESPN’s segment on NFL Monday Night Countdown entitled ‘C’MON MAN’.  For those not familiar with it, this comical segment consists of regular sports analysts who take turns highlighting a...Read More

In today’s barrage of media, researchers cite numbers of impressions in a single day for a consumer to be between 600 and 850.  All of them probably have the goal of engaging you with their brand.  The question is do you want a relationship with a brand, do you care if a brand...Read More

I’ll admit, until recently I didn’t know the practice of looking at something in a store and then buying it online had a name, “Showrooming”.  Smart phones make this easier to do, even while you are standing in the store in question.  A survey from the Pew...Read More

I do a lot of online shopping.  I might even be one of those people who could feature in Confessions of a Shopaholic.  It’s just too addicting and easy to surpass the long lines, rows of merchandise and sometimes clueless customer service representatives.  Just a long...Read More

When I go through my home mailbox I’m typically good about filtering out  those mail pieces addressed to the wrong person, in a lot of times, one that has not lived at the residence for over three years. But there are those days when anything that looks important gets opened out of...Read More

If your organization is like many Altair works with, the amount of customer information you have is restricted by the retrieval/input method.  For instance, your point of sale (POS) only captures name address, phone and/or email.  Even then you are counting on the sales associate to...Read More

Many companies have focused on loyalty for years; although, they weren’t doing it within a loyalty marketing department.  It was previously the growth, retention and attrition campaigns within the marketing department.  Wrapping it to one word “loyalty” not only...Read More

The better part of my career has been spent in an industry that can be highly demanding, overly stressful and can almost certainly be credited for the vast majority of my hair loss.  I worked nights, weekends, holidays, and even cancelled vacations; all for the sake of completing marketing...Read More

OK, I admit it.  I am not a fan of Mobile Marketing.  There I said it.  As a user, I hate using my Android or my wife’s iPhone to do anything on the Internet.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some mobile apps that I LOVE like Google Navigation, Barcode Scanner, and...Read More

At 2012 Loyalty Expo hosted by Loyalty 360 Altair Customer Intelligence conducted a survey. We asked everyone we met, “What is your largest hurdle: Data Integration, Customer Analysis, Predictive Modeling, Performance Measurement or Access to Reports?” We had 68 respondents to our...Read More

If you are looking for improvements to your marketing campaigns, predictive modeling can oftentimes give you just the lift you need.  If you have the time, the data and the money, a custom predictive model will usually yield the best results. For the rest of you, a product-specific shelf...Read More

I’m a fan of Marketing Charts. I get their update everyday, with cool charts and facts from the world of marketing. Today’s top chart caught my eye. It struck me as funny that a survey could claim more consumers are “loyal” to online sites that provide regular discounts....Read More

How well do you know your customers?  Oh sure, you probably (hopefully!) know things that happened at your register like what they buy from you, how often and how much.  But what else do you know?  And how would it help you target your customers to learn more about them. The...Read More

Seeing the strong rumor that Klout raised $30 million on a valuation of $200 million got me to thinking about the future of endorsements and loyalty programs.  This 3 year old company has a vision of their Klout becoming like a credit score.  Klout calculates how socially influential...Read More

John Wanamaker famously said that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Most companies collect enormous amounts of data about their customers but few use this data effectively to improve their marketing efforts.  Data...Read More

Everyone in the Customer Intelligence world is used to the term Customer Data Integration (CDI).  Now, data from the digital age needs to be integrated, Social Data.  Social Data by its very nature already links a persona to a brand or sentiment of an event or brand.  The...Read More

It’s a curious situation.  As the company doing the data processing for many lenders who do refinances, we’re always asked to remove current customers. It is common practice but why?  The models are telling us they’d likely respond, the mortgage amount falls within...Read More

I think one of the best lessons I learned from my college computer programming classes was that no matter how well you thought your program worked you had better be running your final QC on the output file itself.  Your program may run without an error and your output may have been created...Read More

Having multiple locations within a customer’s footprint is not a bad thing.  Although, sending a location based message can be challenging.  Sometimes the customer/future customer does not even know they have multiple locations to use.  In many instances you’ll...Read More

Using a specified radius around your location(s) is a typical method of geographic selection for prospecting.   In many instances this method of selection works without a problem.  In some programs you need more sophistication.  When this happens we move to Drive Time or PMA...Read More

In the data processing world mistakes happen.  It’s just a fact of doing business.  Knowing that, implementing a quality control (QC) procedure is a must. Volumes can be written about QC.  Here are a few highlights from our perspective.  Putting processes in place to...Read More

In my family, one of our favorite games to play is to quote a line from a movie and guess what movie it is from.  In that spirit, I actually thought of a movie quote that meshed well with my blog topic today:  “We’re way past birthdays now”.  If you know the...Read More

The title is not meant to say that the data you collect on your customers is not real or factual, but it is only a portion of what you need to have the full picture. For example, I’m 6 foot tall and weigh in about 197. Take a look at me in my running clothes (with the slight love handles)...Read More

Everyone wants a deal. That statement seems true enough in today’s world. For instance, some of the hottest websites and stocks right now are Groupon, Living Social, and Yipit. Even if you don’t hit the web for a deal, I am sure that one shows up in your mail box at least once a...Read More

As long as Loyalty programs have existed, the corporate giants such as airlines, hotels, and departments stores have dominated this space due to the vast resources at their disposal to offer elaborate loyalty rewards, leaving small businesses with outdated solutions such as punch cards offering...Read More

I recently read an article that highlighted concerns many credit unions encounter –  spending a great deal of time and resources building and maintaining indirect relationships with local auto dealers only to have them finance your member through another lender even though your...Read More

REACTIVATION:  To Make Active Again If you are looking for the proverbial low hanging fruit, then look no further than your current customer data.  Within your data lies opportunities for immediate revenue.  Identify the customers who have not purchased from you in a time frame...Read More

Okay, so you have a loyalty program.  You are collecting contact information on many of your customers.  Your Point-of-Sale system tracks purchases which you can now tie back to an actual person.  You have some very cool offers like buy 5, get 1 free.  And, earn 500 points...Read More

Too often we think we know what our average customer looks like.  Many marketers will devise a direct mail campaign with a specific target audience in mind.  However, who they’re targeting doesn’t always align with what their average customer looks like.  ...Read More

Two years ago I had to learn what gamification meant.  It is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context to better engage users and employees to solve problems. In short, playing games helps us to connect to brands, learn, and earn rewards and/or status.  In...Read More

It’s no secret that poor data quality can have a negative impact on business performance.  However, most of us are so focused and isolated within in our own departments that it’s easy to overlook just how deep the rabbit hole goes.  Poor data can be cancerous and has the...Read More

I find it incredibly ironic that ad agencies are always on the cutting edge of creativity and innovation, yet seem to regularly fall short when it comes to utilizing the data they generate as a result of this ‘innovative thinking’ to produce meaningful insight they can then use to...Read More

In the current financial landscape, banks are struggling to adhere to new regulations, margins are being squeezed and customers are beginning to consider other alternatives. Free checking is becoming extinct or it has many more strings attached. Auto loans, mortgage loans and unsecured loans...Read More

What will 2013 bring? We all use the New Year as a fresh start.  Put the last year behind us and focus on the next is cleansing and dangerous at the same time.  I am in the process of setting personal and business goals as I write this.  I’ve got one eye in the rearview...Read More

As you can see from the figure above, we cannot have information without data and without information we cannot gain knowledge.  Ultimately data, information and knowledge combined with experience will hopefully lead to wisdom.  Wisdom in the context of big data means that you know...Read More

I like this article around improving marketing effectiveness, and a few things jumped out at me that are vital for the improvement process: 1 – Freshness of the contact list – how often are you updating your customer name and address file?  If not at least once a...Read More

Big life changes for consumers mean big opportunities for marketers, according to results from studies by Epsilon and Zillow, which show consumers to be open with their spending and loyalties while moving house. And transitional periods don’t only provide opportunities...Read More

For the past 12 plus years, companies have been striving for a single view of a customer.  Sure we’ve come up with cute buzzwords like CRM, 360 degree view, customer-centric, and omni-directional.   But, the fact remains, the number of companies with a true single view...Read More

Let’s play a little word association. I will say a phrase and you think of the first word that comes to mind. Ready… Business Intelligence. What was your word? Useful, productive, strategic, user-friendly, or expensive, unproductive, confusing, cumbersome, useless. We are seeing...Read More

Yes, the future is upon us. The convergence of smartphone technology, social‐media data and futuristic technology such as 3‐D printers is changing the face of retail in a way that experts across the industry say will upend the bricks‐and‐mortar model in a matter of a...Read More

Demographic data is tremendously useful for marketing.  Knowing the demographic profiles of your customers can improve your ability to market to them and allow you to prospect for new customers with similar profiles.  But demographics only give you a very general view of your customer...Read More

While watching The Godfather the other night (one of the greatest movies of all time, in my humble opinion), I couldn’t help but notice that one of the key philosophies throughout that movie (and most mafia related movies for that matter) is loyalty.  Now in The Godfather...Read More

Only 2 more punches for a Free Honeybaked Ham sandwich! Over the past year and a half, we have been focused on customer intelligence.  During this time, we’ve been helping companies determine how to motivate their customers to spend more money and become more loyal.  Through...Read More

What is the state of your data?  Does it bring value? The buzz in the industry is “Big Data”.  What do you do with it?  How do you manage it?  What is its value?  Whether you plan to use the data in a batch environment or real-time or both, you need to decide...Read More

As I drove my kids to school this morning, my 5th grade son was studying for a Science test today on Controlled Experiments.  His experiments had to do with flipping pennies and swinging washers on strings, but I found myself applying his methodology to measuring ROI in marketing and...Read More

I stumbled upon a website recently that has proven quite addictive.  It is called FindTheData (http://www.findthedata.org/) and is a database tool that compares all kinds of cool information, from the size of various college football stadiums to cell phone usage by country.  For...Read More

The brand of Lance Armstrong is complicated and among the most polarizing in the realm of loyalty.  It is complicated because his athletic career is intertwined with his foundation, Livestrong.  The polarization comes when you mesh the two and ask people to tell the difference. ...Read More

There is a thirst for knowledge spanning across industries.  Data is exploding with social, web, transactional and other data sets becoming more readily available.  To acquire the knowledge demanded by upper management, companies must have access to analytics.  But what kind of...Read More

In the past year I have been continuously looking for ways to save money.  One of the lifestyle changes that I made was not eating out for lunch every day.  I instantly saw an improvement in my bank account.  It wasn’t until my sister started receiving packages from Lean...Read More

As I went about my routine this morning I had the Today Show on in the background.  Everyone is gearing up for the Olympics in London so naturally they interview one of the top Olympians ever, Michael Phelps.  In the interview it he stated that he was looking for incremental gains...Read More

Customer engagement should be easier than ever with all the data available to the top corporations via their social media, email, and web presence.  Why don’t they use it? (This is a reprint of a post by Ginger Conlon at DMNews.) Like many customers, I don’t fit neatly into a...Read More

A few years ago, Financial Institutions were relying on ‘free checking’ programs to bring them new customers, which in turn usually provided more overdraft associated fees.  Well, those days are mostly over with the new laws and regulations in place. In those days some of the...Read More

In today’s economy, consumers are growing fonder of the coupon every day. From Groupon to Living Social, marketers and consumers alike have proven that no matter what may change in their world, everyone still loves a good deal. But what is the threshold for getting a customer in the door?...Read More

For anyone who loves NFL football, I’m sure you’re familiar with ESPN’s segment on NFL Monday Night Countdown entitled ‘C’MON MAN’.  For those not familiar with it, this comical segment consists of regular sports analysts who take turns highlighting a...Read More

In today’s barrage of media, researchers cite numbers of impressions in a single day for a consumer to be between 600 and 850.  All of them probably have the goal of engaging you with their brand.  The question is do you want a relationship with a brand, do you care if a brand...Read More

I’ll admit, until recently I didn’t know the practice of looking at something in a store and then buying it online had a name, “Showrooming”.  Smart phones make this easier to do, even while you are standing in the store in question.  A survey from the Pew...Read More

I do a lot of online shopping.  I might even be one of those people who could feature in Confessions of a Shopaholic.  It’s just too addicting and easy to surpass the long lines, rows of merchandise and sometimes clueless customer service representatives.  Just a long...Read More

When I go through my home mailbox I’m typically good about filtering out  those mail pieces addressed to the wrong person, in a lot of times, one that has not lived at the residence for over three years. But there are those days when anything that looks important gets opened out of...Read More

If your organization is like many Altair works with, the amount of customer information you have is restricted by the retrieval/input method.  For instance, your point of sale (POS) only captures name address, phone and/or email.  Even then you are counting on the sales associate to...Read More

Many companies have focused on loyalty for years; although, they weren’t doing it within a loyalty marketing department.  It was previously the growth, retention and attrition campaigns within the marketing department.  Wrapping it to one word “loyalty” not only...Read More

The better part of my career has been spent in an industry that can be highly demanding, overly stressful and can almost certainly be credited for the vast majority of my hair loss.  I worked nights, weekends, holidays, and even cancelled vacations; all for the sake of completing marketing...Read More

OK, I admit it.  I am not a fan of Mobile Marketing.  There I said it.  As a user, I hate using my Android or my wife’s iPhone to do anything on the Internet.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some mobile apps that I LOVE like Google Navigation, Barcode Scanner, and...Read More

At 2012 Loyalty Expo hosted by Loyalty 360 Altair Customer Intelligence conducted a survey. We asked everyone we met, “What is your largest hurdle: Data Integration, Customer Analysis, Predictive Modeling, Performance Measurement or Access to Reports?” We had 68 respondents to our...Read More

If you are looking for improvements to your marketing campaigns, predictive modeling can oftentimes give you just the lift you need.  If you have the time, the data and the money, a custom predictive model will usually yield the best results. For the rest of you, a product-specific shelf...Read More

I’m a fan of Marketing Charts. I get their update everyday, with cool charts and facts from the world of marketing. Today’s top chart caught my eye. It struck me as funny that a survey could claim more consumers are “loyal” to online sites that provide regular discounts....Read More

How well do you know your customers?  Oh sure, you probably (hopefully!) know things that happened at your register like what they buy from you, how often and how much.  But what else do you know?  And how would it help you target your customers to learn more about them. The...Read More

Seeing the strong rumor that Klout raised $30 million on a valuation of $200 million got me to thinking about the future of endorsements and loyalty programs.  This 3 year old company has a vision of their Klout becoming like a credit score.  Klout calculates how socially influential...Read More

John Wanamaker famously said that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Most companies collect enormous amounts of data about their customers but few use this data effectively to improve their marketing efforts.  Data...Read More

Everyone in the Customer Intelligence world is used to the term Customer Data Integration (CDI).  Now, data from the digital age needs to be integrated, Social Data.  Social Data by its very nature already links a persona to a brand or sentiment of an event or brand.  The...Read More

It’s a curious situation.  As the company doing the data processing for many lenders who do refinances, we’re always asked to remove current customers. It is common practice but why?  The models are telling us they’d likely respond, the mortgage amount falls within...Read More

I think one of the best lessons I learned from my college computer programming classes was that no matter how well you thought your program worked you had better be running your final QC on the output file itself.  Your program may run without an error and your output may have been created...Read More

Having multiple locations within a customer’s footprint is not a bad thing.  Although, sending a location based message can be challenging.  Sometimes the customer/future customer does not even know they have multiple locations to use.  In many instances you’ll...Read More

Using a specified radius around your location(s) is a typical method of geographic selection for prospecting.   In many instances this method of selection works without a problem.  In some programs you need more sophistication.  When this happens we move to Drive Time or PMA...Read More

In the data processing world mistakes happen.  It’s just a fact of doing business.  Knowing that, implementing a quality control (QC) procedure is a must. Volumes can be written about QC.  Here are a few highlights from our perspective.  Putting processes in place to...Read More

In my family, one of our favorite games to play is to quote a line from a movie and guess what movie it is from.  In that spirit, I actually thought of a movie quote that meshed well with my blog topic today:  “We’re way past birthdays now”.  If you know the...Read More

The title is not meant to say that the data you collect on your customers is not real or factual, but it is only a portion of what you need to have the full picture. For example, I’m 6 foot tall and weigh in about 197. Take a look at me in my running clothes (with the slight love handles)...Read More

Everyone wants a deal. That statement seems true enough in today’s world. For instance, some of the hottest websites and stocks right now are Groupon, Living Social, and Yipit. Even if you don’t hit the web for a deal, I am sure that one shows up in your mail box at least once a...Read More