Database marketing meets digital analytics

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By: Wise Marketer Staff |

Posted on February 5, 2013

There is much to be gained by marketers who marry the two distinct but complementary disciplines of digital analytics and database marketing, creating the hybrid corporate function of 'digital database marketing', according to a joint white paper by big data software firm Celebrus Technologies and data analytics consultancy Semphonic.

In the white paper, entitled 'Web analytics marries database marketing', Celebrus' vice president of marketing, Katharine Hulls, and Semphonic's vice president of digital analytics, Matthias Bettag, illuminate what they believe to be the considerable business value that can be gained by the bringing together of "something old and something new".

By uniting traditional database marketing techniques and new digital analytics data, Hulls and Bettag explain how an organisation can use its online data much more effectively to grow revenue, increase customer engagement, enhance brand loyalty, and optimise its marketing effectiveness.

According to Hulls, "Through using the two disciplines, techniques, data types and mind-sets to explore this new way of thinking, organisations can generate even more value from their analytics and marketing teams. This can help increase customer loyalty, improve new customer acquisition and enhance the customer experience for long-term growth and success."

The paper goes on to highlight four examples of how to bring together these traditionally separate disciplines and feed a digital database marketing team with streams of highly 'granular' online data. This marriage of digital analytics data and database marketing techniques can, the authors argue, provide organisations with a deeper understanding of customer analytics and drive effective marketing actions - including one-to-one personalisation, lifecycle attribution modelling, predictive campaign optimisation and channel cost reduction.

"Web analytics has evolved considerably since its beginning in the 1990s and has now matured to become 'Digital Analytics'. By contrast, database marketing is a long-standing discipline with well-established methodologies to explore data and generate actionable insight from it," added Bettag. "By developing an appreciation of database marketing, its techniques and value, and collaborating on projects and ideas, organisations can truly look to maximising the impact of both disciplines and then share the glory of achieving improved results."

The paper asserts that digital analytics is no longer just about websites; it now includes the growing array of digital channels including mobile devices, apps and social media. This insight enables a company to understand customer trending and overall online behaviour, which is valuable to build better websites and increase conversion rates. It looks at the value database marketing brings and how that, until recently, it has been challenged by the lack of individual-level data required from today's digital channels in order to get maximum value from the discipline's well-proven tools and methodologies.

However, Hulls and Bettag go a step further, explaining how, as a result of individual-level digital channel data now being available, organisations can use digital database marketing to truly understand and interact with individual customers and transform the quality of their customer engagement.

The complete white paper has been made available for free download from the Celebrus web site - click here (web cookie opt-in and free registration required).

For additional information:
·  Visit Celebrus at http://www.celebrus.com
·  Visit Semphonic at http://www.semphonic.com