JT on EDM

Ginger Conlon had a nice post this week – Don’t Blast. Target. – Think customers: The 1to1 Blog.
many marketers are still drawn to the ease of blasting to a broad audience, instead of targeting for maximum impact among those most likely to respond
If you are trying to make this transition from blasting to targeting – [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ
Tom Davenport had a post today on Microdecisions for Macro Impact that pointed out on the key benefits of decision management, with its focus on operational decisions:
If you can identify a few key microdecisions that can be addressed and improved, you can often dramatically improve performance.
“Micro decisions” is a phrase Neil and I [...]

This post caught my eye last week – ecommerceinsights.com Blog » Automated recommendations: ubiquitous in 2009?
Predictive merchandising becomes ubiquitous, and the crowd begins to separate. “Predictive merchandising” is also referred to as “automated merchandising” or “personalized product recommendations”. Whatever term you like (or are marketing) we will see this area are the “product reviews of [...]

Elana Anderson, now at Unica, wrote a nice piece titled Where CRM Goes Next for Baseline Magazine. In a short piece she highlights some of the key challenges for CRM/Marketing going foward:

It must become more focused on interactive marketing, engaging with customers
It must break free from old habits like fixed campaign schedules and a focus [...]

Great post by Elana Anderson – What Will Campaign Management Be Like In 2020? « NxtERA Marketing Blog. I have long believed that improved campaign management, like improved customer experience and improved marketing, requires a greater focus on customer treatment decisions. I have blogged before about the role of decision management in campaign management (in [...]

Interesting article on how the NHL used the power of personalization and targeting (or extreme personalization) to improve results. It does not talk about how they do this but clearly they have made things like the front cover choice for their catalog and key elements of their web presence decisions so they can make [...]

Tim Walters of Forrester had an interesting post this week – Is Web Personalization Now A Matter Of “Thurvival”? in which he emphasized that, even in a downturn, getting better at web personalization has a payoff. Now I think personalization is a good thing and the evidence that it results in more engagement, better results [...]

Scott had a great article on segmentation and personas this week that is a nice, quick read. I think the use of analytics in persona design can make a big difference (as I have noted before) and that decision management can use good customer segmentation as a first step towards extreme personalization.
If you are not [...]

Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]

Some time ago I saw an article that discussed the 8Ps (4 old, 4 new) of Marketing. It seemed to me that decision making, especially operational/transactional decision making is critical to most of these Ps. Here, then, is my summary of the 8Ps and why decisions, and decision management, matter.
4 Ps

Product
You might think that [...]