We all get direct mail with personalized fields that are supposed to make us think the company marketing to us knows what makes us tick. The same with email, personal URL's, and other messaging that we know deep down is really just mass-produced by a computer. In today's saturated media market where people's attention spans are split in five thousand different directions, companies have to do something really special to capture a customer's attention and make them believe an advertisement was made just for them. And that's exactly what Wilkes University recently did.

Continue reading "The Ultimate Personalized Marketing" »

Posted by Jeremy Nedelka at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Think you can’t sell your company’s product online? Maybe it just requires a different way of looking at what you’re selling. Wells Fargo did just that, and is now bringing a new meaning to the term “online banking.”

Continue reading "Under Digital Lock and Key" »

Posted by Jeremy Nedelka at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Making messages to customers more personalized is one of the drums being beaten loudest these days, as companies large and small have seen the merit (obvious, it would seem) in moving away from the generic “Dear Valued Customer” greetings of yesteryear and moving towards the at least seemingly more intimate “Dear Mr. Doe”—or even “Dear John.”

Studies show that if the communiqué in question includes detailed knowledge about an individual customer’s account—via recommendations of similar products or an in-depth recognition of past buying habits—the customer usually gets a warm and fuzzy feeling. They may not necessarily believe that the CEO of Engulf & Devour Inc. really is taking a personal interest in their lives, but they can rest assured that the company’s at least paying attention to them.

But what happens when a company sends out an email message to thousands of customers, all with the wrong names? Such a thing happened last week with drugstore chain CVS, when it sent an email to my colleague Elizabeth Glagowski calling her “Ruby.”

Continue reading "A Message for Every Tom, Dick, and … Ruby?" »

Posted by Kevin Zimmerman at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s a pretty good time to be Jack Noonan, president and CEO at predictive analytics software company SPSS.

The company recently reported record third-quarter revenues of $72.3 million, a 12 percent increase from the $64.7 million announced for third-quarter 2006, with new license revenues up 15 percent and operating income up 29 percent. Revenues for the nine months ended September 30, 2007 totaled $211.4 million, an 11 percent increase from $190.4 million in the same period last year.

The financial news was good enough to lead an analyst at Roth Capital Partners to upgrade the stock yesterday from “Hold” to “Buy.” Coming off the by-all-accounts successful SPSS Directions conference in Orlando last month, Noonan’s riding pretty high.

Continue reading "High Noonan: SPSS Paints a Rosy PA Future" »

Posted by Kevin Zimmerman at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Business intelligence is usually about the past. We need more causal, predictive approaches.”

So said management authority Thomas Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (Harvard Business School Press) during his keynote address last week at SPSS Directions in Orlando. A handy viewpoint, given that SPSS has built its reputation on predictive analytics, but Davenport takes a somewhat wider approach than what most of us think about when talk turns to PA.

Continue reading "Analyzing Predictive Analytics" »

Posted by Kevin Zimmerman at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)