The year-end is a great time to reflect and plan ahead. With that in mind, the Clario team put together 12 tips for 2012 to share our collective thoughts going into the New Year.  Our focus is on smarter marketing through analytics.  With a combined 100+ years of marketing analysis experience, all of us at Clario have witnessed first-hand many marketing challenges and know how data and science can help marketers make smarter decisions. 

Heading into 2012, marketing continues to be challenged with major issues such as lower response rates, inadequate investment to grow the customer base and keeping up with new marketing channels. Let your 2012 resolutions include actions to address these issues and close the gap between your current situation and the ideal state in these critical areas.   Here is our 12 Tips for 2012:

1. Watch Your Health.
Track sales, retention and margins monthly using strategic segments from your customer file. Keep tabs on the health of your customer file, and use it to build your sales forecasts and budgets.

2. Strengthen Your Foundation.
Build a robust set of customer-level attributes, that includes historical purchase data (recency, products, channels, amount), email activity, web activity, opt in/out information, demographics, and co-op data.

3. My Head is in the Cloud.
Augment your internal marketing systems with fast and easy-to-install cloud-based systems. You can now get a marketing database or analytic solution via the cloud.

4. Models that Last.
Build campaign performance models to last. Build fewer models that can be applied to multiple events.

5. Models that Fit.
Build unique campaign performance models by customer segment, driven primarily by predictor data niqueness and coverage.

6. What Loyalty?
Measure the incremental value of your loyalty programs. They’re often lower in value than expected.

7. Just Browsing.
Pull in web browsing data (page views by category, viewing recency) to better inform marketing decisions across channels, including the web, email, and print.

8. Get with the Flow.
Manage your customer base as a strategic asset by monitoring the value of key customer groups and the flow of customers into and out of these segments.

9. Shopping Preferences.
Use your customers’ channel shopping history in your marketing contact strategies. Leverage all channels: email, web, phone, store and other channels important to your business.

10. Cause and Effect.
Give credit to the marketing source of customer purchases. Conduct holdout tests. Survey shoppers so you can establish the level of revenue attribution across channels.

11. In the Zone.
Augment your data on prospective, new and lapsed customers with accumulated history and census demographics by geography.

12. Get Your Annual Checkup.
Measure the 12-month value of customers each year. It is too important for making investment decisions to ignore.