Vol. 5 , No. 2     January 10, 2006

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Premium Content

Pat LaPointe
The Metrics You're Most Likely to Overlook (but Shouldn't)

The greatest insight often comes from unexpected places. That's true of the mixture of metrics you'll eventually select for your marketing dashboard. Here, we look at some critical metrics you may not have considered for your marketing dashboard but that may be among the most insightful and predictive you'll install.

There are quite literally hundreds of prospective dashboard metrics to consider, but only a few that will provide any leading-indicator insight. The goal here is to point out some of the places where we normally find high correlations to company profitability.

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Please note: This article is available to paid subscribers only. Get more information or sign up here.

Leigh Duncan
Just What Is Customer Experience Management, Anyway?

A growing number of books and articles are actively promoting the concept of Customer Experience Management, or CEM. There are also a growing number of agencies and consultancies claiming expertise in the field—all with varying degrees of involvement and expertise.

While there's a clear reason to become a staunch supporter of CEM, there's a great deal of confusion over what it really is. As more individuals get on board the CEM bandwagon and build services in the arena, confusion seems to be increasing. It's time to demystify the hype.

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Michael W. McLaughlin
Account Management as a Marketing Investment: A Lesson From the Airlines

From the time you book an airline flight until that plane lands, your pecking order in the airline's customer hierarchy determines your travel experience. To the airlines, all customers are not equal—they are segmented and managed according to profitability, loyalty, and frequency of travel.

Like the airlines, professional service and solution providers have embraced the concept of account relationship management, yet many struggle with execution. Account management is based on the premise that a subset of your clients will purchase most of your offerings, and so you should manage and market to them differently—and directly. All clients are important to your business, but some are more so than others.

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A Note to Readers

Our New Look

Greetings, discerning readers.

Some of you have noticed the new look and feel of our article pages. If you haven't, click on any article in today's issue. You'll notice a cleaner, more streamlined look. There's more white space and less clutter, underscoring a "less is more" approach. Our hope is that the cleaner page makes it easier on your eyes and the greater line length makes for less scrolling. Let me know what you think—I'd love your feedback.

Also this week, we are continuing our two-part series on marketing metrics with "The Metrics You're Most Likely to Overlook (but Shouldn't)."

In her Premium article, Pat LaPointe gives some valuable advice on how the greatest insight often comes from unexpected places, and she suggests some less-obvious, but nevertheless critical, metrics that you can't afford to overlook on your marketing dashboard.

Be sure to check it out.

As always, your feedback is both welcome and encouraged!

Until next week,

Ann Handley
ann@marketingprofs.com
Chief Content Officer
MarketingProfs

Last Issue's Top 5

Recent Know-How Exchange Questions/Answers

Jeff Thull
Is Your Purchasing Department Stripping Value Along With Reducing Costs?

There are two big problems with today's purchasing departments. Most obviously, purchasing is incented to save dollars of cost, a mandate that too often means dollars of value are lost. And the other problem—which is interconnected with the first one—is that purchasing often operates by obsolete and counter-productive rules.

So what can companies do to ensure that purchasing is not undermining other departments by diluting value and ultimately bringing down profits? Here are some tips.

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Ernest W. Nicastro
How to Get Your Prospect to Open Your Mail

You've carefully selected your list. You've labored long and hard over your letter—every word, sentence and paragraph. It's a powerhouse of persuasion with every key element firmly in place, including compelling benefits, powerful testimonials, a superb P.S. and an impossible-to-resist offer.

But all your hard work, your hours of craftsmanship and painstaking attention to every little detail will go for naught, unless your prospect opens the envelope. Here are two distinctly different ways to go about that.

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Michael Antman
Extremely Frustrating and Completely Unimportant: The Arcane Art of Naming

Here's a pop quiz: Name a form of marketing communications that can take as little as five seconds to complete, can be accomplished by a nine-year-old child or an adult, and is of absolutely no importance whatsoever. Oh, and it also happens to be the most difficult and frustrating form of marketing communications, by far.

The answer is naming consulting, the often-arcane art of creating and applying names to products, services and companies.

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Robert J. Kaden
Discovering Needs, Wishes, Wants, Desires: The Marketing Research Challenge

The way research is practiced today taps into the consumer spontaneous attitudes. While this may be all that is needed for many of our studies, it's rare that tapping into consumer's top-of-mind provides breakthrough brands.

It's time to try some new approaches that dig below the surface.

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Contact

Publisher:Allen Weiss
amw@MarketingProfs.com

Content: Ann Handley
ann @MarketingProfs.com

Strategy and Development:
Roy Young
roy@MarketingProfs.com

Director of Premium Services
Val Frazee
val@MarketingProfs.com


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