One to One Interactive Represented At New MITX Event

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of being a panelist for a new MITX event called the Marketing & Technology Series.  This new track is focused, as the topic might suggest, on bringing Marketers and Technologists together (A scary concept, yes?) to discuss insights and swap war stories about the technical/integration side of the business.  Joining me on the panel was Marc LeCours, moderator and Director of Consulting Services for Unica, Nick Ruotolo, VP of Analytics at VistaPrint, and Don White, Managing Director at Quaero.  The topic of the day was Data Collection & Enhancement, broken up into 2 sections. 

First, we spoke about the data itself. Where it comes from, how to qualify it, and how to aggregate it in ways that make the data most actionable.  While many insights came up, there were some consistent messages that came out of all our experiences:

1. Before worrying about your data, make sure you have clearly outlined your business goals. Then you'll have plenty of time to delve into your data sources.
2. When goals are in place, be sure to bring both your technical/data stakeholders as well as business folks to the table AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE IN THE PROJECT.  This will save you time and money down the line and avoid significant rework.  This is also the appropriate time to lay all your data sources on the table, identify gaps, and work to fill them.
3. Take the time to clean, de-duplicate, and rework your data up-front as necessary to support your long-term goals. Otherwise, you're always playing catch-up with your own content.

Second, we addressed how to make the best use of the data as part of program execution, customer follow-up, targeted messaging, and the like.  Again, there was consensus in the takeaways:

1. Test & Learn - Best-in-class marketers are not afraid to spend the time and money trying numerous channels for their campaigns.  Targeted/personalized e-mails, "scenario" a/b testing on Websites, and path analysis are all effective ways to drive traffic and conversions.  However, it's important to remember that any particular idea has a window of effectiveness before you need to pull up the tent and move on. 
2. Measure, Measure, Measure! - There is no excuse for not measuring the success rate of every campaign you put into market.  Don't assume that buying a huge block of paid search advertising is going to give you the ROI you expect.  Yes, you may be converting more customers, but pay careful attention to your cost per acquisition.  Thanks go out to my learned colleague Charlie Ballard for stressing this point to me before the event.
3. Maintain - You invested good money into building your database. Continue to expend the efforts needed to maintain the quality of your data, otherwise you will find your $50,000.00 - $5,000,000.00 database is out of date 2 weeks after you begin your campaigns. 

Again, numerous stories and insights were traded during the event, but this gives you a general idea of the content.  I encourage folks to keep an eye on http://www.mitx.org to learn about upcoming events.  Thanks also go out to my OTO cohorts for coming and not heckling supporting me during the event.