In our blog series focused on getting to know your customer, we covered the first step Find your Data focused on finding your data and building relationships with your data providers.
After you find your data, it’s time to think about what you can learn from all the information at your disposal. What is your big question?
Graeme Noseworthy, one of IBM’s Big Data specialists, once told the story of how email marketer, Constant Contact, came up with their big question:
“What is the right time to send an email?”
Constant Contact could gauge the performance of about 100,000 emails at a time. After they put their new technology and processes into place, they could see how 36 Billion emails performed in near real-time.
What does this tell us? “Constant Contact was able to tell their customers ‘Here’s the right time to send your email.’ They created a currency of relevance they could pass down to their customers which created a higher customer retention rate, a higher performance rate on campaigns and created a win-win-win where they were able to delight their customers and get better ROI on their campaigns,” according to Noseworthy.
Your big question should be focused on what you can do that has never been done before; it should help you focus on areas where you can do more or areas where you are not doing anything at all:
- What is your biggest challenge?
- What is standing in the way of acquiring, growing, and retaining more customers?
- Where could you be doing more to scale?
- Where are there missed opportunities due to known limitations?
You can find powerful answers by first asking the “right” questions that stem from your organization’s internal data; this information will guide you to ask questions that are on target with your business and customers.
Like Constant Contact, your big questions will lead to answers that can help improve your business’s performance and profitability.
What’s your big question?
Stay tuned for future posts that will outline the remaining 2 steps in your analytics journey, or download this white paper designed to help you understand how to turn your raw data into accessible, actionable insights from virtually any source within your organization. Get started today!
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