For Customer Intelligence Professionals

The Marketing And Customer Analytics Software Landscape

Unraveling A Potpourri Of Technology Options For Customer Analysis

by Suresh Vittal, October 16, 2009

Marketers recognize that Customer Intelligence is rapidly becoming a mission-critical discipline. This should come as no surprise — valuing, targeting, and retaining the best customers are skills in high demand. But few marketing organizations can muster . . .

For Customer Intelligence Professionals

Adobe's Acquisition Of Omniture Rocks Online Marketing

by Suresh Vittal, John Lovett, September 24, 2009

On September 15, 2009, Adobe announced that it would acquire Omniture for $1.8 billion. Adobe's CEO, Shantanu Narayen, promised that the combined entity would help marketers "realize the full value of their digital assets." Forrester believes that while . . .

For Customer Intelligence Professionals

Creating A Customer Contact Governance Council

Successful Contact Strategies Require Cross-Functional Support

by Suresh Vittal, Dave Frankland, September 10, 2009

An enterprisewide contact strategy is an important key to success for the marketing organization. Optimal contact strategies help marketers reduce contact fatigue, lower opt-out rates, reduce costs, and embrace customer centricity. But most marketers . . .

For Customer Intelligence Professionals

Understanding The Total Cost Of Listening Platforms

Marketers Must Account For Expenses Beyond Technology

by Suresh Vittal, September 9, 2009

Listening platforms are hot and marketers are keen to use consumer conversations to inform marketing and business strategy. But as more marketing teams adopt listening platforms, the question that comes up most often is: How much will these tools cost? . . .

For Interactive Marketing Professionals

Listening Metrics That Matter

Avoid Data Overload By Targeting Metrics That Support Specific Listening Goals

by Suresh Vittal, May 29, 2009

The growing popularity and influence of social media makes listening a critical research and insight generation activity. Marketers are turning to listening platforms to harvest the rich trove of consumer conversations generated across all social media . . .

For Customer Intelligence Professionals

SMB Marketing Technology Adoption

Findings From Our Q3 2008 Direct And Database Marketing Panel Data

by Suresh Vittal, May 22, 2009

Forrester surveyed 224 direct marketers in Q3 2008 about their technology adoption plans. This report drills into the technology adoption trends of our small and medium-size business (SMB) respondents. SMB marketers continue to pursue improvements to . . .

For Interactive Marketing Professionals

How To Choose A Listening Platform

Five Questions To Guide The Selection Process

by Suresh Vittal, May 5, 2009

Marketers are using listening platforms to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of online discussions. But a crowded and immature marketplace with many confusing messages makes selecting the right listening platform challenging. To help, Forrester . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Campaign Management Needs A Reboot

The Next Generation Must Simplify Use And Support Multiple Channels

by Suresh Vittal, April 2, 2009

Marketers find that current campaign management tools — while good for defining communications in traditional channels like direct mail and email — struggle to keep up with numerous digital, inbound, and emerging channels. The economic slowdown forces . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Understanding The Marketing And IT Relationship

by Suresh Vittal, Jennifer Joseph McGann, March 31, 2009

Forrester surveyed 224 direct marketers to understand how relations with internal and external partners affect technology adoption. Across the board, marketers recognize the need to improve customer information systems and measurement technologies in . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Executive Q&A: Customer Lifetime Value

by Suresh Vittal, March 11, 2009

Customer lifetime value is a powerful metric that rewards marketers for understanding their relationships with their customers. But while it is one of the more valuable measurements for marketers, many companies either do not collect the data or do not . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Marketing Technology Adoption 2009

Direct And Database Marketing Panel Data From Q3 2008

by Suresh Vittal, January 28, 2009

Forrester surveyed 224 direct and database marketers in Q3 2008 to understand their marketing technology usage, plans, and budgets. Direct marketers tell us that insufficient measurement and a lack of a centralized view of their customers limit their . . .

For Interactive Marketing Professionals

The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q1 2009

Nielsen BuzzMetrics And TNS Cymfony Lead A Pack Of Strong Performers

by Suresh Vittal, January 23, 2009

In response to marketers' changing needs, brand monitoring vendors are evolving to offer a more strategic and comprehensive platform. Forrester refers to this category of vendors as listening platforms. Listening platforms differ from brand monitoring . . .

For Interactive Marketing Professionals

The Listening Platform Landscape

New Solutions Extend Beyond Tracking To Deliver Consumer Insights

by Suresh Vittal, January 22, 2009

Consumers continue to use social technologies to wrestle control of brands away from organizations. Marketers operating in this hyper-inclusive environment must go beyond simply tracking brand mentions and impressions and get at the root of the discussion. . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Optimizing Customer Retention Programs

by Suresh Vittal, October 20, 2008

Managing customer churn continues to flummox direct marketers. They struggle to define, target, or properly value customers. But increasingly marketers are turning to predictive analytics to power retention programs. Uplift modeling is an emerging technique . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Q&A: Five Web Analytics Answers Direct Marketers Must Know

by Megan Burns, Suresh Vittal, October 14, 2008

Web analytics data is one of the few pieces of customer data that direct marketers have not yet integrated into their customer databases. This is a missed opportunity for most direct marketers: Web analytics data helps marketers deepen their understanding . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Selecting The Right Enterprise Marketing Software

by Suresh Vittal, July 18, 2008

Most approaches to selecting marketing technologies are plagued with market confusion, poor capabilities, and lack of support from a critical partner — IT. Forrester has identified eight questions that help marketers ensure that their own process lands . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Creating A Multichannel View Of Your Customer

Expanding Online Visibility Is Key To Improving Marketing's Effectiveness

by Suresh Vittal, June 19, 2008

A comprehensive view of the customer helps marketers deliver productive customer experiences, support marketing measurement, and drive new business opportunities. However, despite longstanding efforts, today's customer databases lack the information to . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Measuring Engagement

Four Steps To Making Engagement Measurement A Reality

by Brian Haven, Suresh Vittal, June 10, 2008

The metrics marketers use today fail to capture the supercharged social behaviors and intimate relationships people have with brands. With the four I's of engagement: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence — marketers obtain a framework to . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Five Tools And Technologies To Measure Engagement

by Brian Haven, Suresh Vittal, April 22, 2008

Measuring engagement is no simple task: It requires a cross-channel, data-intensive approach that strains today's measurement processes and the underlying technology that supports them. Furthermore, marketers attempting to measure engagement without the . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Top 10 Strategies To Successfully Implement Your Enterprise Marketing Platform

Lessons Learned From Forrester Wave™ Evaluation Customer References

by Suresh Vittal, April 11, 2008

Marketers are in agreement; enterprise marketing platforms are critical for managing integrated, cross-channel marketing programs and improving marketing's efficiency. But firms that put a lot of time and effort into selecting a marketing platform vendor . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Optimizing Online Interactions For Customer Centricity

A Requirement For Delivering Relevant Web Experiences

by Suresh Vittal, March 26, 2008

Direct marketers are adding another weapon to their communication arsenal: the corporate Web site. However, most Web sites do a poor job of delivering compelling and relevant content to online visitors. Online interaction optimization technologies like . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

Database Marketers Evolve Their ROI Measurement

Customer Value Metrics Supersede Basic Operational Counts

by Suresh Vittal, March 12, 2008

We surveyed 107 direct and database marketers to understand their measurement successes and shortcomings and found that 69% percent of respondents say they are at least somewhat effective at measuring ROI. Despite this success, these marketers face several . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

The State Of The Database Marketing Organization in 2008

Findings From Forrester's Database Marketing Benchmark Study

by Suresh Vittal, March 7, 2008

Database marketing organizations say they want to be involved with every customer contact across the company. We surveyed 107 database marketing professionals to understand how close they were to reaching their goal. We found that a minority of the market . . .

For Marketing Leadership Professionals

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2008

Unica And Aprimo Are Leaders; Oracle (Siebel) Leads A Pack Of Strong Performers

by Suresh Vittal, January 17, 2008

Eighty-three percent of marketers, a significant majority, tell us that they need a comprehensive marketing suite to improve their effectiveness. Enterprise marketing platform vendors that aspire to deliver this solution suite are currently unable to . . .

For Interactive Marketing Professionals

Defining The Online Marketing Suite

by Suresh Vittal, October 17, 2007

Today interactive marketing is a fragmented discipline in which marketers work with many different vendors to develop and execute marketing programs. But as the number of channels and programs grow, this situation becomes untenable. Today's interactive . . .