Why Is Data Analytics Important in Marketing?

Data analytics is an essential function of any marketing department, but sadly underutilized for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the analysis and preparation of data is rarely the reason that marketers get into the profession. Often a skill that comes with IT and technical-related jobs, data crunching is not always a task that is as glamorous as working on creatives, the brand positioning or briefing in the latest advertisement.

A recent article published on Data IQ found that 38% of marketers have had no business data analytics training in the last 12 months, only 22% have had any training in analyzing customer data or insight, and only 16% on data and database management.

(Screenshot showing RFM analysis in the BlueVenn Customer Data Platform)

The article also states, however, that many marketers see data analytics skills as being ‘very important' or 'extremely important' in their current roles – 72% in fact! This is backed up by BlueVenn's Data Deadlock report, which claims 90% of marketers agree that without the right skills, effective data analysis is impossible.

So why is data analytics so important in marketing? Let’s take a look at a real-life example from the BlueVenn client community…

Why use data analytics?

How this data analytics example saved a major UK retailer £2million a year...

This retailer is one of the top three clothing and footwear retailers in the UK. As is often the case, the marketing team had restricted and fragmented access to their customer data due to some legacy systems and data access not optimized for marketing. Held across many disconnected systems, it would take too long to request data extracts from the IT department and then clean and merge the data.

Such a long process meant that any data analysis could take weeks or months without any assurance that the data would provide any meaningful answers. Therefore, the marketing team had few insights to work with.

What they did know however, or so they thought, was that they had a segment of 100,000 VIP customers that would buy six or more items online within a week of the dispatch of their quarterly catalog. These high-value individuals would all be sent their own copy of a £5 catalog four times a year, as they represented good ROI based on basic attribution and revenue analysis.

How this retailer’s VIP segment was destroyed in one hour!

Following going live with the BlueVenn Customer Data Platform (CDP), the marketing team were, for the first time, presented with a Single View of their customers, their transactions and behavioral history. Most importantly this Single Customer View provided the ability to unify and analyze online transaction data and in-store returns data.

segmentation-modeling

Within just one hour, the marketing team had discovered that a large percentage of the VIP segment showed that those buying six or more items would often return three or more to the store. In total, they found that more than 40% of their VIP segment was, in fact, worth much less to the business than previously thought. The data analysis enabled the retailer to rebuild the VIP segment and stop wasting expensive catalog mailings to the wrong audience.

In total this saved the retailer, on average, £2 million per year, every year, for five years and paid for the solution many times over.

Putting insights at the fingertips of everyday marketers

The BlueVenn CDP puts analytics and insights at the fingertips of everyday marketers by unifying all their offline and online data into a Single Customer View. BlueVenn also provides analysis, predictive models, RFM and lifetime value tools that help marketers segment and target customers more effectively.