Nineteenth century Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker supposedly said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. To prove the level of the unknown in marketing, this quote has also been attributed to Viscount Leverhulme and if you are in Europe, you’re probably more likely to believe it was his quote. It’s all part of the timeless legend!
Whatever the truth is, or whether either of the above businessmen said it, matching back money spent on marketing to transactions entered into by customers has been increasingly scientific over the last 20 years. Of some interest is that up until now, this calculation has been carried out repetitively, manually and in a costly manner using the ubiquitous Excel. The by-product of this is that the calculations are fraught with error and offer no ability to audit the data coming out of the system. In general this activity has been carried out by “boffins and wizards” outside of the commissioning organisation. This means that the expertise of the client’s Marketing team cannot be fully brought to bear on their own data under their own control. Hard to believe, but nonetheless true.
Using Azquo we’ve built a range of applications to match purchase transactions to marketing communications and browsing behaviour of customers. We’ve made this into a self-service daily updated dashboard offering that enables marketing teams to better understand campaign effectiveness as the campaigns unfold. In turn, this allows suppliers to create better more personalised (and therefore more successful) experiences to their customers.
The range of benefits cannot be simply stated in terms of campaign Return on Investment – it’s far more strategic than that. This is something that creates a stronger bond between supplier and customer, enhancing lifetime value and enabling greater engagement between the supplier and customer. But perhaps the most important element of all is that this puts marketing departments in direct control of their data, with complete understanding of the process for matchback and an ability to scrutinise any transaction that is matched back to check the logic of the application. This is a fast, dynamic and transparent system.
The real advantage of working with Azquo is that apart from being quick, intuitive and accessible, the client is always demonstrably in charge of their own data in their own time and with greatly reduced overheads. Azquo offers a better way to turn ideas into analysis and analysis into operational decisions whilst creating greater accountability and impact of internal personnel.