Analytics can produce powerful data-driven insights for effective targeted marketing, but without an effective strategy it can easily become a huge ongoing expense with little payoff. There are many ways to execute analytics poorly:

– Build a data warehouse without proper data governance so that it’s ineffective or unusable, or …
– Build a data warehouse with so much data governance that it costs too much and takes too long before it’s usable.

– Keep data and reports siloed away from the people who would use them, or …
– Distribute data and reports freely but without proper guidance about how to interpret or actionize them into marketing and sales operations.

– Hire analytics professionals not skilled enough to do their jobs effectively, or …
– Hire extremely skilled analytics professionals but not manage them properly.

These and similar actions are all too common and can severely reduce your analytics ROI.

An effective analytics strategy requires coordinating many moving parts among multiple teams. Striving for perfection in any of them easily leads to delays and cost overruns. A much better strategy is to bet basic results quickly and then improve on them later on.

What’s your analytics ROI? We can raise it through two different programs depending on whether you have an in-house analytics team or not: