According to a study by Coremetrics released in February 2010, while most marketers report a desire to use online data to personalize their marketing efforts and deliver tailored offers to their customers, their current technology use does not support this goal. In addition, the study entitled “The Face of the New Marketer,” finds that there is a marked discrepancy between marketers’ need to manage to metrics and their confidence in the accuracy of the data.

The study further reveals that fully three quarters of marketers report using various online tools for personalization is a priority and 81% claim that it’s very important for them to increase visitor value through compelling product and content offerings. Yet, only half report they currently use online personalization tools (51%). This suggests that the information and data gathered through online marketing efforts is not being utilized to its full potential.

In addition, while spending on online marketing efforts has increased, most marketers lack confidence that they are using the right metrics to gauge marketing success and value.  When asked how they would evaluate marketing success at the end of 2009, nearly half (47%) said "meeting our key performance indicators." However, well over half of marketers (62%) claim they are not confident they are tracking the right metrics for online marketing performance—a significant discrepancy.

Other key findings include:

The two top challenges facing marketers are:

  • Obtaining an integrated view of customers across online marketing touch points (45%)
  • Interpreting the resulting data (41%)

The three areas that have seen the biggest spending increase this year are:

  • Online marketing (69%)
  • Generating online business (56%)
  • Web 2.0 (55%)

Marketing has always been viewed as critical to the organization.

Two-thirds of marketers (67%) indicated that marketing has always been viewed as critical in their organization--only 19% say that marketing is seen as discretionary.

The three most commonly used forms of online marketing are:

  • Email marketing (87%)
  • Display advertising (86%)
  • Paid search (69%)

The three most commonly used marketing measurement tools are:

  • Individual online marketing campaign performance (77%)
  • Online customer behavior--per visit/session (76%)
  • Display advertising performance based on impressions (69%)

 

Collaboration is important and could be easier if barriers are removed.

97% of marketers say it is important for their organization to collaborate to better target customers. However, only about half indicate that this is an easy process. The biggest barriers to collaboration are:

  • Organizational structure (47%)
  • Control issues (38%)
  • Decision making procedures (33%)
  • And poor communication (33%)

Source: Coremetrics

 

 

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