All things of interest to most of us, right? Different verticals care about different customer dimensions. Retailers look at transactional data. Airlines look at performance, routing and loyalty considerations. Financial services companies model funnel movement characteristics. From a horizontal perspective, brand marketers focus on response and core values-based segmentation. Many of these folks miss the connection among campaign response, advertising response/source, response to retention programs, and Web site behavior, as well as all the personal data that helps define the target "who." So where does Business Intelligence fit and how does the e-mail channel help support this?

E-mail systems today have tried to fulfill the need for direct response data, conversion data, Web activity caused by direct campaigns; they also report based on segmentation, source and value. This transaction-driven environment has become more and more important to marketers because it gives them one of the few available snapshots of response/conversion and Web activity tied to an initial intent, all in one view. Few have a consolidated view of these interactions, and even fewer have developed a means of putting weights on these interactions.

The e-mail channel presents a "poor man's" version of Business Intelligence, helping to justify investments in segmentation, promotional strategies and advanced analytics (not to mention the advantage of real-time reporting that you get with e-mail). We've evolved reporting to accommodate conversion tracking--what people purchased or signed up for--to individual transactions then parsed by customer segment, source and lifetime value. In addition, we do path analysis driven by e-mail campaigns, essentially what site behavior was associated with the e-mail campaign at a very individual view. This "transactional" view that lives outside most in-house database environments can give you more meaningful insights of Business Intelligence than advanced analytics.

Many of the challenges marketers will face this decade will be tying the effort to the interaction, and building a story around this value. The testament of good business intelligence is that of repeatable processes. It can't take three to four weeks to generate a report; data must be visible to different groups based on different needs and it must be accessible in multiple formats, yet someone must be able to interpret its meaning to the organization.

The moral of this story is: build a vision for what Business Intelligence will mean to your business, and articulate it internally. CFOs will be asking about it in 2007, if they haven't started already. Investigate how you are set up to support the technology requirements, the resource needs, the organizational needs and the leadership needs for this view of the business.

There are many good sources for more information on Business Intelligence. If you'd like to learn more, e-mail me (at DBaker@agency.com) and I'll happily forward several links to articles on the subject.