Price deal is a common method to boost sales. Steam push it to an art. There is always a lot of stuff to buy at -50% or even -75%. But is it really so easy? Should you just cut price to increase profitability? How can you really asses the impact of such price deal campaign? Well it’s not that easy and you should rely on analytics to really understand what is happening.
Measuring and managing return on marketing investment, that’s the promise of the book from Guy R. Powell. A famous quote in marketing is : Half of my advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half (John Wannamacher). Indeed, how many marketing initiative are rigorously evaluated? No doubt price cuts increase volumes, but how often does it to improve the top line, not even talking about the bottom line. This book is about putting some analytics in marketing and knowing the truth.
Predicting the number of sales representatives on a particular time on a particular store is harder than expected. If you instrument the whole process, you could know the activity of your representatives (number of customers, average time of a transaction, activity rate, …). We could then predict the number of required representatives. We know the cost of having set too much of them but what is the cost of having to few representatives? How to value a missed opportunity, a customer unsatisfaction of the quality of service, the behaviour of a too much stressed employee?
Actionable Web Analytics : Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions is a marketing book like Competing on Analytics. A lot of sentences to say simple things. Here there is even sometimes copy and pastes. Nevertheless, this kind of book are sometimes interesting. This one is to some extends.