Marketing success in today's digital world requires a mix of art and science that involves both data-driven decision making and intuitive creativity to show how to improve your marketing. While marketing analytics have enabled the "scientific" side of marketing to evolve, it's also become apparent that creative thinkers working with the analytics are equally important.

For a great example of how that mix of powerful analytics and intuitive creativity can measurably improve your marketing, we need look no further than our own SAS Americas Marketing department. We've previously highlighted several ways that using marketing analytics have improved our marketing, and our latest example focuses on how we use SAS Adaptive Customer Experience analytics to interpret our customers' online behavior.

By doing that, we've been able to let our customers show us how to improve our marketing and realize the following results:

• Four-fold increase in average online response rates (2% to 4%).
• 6.6% incremental campaign lift through remarketing with tailored messaging.
• 52% reduction in customers caught in a navigation loop. (25% to 12%)

In the case of that last metric, my colleagues Julie Chalk and Craig Emerick were analyzing online customer behavior, which alerted them to a potential problem with the navigation layout of the SAS Visual Analytics pages. By looking at the data at a contact level, they noticed that about 25 percent of website visitors were visiting the same three pages over and over again. 

That's obviously an issue and it prompted them to alter the page layout, after which the incidence dropped to 12 percent. In that case, their ability to spot and react quickly to the problem alleviated much user frustration and helped keep our audience engaged. And it's a great example of how their comfort with analytics (the science) made them attuned to an issue triggered by customer online behavior, and their marketing acumen (the art) equipped them to quickly address the issue very effectively. How awesome is that?

For more details about that great case study, click here. It's all part of a broader strategy here in SAS Americas Marketing to instill an analytical culture - something you may want to consider for your marketing organization. And something we can certainly help you with.

Let me know what you think!