I have a challenge for you - guess which of these three email offers below are what I consider "sloppy marketing." Base your decision on these demographics- the recipient is a 50-year old married male with two kids at home, has stable employment, is a homeowner with a good credit rating, active in social media, and is an active volunteer in the community (Boy Scouts, PTA, etc.).If you answered all three - you're correct! And I shared all 3 of them with friends on Facebook and Twitter with appropriately sarcastic commentary. I really have nothing against the providers of these three services, but they were delivered to the wrong person for whom no time is the right time.

In the case of offers #1 and #2, I just couldn't imagine how they might consider me a target for those services unless they did no targeting at all. I suspect the latter, which to me is inexcusably sloppy marketing.

In the case of offer #3, I applaud the marketer's ability to discern my impending 50th birthday, but there's a big chance that someone facing that milestone might not embrace their upcoming status as being 50+. Even if I were not happily married and if I were interested in meeting 50+ singles, seeing "seniorpeoplemeet.com" in my inbox is just not something I welcome.

There really is no excuse for sloppy marketing. It's wasteful and potentially damaging because your customers will laugh at you and share their bad experience with your brand and it ripples outward from there. Do you really want potential new customers to roll their eyes when they see one of your offers? Of course not.

The way to avoid that is to use the data we have and make informed decisions with marketing analytics.  The data is available and we have the means to be better at marketing in ways that include answering good questions such as these:

• Which offer types resonate with our different customer segments? What offers should come next?
• How are our marketing initiatives performing today? How about in the long run? What can we do to improve our iniatives?
• How do our marketing activities compare with our competitors’? Are they using channels that we aren’t using?
• Are our marketing resources properly allocated? Are we devoting time and money to the right channels? How should we prioritize our investments for next year?

For more details, watch this video of noted thought leader and best-selling business author Tom Davenport being interviewed by HBR's Angelia Herrin. It's called Marketing Analytics and the Big Data Advantage. It's longish, but moves quickly and is worth watching.

As always, thank you for following and let me know what you think!