Three numbers: 90/10/0. 90 is the percent of time that email marketers spend on the tactics of getting an email campaign out the door. 10 is the percent of time that is spent in reporting and analysis. 0 is the amount of time most marketers spend figuring out how to optimize a program. The key to optimization is understanding what is maneuverable and weighing this with the expected return. If the return is too small, you’ll never build continuity over time. If the effort is far too complex or time consuming, it will compete with the day-to-day operations and ultimately drive your business down.

The keys to creating actionable insights is best described through these metaphors:

1. Simplify the Cockpit Instruments. If you’ve ever looked inside an aircraft cockpit, it is in many cases synonymous to business process and analytics; confusing if you try to take it all in at once. While the marketer, much like the pilot, may know all the panels and instruments and the outputs of each, it becomes increasingly difficult to marketers to know which instruments to monitor, which to tweak, and in what order. To simply the instruments, you have to strip it down by what insights each variable or output informs. Think RFM. While it’s directional in theory, I do want to index high frequency purchase segments and keep a pulse on these campaign over campaign, program over program. I want to know the high cart value transactors and index them to understand timing and how offers/pricing impacts these behaviors. I want to understand how these segments interact with my site and model this against other front of the funnel behaviors. All in all, I want an instrument panel that helps me understand transactional behaviors and how this channel influences this.
   
2. Shake the Magic “8 Ball.” As I’ve said many times, marketing and business is a process of hedging bets on what you think will work. In the eCRM space, the tactics have been done over and over again for years, so there really isn’t some magic bullet that works for everyone. I think you should create your own “Magic 8 Ball” for marketing decisions. Just ask a question, shake the 8-Ball and the following options will come forth: “Go with your first instinct.” “Ask your best engineer.” “Reference your benchmark guide.” “Do what you did last year.” “Ask someone that knows nothing about email.” And “Shake it again.” The magic of great marketing is making decisions faster than someone else, so you can maximize in-market. You can’t do this, unless you have strong hypotheses about the outcomes. The problem with many is we wait for data before we make decisions. This only works if you are a really fluid organization. If your reports take two weeks to produce, then your data supply chain or outputs are too complex and need to be revisited. But that shouldn’t preclude you from making in-market decisions. Just shake the “8-Ball” when in doubt.
   
3. Become a Finance and Risk Manager for a day. In finance, actionable analytics are a vital forensic and forecasting tool which helps assess the implications of past performance and model future implications. Take a day per month and run analysis of performance, costs, process assessment, and vendor analysis and pull these variables together. By removing your marketing hat, you can take a clear picture of the finances of your business unit and the marketing function and assess which attributes are most important. What is your real cost to send an email? What would happen if you wanted to modify the conversion process on your site, what is the potential risk? What if you wanted to hold out a group for testing? What is the impact of that hold-out ? What costs would apply putting some of your hypothesis in action? What is the cost /benefit of outsourcing some of these activities?

Actionable insights can be realized but only if you understand the gaps in your data supply change, you are willing to take “action” on your hypothesis, you have a financial foundation to support your logic and you have an understanding of the risk involved.