My Ten Favorite MineThatData Articles Of 2008

I think these are the articles that provided you, the loyal reader, the most value during 2008 (in no particular order). You're free to disagree.

• Multichannel Generational Behavior. Often marketing fails to account for the differences between these two individuals.
• Rule Of Thumb For Marketing ROI / Profit. I'm amazed by the number of people who criticize me over this concept, especially the vendor community. And yet, they offer no solutions ... they just like to criticize. If you're going to criticize, please offer an alternative methodology ... and publish it so that all may benefit.
  
• Lands' End E-Mail Marketing Contact Strategy. Oh boy.
• Housing Market Deflation Correlates With Zip Code Forensics. A free way to filter out zip codes with unproductive households, who can beat that? Hat-tip to Don Libey for recommending the topic.
  
• Net Promoter Score? Try Net Google Score! I am confident that the majority of $50,000,000+ catalogers are losing more business because of Google than we get paying Google to drive traffic to us. I do not understand why we continually choose to ignore this topic.
  
• The Five Ways We Generate Demand. It's amazing how little energy we spend trying to generate organic demand --- instead opting for easy "free shipping" or "up to 60% off" promotions.
• Using Soap Opera Data To Understand Multichannel Marketing. Just look at the numbers! I loved researching/writing this. You hated it!
• The Most Important Catalog Marketing Metrics: The Organic Percentage: Matchback analytics are causing us to dramatically over-mail our customer files. Simply knowing this metric causes us to make very different decisions.
• The Lifetime Value Of The Customer Who Writes Product Reviews. We increasingly use our own customers to do our marketing for us, at no cost. Both the marketing staffer and the customer writing reviews lose.
• What Would Happen If Each E-Mail Cost $0.05 To Deliver?