Why Every Internet Marketing Professional Needs to Know SQL

My first job after college was with Oracle back in the late 1980’s.  At the time Oracle made all employees go through an incredibly intensive 3 week training course on SQL.  It didn’t matter if you were a developer, a marketing professional, or a receptionist, you were sent to a training class at a hotel for 3 weeks to learn SQL 20 hours a day.  Yes, it was 20 hours a day – Oracle took things seriously.  At the time I remember thinking, “Why in the world do I need to know SQL when I am on the marketing side?”  

Boy was I wrong!  More than 20 years later, I have written thousands and thousands of queries and use SQL in my job almost every day.  I have come to the conclusion that every online marketing professional needs to know SQL.  As many online marketing professionals like to say, “To be in online marketing, you have to be a data geek.”  If you are a data geek, you need to be able to able to collect and analyze data on your own.  Let’s face it, the explosion of the Internet means that the amount of data being captured in SQL databases these days is jaw dropping.  I have seen far too many Internet professionals who don’t know SQL who are literally hostage to IT, waiting for IT to write another query for them.  You won’t be a world-class Internet professional if you have to wait for others for a key part of your job.  

For years I have started my work day almost the same way every day.  I get a variety of reports via email that talk about the health of the business.  They essentially give me a high level picture of the customer funnel.  How many customers came to the site?  How many registered?  How many ordered?  Some of these come from Google Analytics and others come from the transactional systems.  More often than not, the reports highlight issues that require further investigation.  If the data is in Google Analytics, I drill down in Analytics.  If the data came from the transactional systems, I fire up SQL.  Canned reports just don’t do it – I need to be able to explore the data in whatever direction it takes me to answer the questions that have arisen from the previous day’s data.  I often have the answers to my questions by 9am.  If I was waiting on IT or a marketing analyst, it would be hours at best and possibly weeks before I got an answer.  I need to be self-sufficient.

Learning SQL can be intimidating for a marketing person.  A lot of SQL books that you find on developers’ desks are the size of a dictionary and look pretty daunting.  However, the reality is that SQL has become a lot easier for a variety of reasons.  There are a wealth of books that cover SQL for business folks.  Furthermore, the tools have advanced a lot.  If you are using a visual query tool, it really makes building queries much easier for someone just getting started. If someone on the IT side has been nice enough to name the tables and columns clearly that is a big help. Even better, if IT has defined the primary and foreign keys, most query tools will automatically join the tables together for you. 

Here are my tips for a marketing person who wants to learn SQL:

• Buy a good SQL basics book, but make sure you read a little and then try it out with a hands-on session.  Read a little more, try it out.  You get the idea.

•  Microsoft Access is a great tool for getting started.  Access does an incredible job of importing data from Excel which makes it easy to pull in data and get started.  It also is super easy to export data from Access to Excel so you can show others the results of your work. (I still use Access almost daily because of the Excel integration.)  Access is also great because if you do something horribly wrong, the worst thing you can do is cause the CPU on your local machine to peg at 100%.  Finally, Access allows you to build queries visually and see the SQL behind those queries, something that is key for SQL novices. My only caution with Access is that there are some small SQL differences between Access and the database systems that most companies use like Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc.
• When you are ready for a real world project, ask your IT department to set you up with read only access on a reporting server.  You want an environment where you cannot delete any important data and where if you issue a CPU-intensive query, it won’t block customers from using your site.  Before you approach IT, I strongly encourage you to know some of the things that you can do incorrectly in SQL that can suck every ounce of CPU from your server.  Do you know what the following things are: a Cartesian product, doing a full table scan vs. hitting an index, and locking a table?  If you don’t know what those things are, you aren’t ready yet to write SQL against a real world system – keep reading your SQL books.

Knowing SQL has a lot of additional benefits beyond just analytics. For example, I have regularly used it to provide exports to key customers or partners.  I use it to set up complex, tailored email marketing programs.  SQL is everywhere these days!

So while SQL can seem a little intimidating at first, it is a tool that every Internet marketing professional needs to have in their tool-belt if they are to be successful.

Online Marketing Starts and Ends with Analytics

Marketing professionals regularly ask me how they can improve their online marketing skills, and my response is always, "Online marketing starts and ends with analytics."  The whole premise of online marketing is that you can measure the ROI on everything.  No more hand-waiving to your CFO when s/he asks what the return was on a specific campaign - with online marketing you can say EXACTLY what the return was for the spend.

The problem is that I find a lot of online marketing professionals are particularly weak in analytics.  They know a little about Google Analytics or another tool, but they don't really dig into the numbers.  Well, if you are going to tell your CFO what the return was on your campaigns, you (or someone on your team) needs to be a rocket scientist when it comes to analytics.  Everyone wants to jump into all the sexy functional skills like social marketing or email marketing, but if you cannot measure your results, you are missing the point.

I also see a lot of marketing professionals cast about looking for new analytical tools.  However, when it comes down it to, most of them only use 1% of the capability of Google Analytics, and Google Analytics is free!  There is no need to look for something better if you are not really using the tool.  Google Analytics is really an amazing tool when you dig into all the advanced goodies like custom variables, event tracking, advanced segments, profiles, custom reports, the API, etc.

Learning Google Analytics is mostly a mental challenge.  You can set the tool up on any web site in a few minutes so the learning opportunity is right in front of you.  However, really squeezing a lot out of the tool takes some tenacity - the product is deep and wide and takes time to learn.  I recently have been touting a book that I think does a superb job of teaching online marketing professionals what they need to know about Google Analytics; the book is "Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics" by Brian Clifton.  The book walks through how to use all the advanced capabilities of Google Analytics in the real world - how you apply the techniques to SEO, paid search, video marketing, etc.  I love that the book is so focused on real world situations and not academic theories.  I am such a fan of the book that I already have pre-ordered the updated edition that comes out in March of this year.  The book is not for beginners, it covers advanced techniques for people who are serious about their analytical skills.

So back to the task of becoming a better online marketing professional.  Analytics is so important, and there is so much to it, that you really have to work analytics first and last.  Start by learning a ton about Google Analytics by reading a book like Brian Clifton's and applying it in the real world.  Then go build up your functional customer acquisition and customer engagement skills (paid search, affiliate marketing, SEO, social marketing, email marketing, etc).  Then when you have built up your customer acquisition / engagement skills,come back to Google Analytics.  Analytics are so important that you need to be reviewing them regularly.  Hey online marketing professionals, if you are not a Google Analytics guru, you are not an online marketing professional!

Race against the Machine Review

I just finished the book, "Race against the Machine," and I cannot stop thinking about it.  The book tackles the impact of technology on the current unemployment figures.  The hypothesis is that technology is the driving factor behind high unemployment. The book points out that while unemployment is high, corporate profits and GNP are at record or near record levels.  Why is that?  Broad swaths of the economy are being automated by technology and this is likely to continue or accelerate.  Due to Moore's Law, the power of computers is growing at an exponential rate, and now we are starting to be able to do things with computers that really can replace humans.  For example the book covers the fact that just a few years ago it was inconceivable that cars could drive themselves.  Recently Google cars have driven over 100,000 miles under the control of the computer.  That is some very fast progress, and it isn't hard to imagine our cars driving on their own in the not too distant future.

The book also makes the point that as computers automate much of our economy, we will see more stratification of the workforce.  One group will be the winners. These could be the folks who have created the new technologies (e.g., Google, FaceBook, Apple, etc) or folks who really know how to leverage them.  For example, the book says that the best chess players are teams that pair computers with humans.  A second group will be those in very manual jobs that are hard to automate (e.g., hairdressers).  Those jobs are not going away anytime soon. That leaves the rest of the economy which is at great risk of automation.

This book rings true on so many fronts.  I cannot believe it was just a few years ago that there was no iPhone. Just think about how much the iPhone (and other smartphones) have turned our worlds upside down in a few short years.  Siri, Watson, and some of the other great computer advances of the past couple years are proving that computers can finally do things that we may never have thought they could.

In addition, I see business after business using technology to streamline operations, thereby trimming headcount.  Look at the package delivery business.  Fedex, UPS, and others now rely heavily on GPS and automated delivery routes that make delivery routes much faster, enabling these companies to delivery the same number of packages with fewer people.  In addition, they have started to implement keyless ignition systems so drivers to speed up each stop.  These small steps drive down labor needs in these industries.

The book ends on a high note talking about all the opportunities of technology.  Having said that, it cautions that we need to get our education system in order to be able to take advantage of those opportunities.  I completely agree!  These new jobs require advanced skills and advanced degrees.  Many of them require sophisticated knowledge of math, technology, etc, and we are not training enough people with those skills.

Ironically the Wall Street Journal ran an article this past weekend that was very similar.  It talked about how certain industries cannot find people who have high end skills, even in these times of high unemployment.

The book is a must read for anyone interested in technology, whose job is at risk of automation, or with kids that will be coming into the workforce.  In other words, it is a must read for almost everyone!

Why Should I Buy the New Nokia / WP7 Phones?

I just saw the announcement on the new Nokia Windows Phone 7 phones.  Unfortunately the Nokia site doesn't explain to me why I should buy these phones instead of an iPhone or an Android phone.  Given how much market share iOS and Android have, Nokia needs to sell the benefits of their new phones.  I see a fair bit of information on the Nokia site about HTML 5, IE 9, fast internet connections, staying connected with friends, etc, etc.  Consumers want to be excited by a vision. That has what Apple has done so well.  It is going to take a lot more than technical specs and high level marketing statements to get people to buy a Nokia Windows Phone 7 device instead of an iPhone / Android phone.

More Background on the LifePics Photo Ecosystem

Internet Retailer did a nice article on the LifePics photo ordering ecosystem.  As the article says, our goal was to have an order button everywhere that photos exist on the Net. 

Building a Mobile Photo Ordering Ecosystem

I recently presented at Mobile Commerce Forum on how we built an ecosystem for allowing partners to send us photo orders.  The stats are showing that consumers only actively use a handful of apps.  If that trend remains (which is likely) retailers will find it increasingly difficult to convince consumers to use their apps.  These retailers instead will need to adopt strategies that allow consumers to send them orders from inside other apps, much like the affiliate programs of many years ago.

View my presentation on building a mobile photo ordering ecosystem.

Fire - A Bold Move by Amazon

As  you have probably heard by now, Amazon will be offering a 7" tablet for $199 this holiday season called Fire.  Critics have complained that Amazon will be losing as much as $70 in hard costs per tablet, more if you include marketing / advertising costs for this new line of tablets.  Furthermore, Amazon's margins are already thin so how will they recover the lost costs?

I, however, believe this is the right move for Amazon for three reasons:

Tablets appear to be well suited to e-commerce
As reported in the WSJ yesterday, conversion on tablets is 4 to 5% compared to 3% on PCs (according to Forrester Research).  In addition, retailers are reporting 10% to 20% larger carts on tablets than PCs.  You bet Amazon is watching these stats and wants to make sure that tablet users are shopping at Amazon!  An Amazon tablet greatly increases that likelihood.

Apple and Amazon are on a collision course
Apple has built up a tremendous franchise selling digital content through iTunes.  At the same time, Amazon knows that in order to keep its growth going, it needs to put more emphasis on digital content.  CDs, books, and DVDs are quickly being replaced by digital music and video downloads.  If Apple continues their dominance of tablets, those consumers will be steered (by Apple) to iTunes or other Apple services instead of Amazon services.  Amazon needs to ensure that the iPad doesn't continue to dominate the tablet market.

Consumers are insisting on innovation
Consumers have no patience for companies that don't move.  Companies like Palm, RIM, Yahoo, AOL, and others that have played it safe and have seen their fortunes fall quickly.  When companies like Apple and Google are innovating at a ferocious rate, there is no room for hanging back and playing it safe.  Fire is just the kind of bold bet that will keep Amazon going.