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The use of the internet is growing every day, thanks to rapid technological advancements. The Internet is a global networking infrastructure that can now be accessed from almost any device and has become an integral part of our daily lives. In today's technological age, the majority of businesses conduct their business over the Internet. Companies and individuals use the Internet in a variety of ways to make their everyday activities more efficient and relaxed.
Speaking with Analytics Insight, Sagar Das, Director of Marketing Analytics, Stamps.com, provides insight into how the company's online postage service enables small businesses, enterprises and online retailers to print U.S. Postal Service-approved postage with just a computer, printer and Internet connection, right from their home or office.
Sagar Das is the Director of Marketing Analytics at Stamps.com, the leading provider of Internet-based postage solutions for small businesses and online retailers. He has been working in the field of Marketing Analytics since 2013 and specializes in Landing Page Optimization, Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Models.
Sagar has a bachelor's degree in Information Technology from the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of ICT, India and an MBA from the University of Maryland, College Park.
During Sagar's tenure at Stamps.com, he has consistently improved the company's homepage, landing pages and registration funnel to optimize conversion rate, perfect customer tracking, and improve customer experience. He has also led the initiative in building Marketing Mix Models and Customer Lifetime Value Models to help determine the impact of various Marketing initiatives. At Stamps.com, Sagar has perfected a custom approach to Direct Mail creative testing that gets statistically significant results while minimizing associated risks. His most recent achievements include, conducting a pricing test to maximize subscription fee revenue and successfully launching the new pricing across more than half a million business customers.
Sagar enjoys reading management books and business articles related to Analytics, hiking, and spending time at the beach. He currently lives in Torrance, California.
Having a background in technology and a degree in Business, helped me understand the technical nuances of the Analytics world while being able to partner and liaison with various departments across the organization to help the business aspect. As Analytics is becoming the integral part of each and every company across the world, it is becoming a combination of science of understanding the numbers and art of being able to articulate it to all the stakeholders in the company who will be able to make the Financial and Marketing decisions based on the additional insights available to them. Being able to balance the data along with the overall business knowledge has helped me in being successful at my role and drive decisions and profits for my company.
This was my first time working for a Shipping related technology company. Although I was well versed in the Analytical and technology knowledge, the shipping industry was altogether a different ball game. Understanding the small nuances in the industry and the product was one of the steep learning curves for me but one that equipped me to tackle all the problems once I aced it. My understanding of the product and the industry has now made me adept at dealing with analytical and website optimization problem much easily as compared to when I started my journey with Stamps.com. In the recent years, the shipping industry has changed even more drastically with the innovation in operations and more businesses operating from home during the recent COVID times. With the changing landscape, it gets exciting to bring new insights to the forefront that can help the company grow in these times.
It is just mind boggling to think how much data is available in the world today. Big data and AI's combined capabilities has led to a lot of innovation in analyzing customer behavior, the way we market to customers, and the way our digital virtual home assistants are helping us. Big data – massive data that the consumer is generating every day – is growing bigger and bigger. AI is providing a way for us to analyze that data and understand the behavior of the customer and how to approach them with the right product at the right time and place. It has driven innovation to a point where digital home assistant knows when you need to reorder the front door batteries on Amazon based on its connection with the lock installed on your door and the usage patterns. The world is soon going to become smarter with advanced AI capabilities that continuously adopt and learn as we continue to generate more data into the world through our day to day activities and interactions with different social media app and interests.
With increasing data complexity and the amount of data available to companies, it is easy to be overwhelmed with all the information and how to approach it. The key here is to stick to the problem in hand and not necessarily look at anything and everything available. Sometimes the problem in hand doesn't need complex data sets and it is enough to look at the surface and trend of the data overall to make an informed strategic decision. The other pivotal point is to ensure that the foundation of the data structure is right so that in future, the data teams are able to build on it instead of creating patches that end up increasing cost and complexity in future. The simpler the data models, the easier it is to stack up on it.
Implementing analytics for companies can depend a lot on the data systems and architectures they already might have in place and the data collection that they are presently doing to ensure that their customers are paying their bills and have all the basic information related to their spending behavior.
With all the data available out there, ensuring the security and privacy of the data is one of the biggest hurdles that companies struggle with. The high exposure of data makes it risky and raises concerns for data privacy for the customers. Along with setting up secure systems, it is also essential that all the sources of the data are aligned so that there are no issues with data usage/gap from different environments. A lot of small companies also don't plan for scaling up as the company continues to grow and that makes planning for both storing structured and unstructured data vital.
Apart from the technical and resource challenges, another challenge companies' face is getting a buy-in from all the departments across the company. Having a system in place will not help the company if all departments are not in sync about how data is going to play a pivotal role in decision making and going to be the key in driving the business and making knowledgeable decisions.
Some of the key trends that are driving growth in Big Data/Analytics are automation, real-time data visualization and analytics and embedded data for customers. Automation is going to make it easier for more users to be self-sufficient and enable more people across organizations to be able to use the insights without having to deal with technical details of pulling and arranging the data. The real-time data visualizations will help companies make strategic decisions much faster in this competitive landscape.
Social Media is another big driver of growth in Big Data. There is an abundance of data that is consumed and generated in social media that is helping firms generate targeted approach to reaching the consumers. The growth is so organic that being an Influencer is considered a status symbol and lets consumers be a brand influencer for the products they truly believe in. There are companies that are growing to just cater to the needs of big corporations to reach their target audience with the help of social media. Over the coming years, this trend is going to amplify making social media content driven more towards what the customer wants to see and the trends that they want to follow instead of feeding generic information to all your consumers. Customization and individualization will be the key.
When I started working at Stamps.com, there was only another colleague of mine, along with me, who was focused on Analytics. After he left the company, I was the only person working on Analytics for the whole Marketing department for almost a year. Fast forward several years today, the team has grown to a healthy 4-person team working with Marketing, Sales and Product. We have plans to hire more people as there has been increased need for the insights we have produced and strategies that we have been able to influence. Overall, the Big Data and Analytics industry hiring trends almost seem like the IT boom we saw in 90s. Analytics has equipped companies to make decisions not based on their gut feelings but based on actual data, trends and insights.
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