| Big data is taken so much for granted these days we hardly use the term any more. But what about small businesses, many of which — by their very nature — have fewer customers and less customer data. Is there anything to be done with small data? There are some familiar use cases: A/B testing doesn’t require big data, and neither do Net Promoter Scores. Beyond that, are there ways to drive big data value from smaller data sets? In fact, there are at least two approaches. Some vendors like Mailchimp, the marketing automation and email marketing platform, builds large data sets out of its clients’ smaller ones. It has AI tools which can drive insights from this aggregated, anonymized data. A very different approach is taken by Proof Analytics which uses smaller volumes of data to track sales and marketing outcomes in real-time, suggesting optimizations: a kind of “Business GPS,” as it calls the solution. Of course, the larger the data-set, the less vulnerable it is likely to be to unexpected, outlier events. But after COVID-19, perhaps we can agree that past is not always prologue, and maybe real-time analytics applied to smaller data streams creates better opportunities to respond. Read more here. | 