I'm not tethered to my laptop, but I certainly couldn't say that of my iPhone and iPad.  Our new mobile app makes this more true than ever.  Here's my story...

If you're a marketer like me, you are always "on."  I mean you think a lot about marketing even when you're not at work.  Like you, as a consumer and business professional, I am  (as is my immediate family) bombarded constantly by off- and on-line messages, which never fail to get me thinking about the strategy and tactics behind a commercial message that is highly relevant.  I am particularly curious about the communications that completely miss the mark!    I'll also admit that I am a weekend peeker -- on my own marketing initiatives.  I like to know how marketing campaigns are progressing as well as the status of creative reviews, etc.  Don't get me wrong, I do have a life.   And, it just got better with our mobile app!

When I purchased my iPad, I said goodbye and closed my work laptop on Friday evening and used my iPad for everything digital, including managing my work and personal email boxes.  I couldn't, however, fulfill my desire to know the progress or status of some marketing activities or check the numbers on a campaign report, etc.   Sooooo... on occasion I'd boot up my laptop to access our integrated marketing software solution. (More than you think!)  

As of this Monday when we released our mobile app, I can stay with almost 100% confidence that I can power down my laptop on Friday for the whole weekend and still remain informed about my projects.  I am particularly excited about the ability to use my iPad and/or iPhone on workdays that take me away from my desk.   For starters, I plan to take my iPad instead of my laptop to certain industry events for note taking.  It's much more portable and easier to carry, and importantly, I have as much access to any of the marketing information I need -- email marketing reports, post campaign analyses, digital assets, etc.  And when the opportunity arises -- as it often does -- I can pull up a solution brochure and send it to an interested prospect on the spot.  Isn't being mobile with marketing automation awesome?

Check it out --

I was reading the results of a study that challenged B2B marketers long-held belief that human emotions were only a factor in personal purchases, but not commercial ones.  Even without the research, I never believed emotions weren't a factor.  I mean did every human being leave their emotions behind when they arrived at the office?  Quite the contrary, they combined it with the other colleagues on the purchase team. 

Creating relevant email marketing messages and offers takes more than just understanding the organization's business challenges and how you can solve them.  It's about addressing the single key emotion of the buyers -- fear.  In consumer marketing there is an emotional play on Risk and Reward, which does not exist in B2B marketing.  The individual doesn't achieve a personal "reward" for the purchase, which leaves Risk uncountered.  Hence, today's buyer's goal is not to make the best decision, but to avoid exposure to risk.

I think today's marketing automation software aptly equips B2B marketers to adopt relevant B2C tactics, one of which is personalized promotional communications that appeal to the emotional aspects of the purchase.  Use inbound forms to foster 2-way dialogs that result in information capture that reveals something about the individual's thoughts about purchasing solutions for their company.  Face it, it feels more personal when ask about them, not the business.  Use these data, combined with their role and other data to drive dynamic content in your email messages.

You'll still need to focus on the business challenges, but start thinking of your prospects as individuals with human emotions, one of which greatly influences their purchase decisions -- fear. 

A recent Gartner report ventured that marketing budgets at many larger companies may have been cut by 20% or more in 2009. While the economy was certainly tightening at that time, one of the drivers of that reduction is the difficulty in measuring marketing effectiveness. It’s a high spend category with little clear proof of ROI, so that’s why marketing budgets get slashed, especially when times get a little tough. The danger here is that without accurate measurement, organizations don’t know where to trim and may end up cutting valuable programs. The right Marketing Operations solution can help by:

Giving you a complete marketing picture.
Get an end-to-end picture of precisely what is taking place in the marketing lifecycle, from origination through to fulfillment. In this way, bottlenecks can be quickly and efficiently identified and removed.

Protecting your brand.
Manage artwork and approvals using a structured system that ensures marketing and brand managers see and approve new marketing collateral before it goes to print or is released via online channels.

Providing better organization for your creative assets.
Assets can be organized by campaign, project, job number or any other reference and stored in a permanent web-based archive. And they can be quickly found by staff for revision or reuse, long after a marketing campaign has ended.

Improving team communication.
Marketing Operations programs have built-in options to notify managers as key events occur, such as the approval of artwork, or delivery of collateral to channel partners.

Accelerating delivery times.
Flexible workflows make it far easier for staff and suppliers, from one or many regions collaborating on a campaign or project, to share information and speed approvals.

Allowing you to refine marketing operations as you go.
Marketing Operations programs give managers the tools to analyze, revise and benchmark improvements to the marketing lifecycle in hours - not weeks, months or years.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of Marketing Operations solutions out there with hundreds of features, and you need to do your research to find the one that will optimize your own marketing efforts. Start with this report from Gartner (they call Marketing Ops MRM or Marketing Resource Management), “Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management.” It describes the strengths and attributes of today’s leading Marketing Operations software providers. Good luck!
 

Like many other terms, Marketing Optimization (MO) can hold different meanings for different marketers.  For online marketers, it means developing marketing campaigns that do A/B testing on emails and microsite pages to see which one’s generate the most opens, click-thrus, conversions, etc.  Those emails and web pages that underperform are eliminated in favor of the best performers.  For other marketers, MO means optimizing your communication strategy across campaigns and marketing channels to improve response, customer loyalty and profit.  It is the later meaning that this article will focus on.

Initially, optimization was used as a way to mathematically determine the optimal allocation of scarce resources. The concept has been borrowed by business analysts to aid decision-making.  Optimization has been used in the areas of the manufacturing supply chain, airline revenue yields, and financial investment risk assessment. More recently, the concept is being adopted by marketing.

Every day, marketers face realities like competing business goals, campaigns, channels, budget constraints, and product managers with myopic views, to name a few.   Large companies are often faced with campaign calendars that may not represent an ideal communication plan with its customers.  The below diagram illustrates this phenomenon for an electronics retailer.



As you can see, campaigns and customers associated with these campaigns can easily overlap.  If you are a prospect in each of these campaigns, will you feel overwhelmed by the number of contacts?  If you are a marketer with limited budget, how should your prioritize your spend across campaigns to generate desired response rates or ROI?  With multi-LOB companies with many products and services, it makes great sense to employ some degree of intelligence into the marketing equation to ensure a win-win outcome for companies, LOB’s, and last of all but not least, customers.

MO across campaigns and channels typically relies on the development of business rules, the utilization of sophisticated mathematical algorithms, or both.  Most software applications that use mathematical algorithms typically use linear or non-linear algorithms that attempt to maximize an objective function (e.g., response rates, profit), while imposing constraints.  Constraints may include: budgets, minimum/maximum number of offers per customer and/or campaign, channel capacities, etc.  While very powerful, optimization algorithms are problematic to use.  They require statisticians that build customer response and valuation models, as well as profitability models.  This takes time and money.  Then there is the issue of ensuring the algorithms actually find the global minimum (cost) or maximum (response rate) as desired.  The image below helps to visualize this issue.



It’s possible for algorithms to find “local” minimum/maximums that lead to sub-optimal marketing outcomes.  That being said, in the hands of the right practitioners, mathematical optimization can create significant marketing ROI.  So, short of the required expertise and/or budget, what are marketers to do?

More recently, software vendors have tackled this issue via the development of business rules that marketers can build.  Business rules can work within and across campaigns to optimize your communication plan.  Examples of business rules include:

• No more than 2 weekly communications via any channel to a customer, to minimize fatigue
   
• Make the best of multiple potential offers based on profit, revenue, or likelihood to purchase, as examples.
   
• If a customer may be touched by multiple campaigns in the next month, only communicate with them about the two campaigns with the highest priority.

These types of rules can easily be developed using a point-and-click interface like that found in Aprimo’s Contact Optimization module. 

So, business rules are easy to create and use -- there must be a downside, right?  Yes, there are tradeoffs associated with simplicity and ease-of-use.  Some of those include:

• We are really not optimizing an outcome from a mathematical point of view.
   
• Business rules support “subtraction”, i.e., supporting the imposition of a maximum number of touches, offers, etc.  Linear and non-linear algorithms can do that, but they can also impose minimums like, the number of offers or contacts per campaign.

Keep a look out for my next article that will continue this discussion and provide some real-life case studies.

 

Do you have a centralized customer and prospect database that you access to plan, execute, and measure cross-channel 1to1 marketing campaigns?  You're fortunate if your answer is, "Yes."

But... are you done?  I think not, as the pace of change in on-line and digital marketing, coupled with the increased splintering of the web, introduces more and more disparate data that need to be harnessed continuously for marketing -i.e., trigger-communications, interactive dialogs, audience segmentations.  Face it, the ability to frequently modify a marketing database data model, change its update processes, expand audits, and manage the new data sources to sustain the much needed 360-degree view is unrealistic.  Even the best IT staff would be challenged to keep up without making compromises or exchanging long-term strategies for short-term needs.

Don't fret despite my somewhat gloomy intro, as marketers can solve the challenge of data fragmentation -- without IT!

Yes, you heard me correctly!  I'll explain, but first I must go backward in time before forward.  I was never a big fan and stayed away from the industry kool-aid that many drank when they built a virtual marketing database that used campaign management software to create the "single-view" that a marketer could use for segmentations.  (There are many reasons for which I am not a fan, and I can elaborate on those some other time if you should be interested.)  I bring it up because marketers have long had the ability to connect to multiple data sources in order to see a whole customer view, but today's dynamic marketplace reveals limitations and perhaps, obsolescence in yesterday's solution.  How could this be you ask?

On-line and digital customer information is growing at great speed, and the marketer's need to leverage and innovate with it for a competitive advantage is universally embraced.  Marketers need access, and don't have the time to wait for IT and DBAs to load data to the servers to which they have access and map data to the campaign management software, AND to estimate the affect of the additional data on system performance when more data are moved onto the application servers for processing.  That simply doesn't work with the pace of marketing change we are experiencing.

Marketers like me need a campaign management solution that allows me to connect to multiple data sources, adding new ones when and where they emerge quickly.  We need to do this without IT or DBA intervention and without unnecessarily moving data just to create our expanded or new customer view.   

Does anyone know of a marketing automation solution that lets the marketer adjust and expand ever-changing customer view needed for 1:1 marketing communications?  Hmm... I do.
 

Technology now sits at the core of every Brand’s marketing activities.

Point solutions prevail for those brands that are still finding their way in the digital world (Microsite Software, Search Marketing Software, Marketing Communication Software etc).

As the level of sophistication grows, however, marketers find it increasingly difficult to hold all the moving parts together. At this stage, marketers are faced with 3 options:

1.       Work longer hours

2.       Grow the team

3.       Find a smarter way of working

Work smarter, not harder – Coordinate your efforts!

If your marketing sophistication is in the ascendancy and you’re wondering when you’ll find time to sleep in your efforts to stay on top of the complexity that this generates, you need a platform that pulls it all together (Marketing Professional Software).

If you can link your Capture, Engage and Convert activities in one place, you can not only streamline your processes (Marketing Workflow), you will also surface the crucial Marketing ROI that CFOs now rightly demand to justify budgets. Clear collaboration with Sales (B2B & B2C) and open visibility of Marketing's contribution to the bottom line shouldn't be aspirational - they are pre-requisites.

If your day revolves around making things happen at the last minute, juggling all the moving pieces and shouting as you go, there'll never be time to think.  

Know where you are, how you got there, what’s working (and what isn’t) and – crucially – ensure you have enough time to apply your marketing genius to the rapidly changing environment. 

Marketing platforms like Aprimo Marketing Studio enable Marketers to shine.

Customers have “contact rights!” Unfortunately, not all marketers respect them, let alone optimize them for mutual benefit to brand and individual. Why not? I’m glad you asked, and I’ll start my answer with a very light definition of contact optimization.

Contact Optimization: A 1:1 marketer’s use of industry software to centralize business rules, constraints, and priorities and customer preferences that they can apply during a campaign segmentation to ensure the final target audience comprises only the individuals for whom that campaign represents the optimal mix of message, offer, time, and channel to meet current business objectives.

Answer: As optimized campaigns typically produce better results, I am somewhat perplexed as to why   we still have industry colleagues who do not use these tools in concert with their campaign management solutions. Here’s my thoughts about why I think they should use contact optimization solutions -- for reasons that benefit the professional, the company, the customer as well as industry peers:

•       Relevance: Show you know and listen to your customers, or you may pay the price. Yesterday’s overlooked marketing messages are today’s annoyance, as consumer apathy turns to anger and hostility.   Emerging communication venues like social networks can turn a “private” matter public in just a few minutes, weaving and leaving a wrath of brand bashing that will need to be silenced and reversed.

•       Accountability: Unwanted messages are, simply put, marketing resource waste. With increasing pressure to cut cost and grow revenue for maximum ROI, we have our marching orders. Management’s accountability mandate gives us license to optimize and an opportunity to move away from defending spend to championing and promoting its value. 

•       Responsibility: Keep the industry self-regulated.   We have had only a handful of regulations and restrictions imposed on us over the many decades of 1:1 marketing.   Key to a future with marketing freedom that mirrors our past is an ability to pro-actively adjust and align marketing strategies and tactics for mutual relationship benefit, as the customer perceives it. 

•       Reach: Prevent the creation of an email “postage stamp.” The big expense associated with off-line marketing tactics like direct mail and the complexities of a multi-channel marketing may have heavily influenced historical optimization solution use.   As more of us have shifted our emphasis to online communications, a low cost channel, we may not see the “benefits.” This couldn’t be further from the truth, as the email glut continually causes ISPs to develop new ways to filter and block emails. Perhaps they may even begin charging “postage” to reach the inbox.

•       B2B marketers are in need, too. As more B2B marketing organizations build marketing automation solutions with field enablement functionality, these firms will need to centralize contact rules and priorities to ensure that Sales and Marketing teams with access to the same pool of prospect and leads are aligned in their messages, offers, and treatments. With their focus on the integration of their demand generation and lead nurturing solution with their SFA tool, most B2B firms overlook the importance of establishing and automating contact management processes.

We have the means to not only respect customers’ marketing “rights,” but we have the duty to do so!  I can incorporate easily and efficiently the customers’ “rights” in my marketing strategies and tactics without compromising business performance. So can you! 

The key to achieving your desired conversion rate is relevancy -- pure and simple.  It's more than using your microsite software to support specific campaigns.  It's about testing and delivering personalized emails with relevant content that drives customers to a personalized and relevant experience on your microsite. 

A few words stand out in the above paragraph that merit additional attention.

Personalize - This means many things to many people.  It can be as simple as embedding the customer's name in the email message.  A recent study by Aberdeen found that personalizing an email with a name increased conversion rates by 200-300% over non-personalized emails.

Relevant - The message/offer needs to resonate with the customer.  Relevancy can be driven by events,  prior purchases, and/or through segmentations.

• Events - A customer that downloads a whitepaper or article about a product or service could be ripe for a follow-up email or call.  A dramatic increase in bank account balance could signal a call-to-action from a bank about investment options.  A very personalized email could be triggered to drive customers to personalized microsites with a relevant message that speaks to the customer's need or interest.  Lead nurturing applications can play a key role in supporting your marketing efforts related to customer events.
   
• Prior purchases - Simple cross/up-sell campaigns can be driven by product purchases.  For instance, a customer that purchases a water filter could receive an email that drives them to a microsite that attempts to enroll them in scheduled deliveries (recurring sales!) of replacement filters.  Data mining can also use information about prior purchases (RFM type data) to predict the likelihood of a customer's interest in other products or services.  Then we simply communicate to customers about the products they are most likely to purchase (based on a statistical probability to respond).  We won't always be right, but more times than not, this type of personalized communication will increase conversions and improve our campaign results.
   
• Segmentations - There are many ways to create segmentations.  One is based on industry, product and customer knowledge that is accumulated over time.  For instance, "I've worked in this industry for 10 years and know that females, aged 21-25 are the best targets for my product."  Another interesting segmentation approach that improves campaign results is customer clustering.  Clustering is a data mining technique that creates customer segments where everyone in one segment is similar to each other based on customer attributes (e.g., gender, age, prior purchases, geographic location, income class, etc.).  While everyone in a given segment are similar to one another, each segment in general is quite different from any other.  Once we profile each segment, it is easy to develop a personalized message that goes beyond first name.  The actual copy/text of the email can be personalized to be perceived as even more relevant.  If just using first name for personalization leads to a 2-3 X conversion improvement versus mass email, just imagine what affect personalized copy will have.  Let's look at an example.
  
  A large print newspaper in the northeast was experiencing declining subscribers like many of it's counterparts nationally.  The newspaper appended Census data (number of residents, race, ethnicity, age, income, home value, average commute time and many other variables) at the zip+4 level to all of it's subscribers. It then used clustering to create five different clusters of customers based on the Census data.  Their idea was to profile each group and develop editorial zones based on these segments.  Each editorial zone would receive it's own unique newspaper content based on assumed interests as derived from the cluster profiles.  One cluster was comprised of the highest proportion of customers with high home values, 4-year degrees and the lowest proportion of people with blue-collar jobs.  This cluster also  enjoyed the highest penetration in terms of current subscribers.  You can see how the content this group would be interested in would differ from the cluster with lower education and income.  By personalizing the newspaper content, the newspaper reduced the rate of subscriber loss from all segments/zones. 
  
  This information was also used to promote customizable online versions of the newspaper as well.  Subscribers now opt-in/out to various content.  As such, they are directly professing their interests in a topic or issue.  This information is even more powerful from a marketing perspective than what we "deduce" via analytics, and can drive a circular process where we get to know the customer better and better over time.  This increases customer loyalty and ROMI.
  
  Many organizations have even taken this idea farther from a Social Marketing perspective.  Customers can form their own clusters by opting in/out of particular forums or discussions.  Creating customer segments based on the forums or discussion groups to which they belong is valuable low hanging fruit.  Some leading edge companies are also applying Text Mining to customer posts to take proactive steps for customer loyalty/retention, cross-sell and acquisition efforts.  More to come on Social Marketing and Text Mining in future posts.

I've had the opportunity to build a lot of product functionality focused on database marketing. One of the critical challenges of database marketing is dealing with enormous amounts of data in the campaign process. Database marketers were on the forefront of marketing’s evolution towards leveraging vast amounts of customer and prospect data to build more targeted segments and ultimately utilize data in the campaign management process. Interactive marketers are beginning to go through a very similar data transition.

Database marketers have embraced the ability to use data to enable decisions and rules where once there were none. The days of sending out direct mail to ‘everyone in the database’ are gone given both the expense and the ROI in marketing of generic blasts. That direct mail offer you got in the mail yesterday may have utilized dozens of attributes about YOU to drive 1) whether you even got the offer, 2) the details of the specific offer, and 3) the creative used in the physical offer you received.   This need to leverage large volumes of data efficiently and effectively made database marketers one of the first functions in marketing to embrace software tools and automation. Database marketing selection and segmentation tools have grown in sophistication and power given the explosion of customer data and the campaign complexity requirements.

Interactive marketers are now facing very similar challenges – build highly targeted segments, create personalized and dynamic content, process people uniquely given their data and behaviors. To meet these challenges, interactive marketers need to combine their new access to all customer/prospect data and software tools that can leverage that data in the interactive marketing process.  Through products like Aprimo Marketing Studio, interactive marketers can now fully leverage this rich customer data within their marketing campaigns.

In future posts, I’ll look at specific areas where Interactive marketers can use data about the people they market to in many different facets of their campaigns including target audience selection, personalized and dynamic email and microsite content, interactive and progressive forms, and real-time 1:1 communication dialogs.

As I cruise along at 24,000 feet on my way to the Gartner CRM event I can’t help but appreciate the complexity of air travel.  Cram 130 people into a metal cylinder and fling them from Indianapolis to Phoenix.  Repeat thousands and thousands of time around the world every day. How do they make this a successful and repeatable process?  One key is automation.

For example, autopilot allows the intelligence of the airplane systems to automatically perform operations so the pilot doesn't have to.  Autopilot lets systems and software take care of the ‘normal’ activities a pilot would go through to fly along at cruising altitude.  I’m sure autopilot was complicated to program and test but the result of that effort is hugely beneficial.  

Many companies have no autopilot equivalent for any facet of marketing.  “Marketing needs to be high touch” or “Outbound Marketing is too complex to automate” they might say.    My guess is that if we found a way to automate the intricacies of keeping a plane aloft at 30,000 feet we can probably automate some of the processes marketing is doing manually today.

One significant autopilot capability for Marketing is triggered dialogs.  Triggered dialogs give marketing the ability to pre-define a series to steps to take for a given person that matches a certain criteria.  Here are some real-world customer examples of utilizing triggered dialogs:

• Automatically respond to a website whitepaper request with the selected content.
• Automatically follow-up with a prospect two-weeks after a sales call.
• Automatically send reminders to attendees of an upcoming webinar.
• Automatically route leads against lead score thresholds to the appropriate team

• Web Design (all graphical elements behind a website)
• Interactive Flash (interactive objects created using Adobe's Flash)
• Interactive Video (using Canon A1 + Adobe After Effects, Premiere, Flash, Encore, etc)
• Web Programming (everyone loves making forms!)
• Print Media (brochures, booths, flyers. etc)
• Web Analytics, Search Engine Optimization and Traffic
• How we use our Aprimo Marketing Software to fit our Microsite and Email Needs

When I graduated from college and entered the business world four years ago, I would've readily admitted that I didn't know much at all about corporate America. There were things I knew I didn't know, like how people managed to work in the same job for years. My experience, to that point, included various jobs that each lasted between four and six months. But, for the most part, I didn't know what I didn't know.

I didn't know that there were thousands of unique job titles in marketing that I could explore with my marketing degree, and I didn't know what those job titles were or meant. Marketing Research. Marketing Communications. Media and Public Relations. Marketing Campaigns. Inside Sales. Graphics. Web Content Management. Product Marketing. Event Management. (I like the sound of that last one...)

I also didn't know there would be applications and programs and software that would help me accomplish and organize my day-to-day work life, let alone that one of those software programs would fall under the marketing operations software umbrella. I definitely didn't know that I'd be working for a company that develops an industry leading product under that umbrella.

At Aprimo, we drink our own champagne. We develop and sell marketing operations software, and our marketing department uses it. I was introduced to "ARC," our internal implementation of the software, Aprimo Resource Center, on my first day. In those days, using ARC, meant researching, verifying and updating customer and prospect data in our database. Today, it means a hundred different things. I can't manage the planning and logistics of an event without it! I mean, I could. But I'd rather not.

When we're evaluating a new event, we use the proposal process. When we've decided to host or sponsor an event, we track the financial forecast, what we've committed to spend and what we've actually spent. When we need to make sure that ten team members are working efficiently on different aspects of an event, we use a workflow that sends reminders, captures completed work and approvals, and dynamically adjusts if the timeline changes or a new step is inserted. This is not simply project management, people!

I wonder... where do you find yourself today? Maybe, you're like me four years ago and are still trying to figure out what marketing operations software is. (If that's the case, I wonder how you stumbled across my blog...) Maybe you do know what you don't know, you know you need to learn more and find a solution that best fits your organization, but haven't done anything about it yet. Or maybe you're a perfect specimen of a marketer, with effective marketing operations software in place, and we could all learn a thing or two from you. So where do you find yourself and what do you know?