Multichannel Campaign Management

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing my daughter's mid-year report card for her sophomore year.  A pleasure because it was all A's, even with AP classes that will earn her college credits.  Yes, I am boastful, but can you blame me?  With these A’s in mind, I got to thinking about where else an array of A’s makes me happy. It’s in 1:1 marketing...  [yep, no kidding!]

As a seasoned marketing practitioner who's been in the trenches for years, using marketing automation solutions to plan, execute, and measure my multi-channel campaigns, I can appreciate the value of at least 5 A's -- i.e., Audience, Activity, Account, Asset, and Analysis.  Each offers a unique benefit to the marketer, with a whole that is even greater than the sum of its parts.  The A’s, and importantly, the marketer’s ability to record, document and associate them with specific marketing initiative(s) is critical to a marketer’s success! Here’s a couple of big reasons you should demand the A’s from your multi-channel campaign management solution:

·         Accountability (I’m sticking with A’s!) – Marketers can focus on the present (i.e., flawless marketing campaign execution) with applications that automate and/or support the creation of campaign information like audience contact history, funding account, brand assets used, post-campaign analyses, etc. that are "must-haves" to calculate ROI.   

Additionally, marketers can go beyond the campaign-centric use of the A’s to look across campaign, across time – i.e., longitudinal tracking and measurement. Marketers can easily assess aggregate-level spend and ROI, or other meaningful metrics (e.g., retention versus acquisition spend, Brand A versus Brand B marketing ROI comparisons, etc.)

 

·         Advancement (no comment on the A…) Marketing is indeed a mix of science and art. Science gives us the data, i.e., the facts that we transform into information and insight, which then fuels the “art” of marketing.  Marketers infuse a bit of art by adding their experience and creativity [to insights] to produce implications that convert into meaningful marketing actions and decisions. Without the A’s marketers cannot generate the learnings they need to refine and advance future marketing initiatives for greater ROI nor can they advance their individual experience and expertise in the practice of 1:1 marketing.
 

I hope that I have accomplished two things with this post: 1) redeemed myself by showing that my report card intro was not so "far fetched;" and 2) imparted some valuable information about why marketers need a multi-channel campaign management solution that easily supports our marketing A's.  Let me know if I did either! :o)

In an earlier blog I briefly described how data mining and RFM analysis can help marketers be more efficient (read...  increased marketing ROI!). Data mining and RFM can significantly help with all direct marketing efforts (multichannel campaign management efforts using direct mail, email and call center) and some interactive marketing efforts as well.  So, why aren't all companies using it today?  Well, typically it comes down to a lack of data and/or data mining expertise.  Even if you don't have data mining expertise, YOU can benefit from data mining by using a consultant.  With that in mind, let's tackle the first problem -- collecting and developing the data that is useful for data mining.

The most important data to collect for data mining include:

• Transaction data - For every sale, you at least need to know the product and the amount and date of the purchase.
   
• Past campaign response data - For every campaign you've run, you need to identify who responded and who didn't.  You may need to use direct and indirect response attribution.
   
• Geo-demographic data - This is optional, but you may want to append your customer file/database with consumer overlay data from companies like Acxiom.
   
• Lifestyle data - This is also an optional append of indicators of socio-economic lifestyle that are developed by companies like Claritas.

All of the above data may or may not exist in the same data source.  Some companies have a single holistic view of the customer in a database and some don't.  If you don't, you'll have to make sure all data sources that contain customer data have the same customer ID/key.  That way, all of the needed data can be brought together for data mining.

How much data do you need for data mining?  You'll hear many different answers, but I like to have at least 15,000 customer records to have confidence in my results.

Once you have the data, you need to massage it to get it ready to be "baked" by your data mining application.  Some data mining applications will automatically do this for you.  It's like a bread machine where you put in all the ingredients -- they automatically get mixed, the bread rises, bakes, and is ready for consumption!  Some notable companies that do this include KXEN, SAS, and SPSS.  Even if you take the automated approach, it's helpful to understand what kinds of things are done to the data prior to model building.

Preparation includes:

• Missing data analysis. What fields have missing values? Should you fill in the missing values? If so, what values do you use? Should the field be used at all?
   
• Outlier detection. Is “33 children in a household” extreme? Probably — and consequently this value should be adjusted to perhaps the average or maximum number of children in your customer’s households.
   
• Transformations and standardizations. When various fields have vastly different ranges (e.g., number of children per household and income), it’s often helpful to standardize or normalize your data to get better results. It’s also useful to transform data to get better predictive relationships. For instance, it’s common to transform monetary variables by using their natural logs.
   
• Binning Data. Binning continuous variables is an approach that can help with noisy data. It is also required by some data mining algorithms.

I'd love to hear your questions or comments if you have a few moments over the Holidays. 

My best to you and your family!
Jim

Note:  Few people know this, but Aprimo offers an excellent Lead Management system as part of its Multichannel Campaign Management capabilities.  I have personal experience implementing it for a few happy B-to-B marketing customers.  Aprimo Lead Management functionality includes a lead portal to view and screen leads, an integration with Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications like Salesforce.com, territory lead assignment rules to assign leads to sales, a method to score leads, and a process flow designer to define how leads are managed and routed.  It is designed for marketers to collect prospect information and generate leads for the sales team.  This blog discusses one element of Aprimo Lead Management: lead scoring and lead quality.  Now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry . . .

Anytime marketing delivers leads to sales, there seems to be an age old conflict where sales complains that the marketing leads are not good enough and marketing says sales is not working the marketing leads hard enough, or at all.  In sales' defense, and I hate defending sales, marketing does collect a lot of leads, often from any response to a web form, and throws the leads over the wall to sales.  In marketing's defense, marketing is often incented and measured based on the quantity of leads generated - not quality.  This troubled relationship may be a product of out-of-sync objectives and performance metrics.  Aren't we all really just working within our little mazes to find the fastest and easiest way to the cheese?  That was a rhetorical question, and the answer is yes.

Lead scoring is considered a way to remedy this issue - at least a way for marketing to generate better quality leads.  The lead score is a numeric value built from a couple of types of information - profile and historical activity information.  Profile information is information about the contact or the company like title (VP, CEO, CFO, Manager) and industry vertical (technology, financial services, healthcare, etc.) and company size (greater than 1000 employees).   Historical activity information includes the contacts past web form responses and even past web site page visits.  The historical activity score can increment higher based on each web site visit to a product page or a past request for a white paper or even a specific response to a set of qualifying questions on a web form.  When the lead score goes beyond a specified threshold, based on both profile information (best fit) and history (most interest), a lead is generated for the product category of interest.

In theory and in practice if the score is built well, the higher the score then the better qualified the lead.  The contacts from the best verticals and departments with the best titles will be scored higher then the contacts from poor verticals, unrelated departments, and with inappropriate titles.  Also, the contacts that have answered qualifying questions favorably will be given higher scores then those who did not.  Contact that have recently attended a webinar or downloaded a whitepapers, filled out a form, and/or browsed the corporate web site will be score higher than someone whe just filled out a web form.


Challenges to consider when implementing lead scoring

The number of leads generated will initially go down.  I will let you in on a little secret regarding scoring leads that my clients are often surprised about when it actually happens.  If you currently send most all your marketing responses out as leads to sales, after you implement a lead scoring system the number of leads will go down.  It will go down because you went from little to no qualifying criteria to a set of more stringent qualifying rules to build the lead score that must be met before the prospect can qualify.  Lead volumes can return to the previous levels if your marketing activity increases to compensate for the tougher qualification. 

A previous client was unsuccessful implementing a lead scoring system, but not lead management, because of this issue concerning lead volume decrease.  This marketing organization was measured and incented on generating a specific number of leads per campaign and generating a specific volume of leads per quarter.  The lead scoring system started to drop these volumes.  Because of this drop, the marketing department quickly abandoned the lead scoring system because it did not allow them to meet their metrics for the number of leads generated in a campaign or quarter.  Even the sales organization was part to blame here, because sales had become dependent on these higher lead volumes and was staffed to handle a flood of leads.  They were also incented, trained, and accustomed to churning quickly through a bunch of suspect leads.  So, any drop in lead volumes with an improvement in quality would also mean that sales would have to alter their staffing plans and how their sales team works leads.

How can you manage this?  Prepare the organization for the quality of leads to go up and the quantity of leads to go down.  Revise target metrics for marketing leads generated down while increasing the quality metric targets up like percent qualified, contacted, interested, opportunities generated, and closed sales.  Manage change within the sales organization to start working leads differently to work every lead, spend more time on each lead with more contact attempts and time invested per lead, and provide better notes or information on each lead.  Also, make up for the smaller volumes of better qualified leads with sales follow-up calls for marketing campaigns and seminar and event drives.

Lead generation qualification will become more complex.  If you are an organization that offers a wide rage of products across numerous categories, lead scoring may be more complex for you to implement.  The reason for this is around how you score historical activity.  If prospect "Mr. A" downloads a white paper for product Z in category M and then fills out a form expressing an interest in product X in category O, then what will "Mr. A's" lead score be and will a lead be generated for product Z and or category M or for product X and or category O?  There is no right answer here - so it depends on your rules.  That is what makes lead scoring complex.

To remedy this, generate marketing leads specific to a product or product category, then you will want to track activity like white papers downloaded, demos downloaded, webinars attended to a specific to a product or product category and lead score.  In a nutshell, you would not want to generate a lead for sprockets because that was the last web form the prospect filled out after they have been researching widgets for 3 months.  They should be contacted regarding widgets.

How can you manage this?  If you have a small number of products or product categories, then you can probably build separate historical activity component of the lead score by product or product category.  If you have lots of products and a few product categories, then create a few historical activity lead scores by product category.  In situations where there is way too many products or product categories, then consider building the historical activity component of the lead score on demand.  For example, Mr. A responds to a marketing campaign for product Z.  Build the score from Mr. A's profile, from his current web form responses plus add a query to look at historical activity for the same product or product category in the last 30 - 90 days.  The historical activity component increases with the amount of recent activity for the same type of product.

Another prositive effect of the ad hoc building of the historical activity score is that the lead is created in the context of a campaign and for a specific product or effort.  Lead scoring is often divorced from any specific campaign, because a lead could be generated from activities or responses across many campaigns.  This is challenging when you want to report which campaign generates more leads than another.  The ad hoc building of the score per campaign still tightly associates the campaign with the response and subsequently the lead while allowing the marketer the capability to impute interest based on past responses for the same or similar products.

Other things you can try first to improve lead quality to sales
First, reduce duplicate leads for the same contact.  Aprimo automatically merges duplicates. but many systems treat each response as a separate lead and contact.  Buy Aprimo or add a merge and duplicate reduction system to your prospect to lead processing.

Second, make sure all leads have the minimum required contact information.  Any leads passed to sales should have some minimum required information like name, email address, and phone number.  There is a trade off here, the more information that you require then the lower the response.  But the more information that you require, the higher the quality except for bogus entries like Mickey Mouse.  At least look at the amount of information provided as an element of the lead score (quality score) with the score going higher as the profile information is fully populated.  If you can ask for name and address information and validate the address - that is an even better indicator of quality.

Third, create and use your qualifying questions and definitely score the qualifying questions. If someone says that they have a budget and he or she has to make a decision in 30 days make sure you score this so that these leads are immediately sent to sales.  Talk to sales and let them tell you what qualifying question responses should be sent to sales immediately and which ones should be nurtured.  Also, when someone says that they are making a decision in 9 months or a year, then send them an email 3 months before that time to see if they would like to talk with a sales professional or change their level of interest.

This last point is going to seem obvious, but hey doesn't most everything I write about here seem obvious after you read it.   Fourth, do not create a lead for a prospect's first response.  Duh.  Unless the individual answers a qualifying question high enough on their first web form, do not send them immediately to sales to become a lead.  Look for some minimal level of activity over the last 30 - 90 days.  So, make sure the individual has demonstrated a pattern of activity over time that shows they are really interested before creating a lead for that person.

In closing
I can't promise you that if you implement lead scoring or any of the above steps to improve lead quality that the sales people will start inviting you out to their summer homes or boats.  However, marketing should take steps to improve lead quality and take the emphasis off of lead quantity.  Also, you might be wondering what do you do with all those other prospects that responded but did not qualify to become a lead.  Well, these known prospects have provided you with product preference information and contact information for marketing to keep nurturing them until they are ready to talk with sales.  Aprimo is designed to maintain these prospects and maintain a dialogue with them until the prospect self-qualifies as a lead.  Good hunting.

Marketers on the street often come up to me and ask, "How many times can I contact my customers and prospects?"  Actually, marketers do not come up to me and ask me this question, but they should be asking someone this question.  Actually, I decided to write this blog because I am surprised how many organizations do not manage the number of time  customer and prospect communications much at all.  In some cases customers and prospects are being barraged with marketing communication to the point that the communication is becoming less and less effective.

Opt-Outs First
There are customers and prospects that you should not be contacting at all.  These are individuals that have asked to be removed (opted-out) from your marketing communication.  If someone asks to no longer receive your marketing messages by all channels, or by a specific marketing channel of email, mail, or call, then they are probably not interested in your messages or in receiving your offers via that specific channel.  The customer or prospect by providing you this information has just saved you money, increased your response rate, and has provided you a preference. So, you should use that information.

Managing these opt-outs is not JUST a good idea, it is the law.  There are a variety of regulations enforcing opt-outs.  The CAN-SPAM act covers email marketing and requires that you provide a way for your customers and prospects to opt-out of future marketing emails.  The opt-out method can be a link to an opt-out web page or a reply email with unsubscribe in the subject line.  CAN-SPAM applies to commercial emails focused on advertising or selling products and services.  Transactional emails reporting account balances, shipping, and other information are not covered by CAN-SPAM and do not have to provide an opt-out method.   Also, I am not legal council, so please check with your legal professional regarding the specific opt-out requirements for your organization and marketing.

There are other regulations covering telemarketing opt-outs (TSR or the Telemarketing Sales Rule) that require marketers to apply the National Do Not Call list and maintain and use a do not call list for your organization.  For direct mail, there are no do not mail regulations, yet.  However, because of the high cost of direct mail every direct mail marketer should have their own do not mail list and use it.  The DMA also offers its own national do not mail suppression list to members.  For this and other compliance information, check out the Direct Marketing Association's compliance portal here.  Please note, I am only discussing U.S. regulations in this blog.  Each country and/or economic region will have its own regulations.  As I said before, check with your own legal council about these compliance issues.

Number of contacts - There is no silver bullet
Once you can drop the prospects and customers that do not want to be contacted at all, you can concentrate on how often you communicate to the others.  Okay, if you are looking for the silver bullet answer to this question here, you won't find it.  It doesn't exist.  But you can start finding it for yourself.  It is a complex issue.  There is a delicate balance between the power of repeating a message and overwhelming and diluting your messages with too many messages.  You definitely don't want to compete with your own messaging or worse start increasing the number of people who are opting-out or unsubscribing from your marketing messages all together.

The first step to implementing a contact management strategy is to define some basic contact management rules.  The rules should specify how many times your marketing organization will contact a person in a set period of time.  The best rules are marketing channel centric, that is a rule defines how often you will contact the person via email, call, and mail per week or month.  Do not create a rule with large time frames like 10 times a year, because this would still allow a marketer to contact the person 10 times in one day.  This seems obvious, but a client once asked me to implement an only contact 10 times a year direct mail rule. 

At this point, you can use some customer research or anecdotal evidence or gut feel to define your initial rules.  I usually suggest something like no more than 1 email per week, a direct mailing once every two weeks, and a telemarketing effort (could include multiple attempts) only once a month.  Once you have your initial contact management rules implemented and established, you can start testing variants.  You can pull a segment of customers and market to that segment more frequently and compare overall results versus your baseline.  Whenever changing your contact management rules, monitor your opt-outs from the test group as well as response rates.  You want to increase response rates without significantly increasing opt-outs.

Exceptions -every rule has one
There are exceptions to every rule even contact management rules.  Usually, informational messages from marketing are required for regulatory purposes or other reasons.  These messages are not counted as a contact and they are not suppressed because of contact management rules either.  The customer or prospect must receive this information because it is important or required.  It is not promotional in nature.   Really, these informational messages should be rare from marketing. 

Subscriptions are another special case.  Opt-in subscriptions are not counted against the total number of contacts because the prospect or customer has chosen to receive those messages.  Subscriptions are also semi-promotional and informational in nature.  The customer or prospect wants to receive these messages and if they did not, the individual can unsubscribe from them.  If you enforced and counted these contacts against your contact management rules, then the subscribers would not receive their subscriptions and marketing could not reach the subscribers - your most engaged individuals - to make them offers.  So, subscriptions are a special case.

Responses to customers and prospects asking for more information are another exception.  If the customer or prospect asks to have a white paper emailed to them, these emails should not count against the individuals' totals or be suppressed because the customer or prospect received too many emails.  I would also argue that confirmation messages, usually emails, and thank yous are not counted as well. 

What you want to regulate and control with contact management rules are the promotional and unsolicited marketing messages to your customers and prospects. 

Another Exception - Communication plans
There is another unique exception that requires some special handling and some variation to your contact management rules.  In some cases, you will want to run a customer through a series of messages to completion without interruption.  This could be a series of welcome emails, a renewal series, or multiple invites to an upcoming seminar via mail and email.  During this time, you want the customer or prospect's undivided attention.  You do not want other random messages to appear.  The contact management rules would only apply at the beginning of the multi-touch communication plan, but no contact management suppression rules would be applied after the first contact in the series.  Also, the records would be locked for a longer period of time then your normal contact management rules - weeks or months even.

This lock period can be managed by setting a lock date for each individual in the campaign.  Standard exclusion rules applied to each campaign could then suppress these locked individuals. This will prevent the individual from being promoted by other campaigns until after the specified lock date.  This lock date could also be used to reserve control groups that are held back from all marketing promotions for baseline comparisons of marketing lift.  What is marketing lift you ask?  Marketing lift is the amount of additional revenue or responses that marketing promotions to individuals generate compared to the control group that did not receive any marketing promotions.

Technology
Multichannel Campaign Management and eMarketing systems, like Aprimo, provide capabilities to manage opt-outs and to manage contact management rules.  In fact, these applications make it easy to manage your opt-outs, contact management rules, and contact strategy.  The components of the system are simple.  A contact history table or communication log to track which customer or prospect received which marketing message or offer via which channel and when.  Also, the ability to apply predefined filters or queries for each contact management rule to suppress records that have already been contacted more than the allotted time.  A lock table can also be created and written to in order to use in queries to enforce promotion blackout periods for specific individuals.  Multichannel Campaign Management solution has these components out of the box, all you need to provide are the contact management rules.


Think about it
So, I have not provided you with any silver bullets regarding implementing a contact management strategy.  However, there are some guidelines and practices to consider.  The only limitation to putting a contact management strategy in place is the internal discipline and processes of marketing.  Technology, like Aprimo, simply makes it easier to execute and manage.

During a recession you not only have to compete against your regular competitors, you must also fight the most dreaded enemy of all—no decision! During tough economic times the only thing you can count on is that you’re going to have to work twice as hard to close the same amount of business as before. Therefore, you must ramp up your campaign management efforts accordingly.

RFM and data mining help you find a subset of your customers that are most likely to react/respond to your marketing campaigns (personalized emails/microsites, direct mails, call center, etc.).  By targeting ONLY those likely to respond, you achieve about the same response/sales at a fraction of the cost.


Aprimo's Multichannel Campaign Management and Data Miner solutions provide the tools you need to survive and even flourish in the current economy.  No data miners on staff? Simple RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) can help you increase response rates and overall campaign performance.  The notion is those that bought most recently, purchase more frequently, and have spent the most, are your best prospects for future marketing campaigns.

If you're a B2B marketer, Aprimo Lead Manager (LM) can automate the nuturing and scoring of your prospects until they qualify for "Lead" status.  At that point, LM can automatically assign and route the leads to the appropriate sales person.  With Aprimo, no leads escape your sales funnel.  More to come on all of these topics soon!
 

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there in marketing land, the real world from my technology vendor land, about how to get the best return from your Multichannel Campaign Management (MCM) system.  Just to be clear, this MCM super category includes list selection, eMarketing,  email marketing, and lead management functionality.

Insanity
They say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.  This is the same with MCM.  If you market the same way after implementing MCM as you did before implementing it, you are not going to get significantly improved results just because you have a system now.

Your marketing has to change to take advantage of the strengths of the MCM system.  For example, a marketing department that performs a lot of small ad hoc or one off campaigns and then continues to perform a lot of ad hoc and one off campaigns after the implementation will not enjoy any significant efficiency gains from MCM.  The marketing department  will just be doing the same marketing in a new system.  Sure, the marketing department will be more organized and eventually gain some productivity improvements, but not the double digit percentage improvement that was projected in the business case.


How can you get more value from your MCM implementation?

1. Automate.  Start thinking about what marketing programs can run unattended or automated.   MCM is your never tiring, unrelenting, marketing cyborg that will keep chugging until the chip is ripped from its server.   Leverage this capability as much as possible.  Good candidates for automation include - New Customer programs, eShopping Cart abandonment programs, automated information request, eFulfillment of white papers and newsletters, eSurvey marketing programs, lapsed customer programs, lead nurturing or research, alerts, renewals, new product notices, etc. 

2. Communicate.  Stop thinking about marketing in increments of a single email or touch point and automate the entire communication plan across all marketing channels.  The overhead of lots of one off emails or mailing pieces makes these small campaigns inefficient.  Also, your marketing can improve if you change from singleton efforts to having an ongoing conversation with your customers.  This multi-touch communication process through repetition makes your target customers gradually more aware of your company and more comfortable with your marketing.  They retain your message better, and it gives them more opportunities to respond.  This all adds up to improved response at lower cost.  Many MCM systems are designed to run these types of multi-touch programs.

3.  Consolidate and Integrate.  In with the new and out with the old.  If you want immediate efficiency gains for your marketing team, think of the many diverse systems with which your team interacts daily or weekly that can be eliminated and replaced with one marketing platform (cough, like Aprimo).  This is simple math, each redundant system eliminated also eliminates the costs of supporting the systems - licensing, support and maintenance, and administration costs. 

Also, look at systems that your marketing team must update that often require manual effort or double entry.  These systems are great candidates for integration.  Think of the time that could be saved by eliminating the double entry of invoices, the manual uploading of leads in the SFA system, the manual loading of lists into a campaign from other internal marketing data sources and/or the manual uploading of offers into your customer service system.  With a few targeted integration projects, you can make your team more efficient.  MCM systems, those based on a marketing platform, can become your integrated marketing information hub.  Hah!  You can't do that in a spreadsheet.

4. Personalize-ate.  Okay, I could not think of another word ending in ate.  MCM systems provide marketing greater access to your data and it is designed to deliver more personalized content.  I am not talking about just being able to slap a first or last name in the email text or put in a different picture in an email based on the customer's demographic.  That personalization is very cool and powerful.  The personalization that I am talking about is more about getting personal with your customers. 

MCM offers you greater access to your customer data, especially transaction data like purchases or web visits.  Use it to answer questions about your customers.  What products or product categories does your customer purchase most often?  What did they purchase last year during the Christmas season? When do they purchase?  Did they stop purchasing?  What do they view on your web site most often?  Did they move or change titles recently?  Answer these questions and others to better target your customers with the right message and offers.  Also, build models and scores using tools like SPSS/IBM Modeler to mine for hard to find patterns in your data.  Access this wealth of customer behavior with your MCM system to deliver more personal and relevant messages to your customers.


Don't Procrastinate.  These headings are getting a little silly.  Good news.  This is the last one.  Start planning now for how your future multichannel campaign management system will allow you to do more and make more.  Or, if you already have an MCM system, think of ways to further leverage its capabilities to your company's benefit.  There are so many opportunities to gain value from an MCM system, now just do it.

Email marketing has great ROI when combined with a thoughtful "transactional email" strategy.  But, its like taking aspirin -- just because two makes you feel better, doesn't mean you should take four, five or six over a short period of time.  It's not necessary, and can even lead to more problems down the road.  Overdoing email can cause you problems as well.  The most common problem is email fatigue from your customers standpoint.

Let me give you an example...

I am a customer of a well known vitamin retailer.  I shop online and also do brick-and-mortar.  About four months ago, I noticed I was getting a lot of email from them.  So much in fact, that I stopped reading them.  This happened to coincide with my being asked to develop a webinar about Aprimo's Contact Optimization module (a part of Aprimo's Multichannel Campaign Management solution).  I decided to "go personal" and try to get each webinar attendee to really see for themselves how non-optimal contact strategies can hurt a company's marketing efforts.  I went into my personal Outlook and sorted my emails based on "From".  I then quickly looked to see how frequently I was getting emails from my vitamin company.  What I found was surprising.  Over a 20 day period, I had gotten 11 emails -- about 1 every other day.  And on top of that, the offers were not self-reinforcing.  The offers were all over the place and confusing.  As I continued to build out the webinar content, I decided to see who else was spamming me.  Surprisingly, a well know CRM publication had sent me 14 emails in 14 days -- I even got three emails in a 30 minute time period!  My audience laughed-out-loud when they saw this slide -- many mentioned they could relate.  Humor aside -- this kind of email blasting hurts everyone -- from companies that do indiscriminate blasts to those that don't.

What's needed is the development and utilization of an optimized contact strategy across the enterprise.  Aprimo Contact Optimization allows marketers to develop comprehensive contact strategies that are easy to maintain and manage.  There are a couple of high level approaches to contact optimization -- rules-based, and statistics-based (more on the details of these in another forthcoming post).  Aprimo uses a rules based approach that allows marketers to easily enforce global (cross-campaign and channel) suppressions, contact fatigue rules (e.g., no more than two contacts over a 14 day period), offer prioritization, channel capacity constraints and more. 

Let's look at a real-life example.  One of our customers (a large online retailer) applies different contact frequency rules to different customer segments.  They restrict the number of communications as follows: Prospects get one per month; Active Customers can get one per week; and Lapsed Customers can get two per month.  After implementing this type of throttling mechanism, our online retailer found significant improvements in open rates.

Tune in for more details on Contact Optimization and how it can help you build better customer relationships in my next post.

That question popped into my head today, as I read over online media stats about the number of individuals with access to the web, Facebook users, Linkedin accounts, YouTube visitors, and other data points on social and community networks.  I've worked in advertising so I started to think about the similarities (as well as differences) between the seemingly ubiquitous online media channel and one of its venerable well-known mass media counterparts like TV.  I wondered what the online "reach" equivalent would be to TV's Gross Rating Points and Total Rating Points (GRPs and TRPs, respectively), and in particular, how the online metric could be calculated with an increasingly fragmented audience with dimensional behaviors that include commerical email message forwarding, member site comments and/or content creation, viewing, sharing, etc.  

To succeed today, marketers must master the new "mass media" channel.  Why and how?

To the first question of why:  It is a question worth answering -- or trying to answer because companies are increasingly focused on it and ramping up their online spend.  That means 1:1 Marketers, like me, need new ways to break through the online clutter to get noticed and engaged with individuals to attain our goals.  

As to how: We need marketing automation solutions that support a more holistic multi-channel campaign management approach that includes additional online communication vehicles and tactics, some of which support 1:1 interactions and some that do not [directly, that is].   Here's my wish list for a multi-channel campaign management solution that gives me more end-to-end functionality, with the ability to better harness the power and value of the online channel.  This is just a start and not all-inclusive: (Of note, it will never be all inclusive, because the market continues to evolve, and so must my tools!)

• Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
• Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
• New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
• Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools  that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management. 

With applications that enable and empower marketers to use a mix of 1:1 communications and online tactics marketers can execute and measure campaigns improve customer loyalty, increase your brand awareness, and accelerate time to inquiry or brand preference (e.g., visits to your web site, content downloads, agree to live chat, etc).  So...no, the internet is not truly a "mass media" channel, but it is the channel-of-choice so marketers need to expand their toolbox to include more than the traditional 1:1 tools.  Probably should think about an expandable toolbox...

As a child, I loved those wonderful childhood dot-to-dot books with pictures of puppies and other cute animals that kept me wondering what I'd end up with when I connected all the dots with my crayons?  Oh the anticipation...and the delight...when I guessed the animal before finishing the dots!  I'd finish and move onto painting it with watercolors!  But, alas, what happens when the dots are not correct, and do not connect properly?  I'll tell you -- aside from childhood disappointment, the watercolors leak out of the puppy image, as the gap in crayon that is supposed to contain it isn't there!  I've gotten over that.  It's a skill that plays well in B2B marketing...(you think it's stretch, but read on)
 
There's a lot of leaky sales pipelines that needs to be plugged!!  That is, their "dots" need to connected!  Puppy pictures are one thing, but missed revenue from lost leads is quite another!

I, like many Marketers, use lead management automation (LMA) platforms to nurture and qualify leads, which includes the use of demand generation and interactive marketing campaigns with "built in" lead scoring routines.  Marketers need to connect these "dots!"  Many still don't!  I know that there are many sources of "missed dot connections," but two stand out in my mind:

1) Multichannel Campaign Management solutions + SFA tools = LMA.  This seems to the "norm," as it takes advantage of the inherent functional strengths of each.  Too many firms underestimate or simply struggle with how best to integrate them to achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Data- or application-level integration?  It takes time and careful planning to define and develop a solution that meets the needs of the user and stakeholder communities while minimizing compromises that could eventually lead to leaks.

2) Lead Scoring.  There are still many B2B marketing organizations that focus heavily on demand generation and very little time on lead nurturing or scoring.  They still use blast email tactics, and hope they have a few nibbles (i.e., responses) for follow-up.  Problem here is that a lead score or historical information (e.g., past promotions, responses, and behaviors) is not factored into a current campaign.  So... it may not be picked up for a new campaign, or simply gets lost in the audience and does not advance because of misaligned messaging or offers.  Leaky lead qualification processes.

Is your LMA complete, like mine?  Or, are your lead nurturing picture missing some "dot" connections?  What can you do to fix it?

Here we go - my first blog post.  I hope you enjoy reading my musings on marketing automation software.  And yes, I'm naturally a little nervous about freely sharing my thoughts and ideas, but hey, I'm excited to learn from your feedback and dialogue, so don't be shy.

For those who don't know me or my company, I co-founded Aprimo, Inc. with Rob McLaughlin in 1998.  Time flies when you're having fun!  Despite all the nay-sayers chirping "are you out of your mind -- marketing can't be automated, doesn't want to be automated ... marketing is an art, not a science ... don't waste my time," we followed our intuition and passion to build a company to fundamentally transform the way companies would manage marketing in the 21st century.  Looking back, our decision to start Aprimo has been an immensely exciting and fulfilling professional journey that I wouldn't trade for anything.   
 

Since this is the point of origin for my blog, it probably makes sense to start with sharing my vision for Aprimo.  Aprimo's vision is to provide innovative software solutions for companies to automate their marketing value chain; accelerating their marketing productivity and optimizing their marketing return on investment.  It's simple, yet comprehensive.  It's unique, yet relevant.  It's revolutionary, yet overdue.  It's bold, yet achievable.  Our vision and execution over the past decade has created many new categories of marketing automation software - such as Marketing Resource Management and Enterprise Marketing Management, and yet our vision remains an integrated super set of all these sub-categories.  We are still growing into our shoes.  Aprimo's mission is to build a world-class marketing software company whose products become the defacto-standard application platform used by every marketing professional to 'manage the business of marketing.'   
 

Fast forward to today.  Aprimo has hundreds of customers with over 100,000 marketing professionals using our applications in more than 40 countries world-wide.  Did someone say this type of solution was overdue?  We're having a blast teaming with our customers to solve some of their most pressing marketing challenges - encompassing interactive marketing, multi-channel campaign management, lead management, production workflow, marketing planning and financial management.  

I look forward to sharing these experiences with you in my future blogs.