Multichannel Marketing

Customers have "rights!" Marketers optimize them!

Monday, December 7, 2009 by Caryn Gray

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!

Attention CEOs and CMOs, now is the time to invest in your marketing department!

Monday, November 2, 2009 by Gregory Hennessy

This blog may sound like a blatant pitch for investing in enterprise marketing management software, a category that encompasses both multichannel marketing and marketing resource management software. I cannot pretend that this is a completely "fair and balanced" view given my employer (Aprimo). However, the concept for this blog came from my marketing clients and prospective clients. It is not an artificial idea. It was organically grown.  Read it and see if it resonates with you.

The New Economy gives way to the NO Economy
Remember the New Economy. It promised that globalization and the rapid movement of ideas, technology, resources, manufacturing, and financing through the power of the Internet was going to fundamentally change the way we live, do business, and market. It was going to improve everyone's lives.

Well, the new economy has been foreclosed on, though its structure is still there. The New Economy is empty, has growing weeds, contains some broken windows, and needs some attention. What we are left with now is a NEW economy that actually resembles the old economy of the frugal and considerate consumer.  I will call this the New Old (NO) Economy. The NO Economy is not built on instant financing with no money down, creative investment vehicles, outsourcing everything, and ponzi schemes. It is an economy based on a frugal, responsible, and value conscious consumer - the NO Consumer.

Marketing in the NO Economy to the NO Consumer
This NO Economy and NO Consumer has changed how company's market as well. The days of if you build it, the customers will come are gone. Or, if you offer it, the customers will respond. Even in this recovering economy, the NO Consumers are more skeptical and less impulsive. You can see this consumer behavior effecting most every industry - automobiles, hotels, gaming, software, airlines, media, manufacturing, etc.  Economists are seeing this as a fundamental change in the consumer. This consumer behavior makes it much more difficult to get your prospects and customers to respond to your offers, no matter what you spend in marketing. In addition, in order to deliver more value to acquire consumers, companies are compressing prices or delivering more for the same price. This is putting pressure on margins and in turn reducing marketing budgets.  The marketing department is under siege both internally (budgets slashed) and externally (customers not responding).

It is time to invest in your marketing department
In periods of growth, when consumers were spending as fast as they could refinance their property, your marketing could be as targeted as a shotgun blast and as inefficient as a giant SUV. It really didn't matter what marketing did, because the consumer was unstoppable.

It is time to invest in your marketing department to change with these leaner times and equip it to better manage this consumer behavior.  Investing in marketing does not mean giving marketing more money to hire more coordinators to send out more marketing messages, more emails, spend more on advertising. etc. Investing in marketing means putting in the marketing systems, technology, and process improvements that will create a more efficient marketing department.  A good place to start would be an Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) system. This investment could be in a complete or even a partial EMM system. Small incremental improvement with a partial system is better than standing still and doing nothing.

An EMM system can help your marketing department produce targeted messages more quickly with fewer review cycles. It can allow marketing to control and track marketing costs for those messages and deliver them to the right customer in the most cost efficient manner (personalized email, mail, web microsite, point of sale, etc.).  EMM systems combine marketing planning, financial and production management along with campaign, offer, and emarketing management all in one platform. EMM allows you to reduce costs to improve your bottom line while also improving your top line revenue generation with more effective targeting and automated, personalized communication. An EMM system will allow your marketing to be focused, more efficient, and more persistent to pry the NO Consumer out of his or her anti-spending cocoon.

Why now?
Well before your marketing department was too busy generating revenue to implement a new marketing system. Why not use this downturn in the economy to retool your marketing department. This will allow your organization to survive in this bad NO Economy. Then later, when the economy steams back, which economies always do, your company will be ready to take full advantage of the opportunities the next new economy will bring.

Aprimo to Sponsor DMA09 in San Diego

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by Kati Dafoe

Okay, so we won't have a resort-style pool at our booth. But you get the idea.

Aprimo's booth will be an oasis in the crowded exhibit hall at DMA09, October 18-20, 2009, at the San Diego Convention Center. We'll be offering a temporary escape from the conference to a virtual resort atmosphere complete with free water, archery and canoeing with Nintendo's Wii Sports Resort game and a gift for stopping by.

As the Direct Marketing Association's premiere annual conference and exhibition, the event is first class in keynote speakers, including Martha Stewart; track session offerings, ranging from retention and loyalty to leveraging new media; and exhibiting companies, more than 300 of them!

Aprimo is a bronze sponsor of the event, and at our booth we will highlight our multichannel marketing and campaign management software solutions.

Want to see our industry-leading software first-hand? Come by for a group demo, every hour on the hour, or a more tailored individual demo. Let us know where your marketing team's pain points are, and we'll show you how Aprimo can help.

Impressed by the demo and don't want to leave? Challenge a colleague (or one of us!) to a wakeboarding competition or game of table tennis on the Wii. We'll be ready for you.

Are you attending the DMA09 this month? Sign in with a comment to let me know, and I may have a special gift waiting for you at the booth, while supplies last, of course.

When vegetable gardening intersects marketing

Friday, September 25, 2009 by Caryn Gray

I was recently harvesting vegetables from my backyard garden and got to thinking about how my physical plant nurturing is a little like lead management. With the right effort expended, I could produce both quality and quantity of the "things" that I desired. In the case of my garden, I want a lot of high quality, fresh vegetables to eat and share with my family and neighbors. For marketing, I want to drive as many qualified leads as I can for Sales. Of course, I want to do all of this efficiently -- i.e., keep costs low and production high!

I am certainly wise enough to know that a gardener's tools are not going to work well in lead management! Kidding aside, we can confidently say that both need tools, and importantly, they each need the right tool for the right purpose. Just as a gardener would not use a bulb dibber to weed, a B2B marketer would not (or would he/she?) use a SFA (sales force automation) application to execute continuously running interactive lead nurturing and scoring campaigns, which require defined business rules to run against dimensional data (i.e., historical depth within and across individual records) sourced from both off- and online behaviors. Crazy, isn't it?

I know. I know. But you'd be surprised to know how many B2B firms first try to plan, execute, and measure centralized or corporate marketing campaigns from their SFA system, only to find -- quickly, I might add, that they cannot easily (if at all) create,, manage, and measure the effectiveness of the marketing content they need (e.g., dynamic, highly personalized email messages, pre-populated inbound response forms, and microsites). And, although I've encountered many companies trying this approach, I have not seen the "reverse." In other words, I haven't seen many trying to use a multichannel marketing and lead management solution to support their sales process.

Instead, what I have seen and continue to see is companies that want marketing campaign and lead management solutions to integrate with their SFA tool of choice. The integration combines the functional strengths of each to make a whole marketing and sales solution that is greater than the sum of its parts! (Is that anything like hybrid vegetables where the best traits of each are combined to make a "whole" that is better? I'll have to ask my sister, the Biology and Chem teacher who worked summers at a national seed company who did some of that plant mingling...)

Funny thing is... firms have been trying to do everything with their SFA applications for years, and there's probably many who do it and are content with their results [that which they can measure]. Even so, for every one of them, there is a factor of X more that submit RFIs and RFPs each year to marketing campaign and lead management companies looking for solutions that "easily integrate" to other applications, namely SFA systems.

Well, it's been fun thinking and talking about the similarities between my hobby and my work. Is it any wonder why I love both, as the yield can be great -- quality and quantity -- when approached with the right tools for the right purpose! Must go pick some tomatoes...

My life as a Marketing 'Cover Girl'....

Thursday, September 24, 2009 by Barbara Kovacs

...yes it's true. 'Cover Girl' not as in a model, but as one who is constantly running for cover! I work for Aprimo, an online marketing powerhouse, as the Manager of Lead Generation. I can tell you that more times then not, we have been bombarded through our Live Chat. Someone comes on our Web site, probably through the assistance of our Search Engine Marketing tools and by using my web analytics tools, I can see them. I can then initiate a conversation or wait for them to reach out to me.

One day, this person initiates a live chat acting as the CEO of one of our competitors, (like we wouldn't know his name) and then proceeds to ask for a cheeseburger. This technology is great, but it does release some crazies! I wish our Marketing Software could detect the fool hearty as they hit our site so we can dispense them quickly. Now, wouldn't that be cool?

The ability to have something instantaneous, like an answer, is something our Interactive Marketing is trying to foster. I think we need to create a whole new lead nurturing cycle for these 'Chats'. Yes, that is what I will work on today.  Developing my leads through multi-directional campaigns using Multichannel Marketing. Since my Interactive Marketing software tells me where my chat is coming from, all I would need from that point is their name because email configurations are usually quite easy to find.  Then, I could actually create a campaign workflow around these inbound marketing opportunities and really focus on lead nurturing and account development.

Believe you me, it sounds a lot more complicated then it is. Marketing Automation, you gotta love it.   How do you handle those people who hit your site to chat? Or do you even chat?

Multichannel Marketing & Kanye?

Wednesday, September 23, 2009 by Barbara Kovacs

So, nice move Kanye. Take the only moment a young kid, Taylor Swift, has to be truly thankful, make a huge assumption that Beyonce' was overlooked for an award at the MTV Awards and make yourself a PR nightmare. My dad has always said, "Go Big or Go Home." Well, Kanye, you went big, and you went Splat!

I have got to tell you though, this is how I think marketers treat us, as consumers on the Internet. They think they have this whole 'Internet Marketing thing' figured out. They can make wide sweeping, huge behavior assumptions about us based on some random response history we have provided and TADA, we get hit with tons of online marketing and social media marketing.

The good news is, there are companies that are great at predictive behavior modeling through multichannel marketing. I love that software companies can help marketers quickly identify the keywords their market is using and then apply Pay Per Click (PPC) Management and lead scoring to determine those in market.

No need to make assumptions any more, huh? Geez, Kanye...just think...if you had to do things over again, would you do them differently?

Nothing But Net (& Marketing)

Wednesday, September 23, 2009 by Caryn Gray

For me, the mark of fall transcends cooler weather and shorter days to include a return to school for my kids and the switch to other sports, including travel basketball for my older son. This year I did the unthinkable (at least in my book). I organized a new travel team and secured a place for it in a local league. This was no small task, and I had many parents commenting on my ability to do it without dropping any one of the proverbial balls in the air. (Is that a pun? I'd like to think so.) I owe my ability to "get in the weeds" while attending to the "big picture" to both my career and my hobby, database marketing (i.e., 1:1 or CRM) and drawing, respectively.

If you've ever been responsible for managing a multichannel marketing campaign then you know, first hand, the need to focus on the littlest of details, or they, independently or in combination, could be your campaign's un-doing. Today, Marketers use an array of marketing automation platforms that include specific tools for specific needs like campaign management for data query and selection or campaign workflow to help sequence, assign and manage tasks and resources, or reporting and analysis to measure campaign performance. So...unlike those days when I wrote detailed specs for programmers, analysts, printers, and online creatives, today's marketers can use software to "sweat the details."

In addition, today's marketers have greater control over campaign measurement, which goes beyond simply having access to campaign data via reporting tools. Today's marketer can actually set the rules for what is and what is not a campaign response -- i.e., response attribution. This is a huge plus for us, as we no longer have to rely on hard-coded promotion code capture with an inferred response code rule as a back-up. Marketers use campaign management software to set the parameters "in their data" to define and track responses. What's great about it is we can easily isolate intended behavior from those that are more incidental or ancillary, which leads to actionable insights. Nothin' but net, baby!

Back to basketball... I may have the natural tendency or skill to successfully manage all the "moving parts" for a boys travel basketball team like I used to do for marketing campaigns, but not everyone can blend tactical and strategic tasks well. But more importantly, no one can do it efficiently without the right tools. (Even me!) I am certain that I could have been faster, better, and more productive if I had the marketing automation solutions that make our lives so much easier today. And, this means less tactical work and more strategic contributions for everyone! I LOVE that!

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