New school marketers get it.

Companies that realize their customer relationships will be increasingly interactive in nature are now carefully moving digital interactivity toward the center of their marketing strategies, rethinking their priorities and budgets, and substantially reshaping their processes and skills. We call these companies New School Marketers.

Navigating a new world order.

Through our work with hundreds of leading companies navigating this new world order, we have found that the most successful New School Marketers are focused on coordinating their activities to engage the consumer throughout an increasingly digital customer lifecycle. Through analytics, triggers and program automation, they provide relevant, personalized messages to each consumer on the right channel at the right time.

Keeping up with constant change.

Your program may have been competitive a year ago, but is it now? Or if it’s competitive now, will it be two years from now? At Responsys, we’re focused on getting you on a faster path to sustainable marketing success, and it starts right here — with the understanding that marketing success is a status, not a stopping point or one-time achievement. It’s a continuous state that must be maintained and maximized.

Where do you stand on this journey?

Our New School Marketing Assessment provides you with a prescriptive assessment on how competent your marketing organization is in the four key areas that enable you to transform your marketing program and effective ROI.

New school marketing success requires a balance across four competencies.

In our experience, marketing success requires competency in four key areas for driving continuous improvements in marketing effectiveness and ROI: Revenue Generation, Customer Engagement, Automation & Efficiency, and Cross-Channel Coordination.

Revenue Generation

New School marketers understand the important role that interactive channels, particularly email, can play in driving revenue. You must strive for maximum revenue attribution from the email channel and deploy aggressive list growth strategies to bring in quality names and accommodate for natural churn. Second, you must achieve the optimal mix of campaign and program types for your business. The right mix will attain a balance of automated interactions, transactional messages, and segmented campaigns that results in maximum ROI.

Customer Engagement

Today, you have to market to your customer on the customer’s terms. You have to engage the customer with relevant content delivered via the customer’s preferred channels at the right time. In order to keep customers engaged and converting, marketing organizations need to deliver innovative, personalized, and highly relevant messages that map to the customer lifecycle. These communications must be part of orchestrated customer dialogues that span all customer interactions, regardless of the channel, device, or touch-point.

Automation & Efficiency

Being truly relevant requires near real-time information about individual profiles, preferences, and behaviors. It also requires near real-time action, or reaction, by marketing organizations. If you try to execute all your campaigns “by hand,” you will fail. Integrated technologies incorporating functionality like cross-channel campaign management, dynamic content personalization, event triggering, dialogue marketing, process management and data integration are all critical to help marketers automate and make their processes more efficient.

Cross-Channel Coordination

The consumer is quickly adopting new digital channels as a means of interacting with their preferred brands. You must develop nimble communication strategies that can adapt to the individual consumer’s preferences. Successful marketing organizations deliver integrated communications across email, mobile, social, and web channels based on customer behavior and segment. It’s not just about getting the right message to the right person — you now need to ensure you deliver it in the right channel.

The most successful marketing organizations work to maintain a balance across all four of these competencies. How does your organization measure up?

Take the assessment to determine your New School Marketing position.

Answer the questions below to assess your current level of readiness in each of the four competency areas. Note that the statements supporting each question represent a progressive level of capability. If you feel that your capabilities fall into a gap between two statements, please select the lower point value. This assessment is meant to help Responsys create a customized solution for your organization that will enable both parties to focus on activities that will drive greater ROI for your company.

[Download PDF to View Assessment]

Where Do You Stand?

The sum of your scores in each section will help you assess your current level of competency. Your score can range from 5 (lowest level of competency) to 25 (highest level of competency) in each of the four areas. Knowing where you stand in each area will help you identify the gaps in your current capabilities and uncover opportunities for improvement. It also helps us focus and prioritize our efforts as we develop your customized Responsys solution.

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The sum total of the four area scores yields an overall score (ranging from 20 to 100), which determines your current New School Marketing success level. We have identified five common levels of marketing success. Marketing organizations that want to increase their program sophistication, effectiveness and ROI can leverage this model to pinpoint their current status as well as identify the key areas they must enhance in order to progress to the next level.

The following describe the typical marketing organization at each level of success.

Level 1: Untargeted

Untargeted marketing organizations that fall into this level are typically campaigncentric with limited cross channel integration or technology supporting the marketing process. Campaigns are limited to email and are offer-driven. The contact strategy is comprised of mostly broadcast campaigns with little targeting or customization. The organization is siloed — by product and/or channel — and executes very tactically. As a next step, marketing organizations at this level should focus on improving their ability to leverage basic information about customers to target outbound communications across multiple channels more effectively.

Level 2: Targeted

Targeted marketing organizations at this level are focused on serving line-of-business requirements to improve campaign results. Campaign audiences are segmented based on basic rules and communications incorporate some personalized content elements. The interactive strategy is in its infancy, but they are starting to think about a holistic contact strategy. To improve their skills and move to the next level, these marketing organizations should look for ways to automate existing campaign processes and make way for new programs. Strategically, they should also work on developing their understanding of how key customer behaviors might be indicators of a customer need and channel preference.

Level 3: Programmatic

Programmatic marketing organizations at this level have a strong appreciation for the programmatic approach versus a one-off campaign approach and are actively working to increase the relevance of their communications. While these organizations are working to treat customers more holistically, marketing tactics are still primarily specific to one interactive channel. Organizations should continue to work towards a more automated and customer-focused approach by developing interactive marketing programs around key customer segments and lifecycle stages. Communication plans should include a mix of tactics from customized broadcast messages, behaviorallytriggered communications, and multi-wave dialogues. These groups should also begin to hone their understanding of the customer through customer-specific metrics.

Level 4: Integrated

Integrated marketing organizations that reach this level have a strong appreciation for the customer, solid strategic skills, and comprehensive cross-channel contact plans. These marketers leverage automation to deploy highly efficient programs. With streamlined production processes, they are able to shift resources from daily tasks to a focus on optimization and planning. While these groups are continuing to enhance capabilities across all core areas, they are primarily concerned about better — and more holistically — integrating activities across all levels of interaction with the customer.

Data is leveraged across multiple sources for campaign triggers, campaign targeting and channel preference. To progress they must expand their targeted approach across multiple channels. These groups must begin to deploy cross-channel campaigns based on user behavior and preference data. They must work to centralize all interactive marketing efforts and to progress, these groups must take a very metrics-driven approach and have outstanding communication and collaboration skills in order to effectively educate the enterprise, sell the benefits of their customer-focused vision, and work across the enterprise to execute effectively.

Level 5: New School

Few marketing organizations truly exhibit the characteristics and skills required of the integrated and customer-focused marketing organization. Those that do are best-inclass examples of New School Marketing that others should study and emulate. These organizations put the customer at the center of their contact strategy and execute extremely well across all interactive channels. They possess deep understanding of the customer, supported by sophisticated quantitative and qualitative insight. They have established a data and technology infrastructure that is comprehensive and wellintegrated. In addition, their emphasis on process automation enables them to focus their efforts on new and creative ways to engage with customers.