Campaign Management and Optimization

A well-orchestrated marketing campaign requires a coordinated and synchronized process across multiple channels, including both inbound and outbound. The primary components of a campaign management and optimization solution include:

• Campaign management: With the number of customers and level of sophistication required for successful campaigns, a campaign management system must be capable of automating the campaign process, coordinating offers across multiple channels, and reporting results.
• Campaign optimization: Issues such as competing business goals across divisions, managing multiple marketing programs against business constraints, controlling budgets, and managing customer contact policies can all be resolved with campaign optimization.
• Real-time decision management: Being able to make analytically driven decisions about what offers to make (and not make) during real-time customer interactions is critical to ensure a positive customer experience.

Marketing Performance Management

To instill accountability and continuous improvement in marketing processes and results, the following components are required:

• Marketing analytics: To uncover insight into marketing process efficiencies and improvement opportunities
• Scorecards and reporting: Provides complete visibility of all marketing activities and processes through key performance indicators and metrics.
• Budgeting: Optimize the budget across marketing by continuously monitoring the cost of campaigns and other marketing investments
• Planning: Plan sophisticated multichannel campaigns that engage customers while aligning with your marketing strategy.

The most advanced generation of marketing automation technology seamlessly combines the capabilities in the preceding list to produce a centralized, fully integrated MCCM environment for total marketing performance. Forrester Research shows how there’s an improved integration between inbound and outbound execution, which helps realign MCCM to meet the need for customer dialogue today (see Figure 1).

[Download PDF to see Figure 1]

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The Critical Enabler: A Centralized ‘Marketing Brain’

At the heart of this solution is a “central marketing brain,” or decision engine that when fueled with unique customer insight, enables you to manage customer dialogues during actual customer interactions. These interactions can be managed as part of both inbound and outbound communications, across all customer touch points, and at any time based on customer demand.

For example, if a customer visits your company’s website at 2 a.m., the software can analyze his Web behavior in real time and determine that he has a particular need. It will then access all current data about this customer in your data warehouse, feed it into an analytical model about this customer, and calculate the offer that will achieve the best outcome for the customer and your company – all in seconds. This same approach to optimizing live customer interactions based on real-time data and analytics can apply to any channel, such as call center interactions.

Creating this unique customer insight requires a single source of trusted data that unifies everything your business knows about each customer across all channels, as well as powerful analytics that can turn this data into insight. This combination gives you an operational, multichannel view of each customer to drive personalized interactions and optimize offers in real time.

The Current State of Automated, Multichannel Campaign Management

Even with an MCCM solution in place, managing multiple marketing campaigns across channels isn’t easy. This is due in part to the fact that most marketing organizations lack an enterprisewide, multichannel communication strategy. Deciding which campaigns are sent to which customers over which channels can be a very volatile issue. Having effective customer dialogue while staying within budget, enforcing contact policies, and maximizing ROI is very challenging. But to do so when there are multiple products offered over multiple channels in hundreds of campaigns to millions of customers is a task that far exceeds the scope of human intuition and experience.

Marketers should look for campaign management tools that integrate customer insight, support multiple channels and two-way customer conversations, and provide the ability to optimize the mix of campaigns to effectively execute a sophisticated multichannel marketing strategy. Yet many MCCM solutions are unable to keep up with the host of new digital, inbound and emerging channels through which companies need to engage consumers. Additional challenges include:

• Scaling for size and performance: With extremely large customer databases (exceeding 100 million records in some cases), the speed and performance of the MCCM solution becomes very important to productivity and ultimately marketing ROI.
• Customer analytics: Whether for new customer acquisition, customer retention, or customer growth, reliable predictive models supported by quality customer data are critical elements of a successful marketing campaign.
• Integration of inbound and outbound channels: To provide customers with a consistent and satisfying experience, it is necessary that inbound and outbound communications be coordinated and complementary.
• Integration of social channels: Customers are communicating over all kinds of new social media channels. It is becoming increasingly important to leverage these channels in support of your campaigns.

The good news is that leading software vendors now offer enterprise-class MCCM solutions that address these challenges. These scalable solutions integrate and automate core MCCM activities, support detailed measurement and sophisticated analytics, and reduce the cost and complexity of managing technology by offering a platform-based solution.

The Future of MCCM: Managing Conversations Across Social Media

Looking ahead, MCCM solutions enabling optimized, analytically driven customer interactions across channels will be the foundation for every successful business’s marketing operations. It is expected that interactive marketing will continue to become more important and consume more of the marketing budget. This increased investment is in response to expectations that customer empowerment and influence through social media channels will grow significantly. For example, over the next few years, social channel communications by consumers, including blogs, opinions, Twitter messages, and LinkedIn and Facebook networking, will continue to grow unabated. At the same time, expect increases in customer-initiated contact, which will force companies to react in real time based on customer insight – and shift away from “push” marketing even further (for example, by providing mechanisms for customers to self-educate at will through different channels).

In response, SAS expects that MCCM solutions will evolve in ways that will allow you to exploit the growth of social networking and customer influence as a valuable source of new customer and trend insight. Technologies are already available that harness the power of social networks in new and powerful ways – for example, to capture net-new consumer insight and understand how consumers are talking about your products and company, and influencing others online. In addition, marketers can identify social communities based on relationships between customers, measure and segment customers based on their social influence, and target customers based on changes within their social communities.

Other tools enable you to integrate, analyze and act on intelligence gleaned from online conversations occurring across professional and consumer-generated social media sites. For example, you can identify and respond to shifts in the marketplace by analyzing conversation data; identify advocates of, and threats to, corporate reputation and brand; and quantify interaction among traditional media/campaigns and social media activity. Armed with this insight, you can establish a framework for a social CRM strategy.

In the near future, these kinds of tools will be central to the MCCM functionality discussed previously in this paper. The insights gained through social media analysis will be fed into the central marketing brain and used to turn increased customer empowerment and social media influence into ways to use customer insight to provide richer customer experiences and perceived value to customers.

The SAS Approach to Automating Multichannel Campaign Management

As the prior discussion suggests, you can’t orchestrate multichannel communications and live interactions without the right technology foundation. SAS is the only company that can provide an integrated solution that addresses all aspects of marketing automation and optimization in real time, as summarized by Forrester Research in Figure 1. Our customer intelligence solutions – delivered through the SAS® Customer Intelligence suite – offer the most advanced generation of marketing automation technology that seamlessly combines these capabilities to produce a centralized, fully integrated environment for total marketing performance.

SAS Customer Intelligence solutions enable you to achieve this vision by:

• Deepening customer insight. SAS enables you to manage customer data and understand the behavior patterns of your best and worst customers. By having insight into your customers’ attitudes, behavior, profitability and risk, you can make smarter decisions for your marketing organization.
• Choreographing customer interactions via marketing automation. A well-orchestrated marketing campaign requires coordination and synchronization across multiple channels. SAS provides the ability to choreograph a comprehensive, multichannel marketing communication strategy that optimizes every resource to effectively achieve your goals and maximize your ROI.
• Continuously improving marketing performance. SAS provides the scorecards, reporting and analytical capabilities needed to instill accountability and have complete visibility across your marketing process and the resulting performance so you can make midcourse corrections when you hit a bump in the road.

The integration built into the SAS Customer Intelligence suite enhances the capabilities of the various applications so you realize greater value from them. For example, SAS Real-Time Decision Manager and SAS Marketing Automation share the same design and administration clients, reducing the costs associated with training and maintaining multiple clients. They also share a common reporting model that captures results of customer interactions based on a common contact and response history. The history can be fed back into the central marketing brain to direct the next-best actions across multiple channels and campaigns in a unified manner, whether inbound or outbound.

SAS solutions also reflect the fact that in the new normal, a well-planned offer delivered too late is just as bad as a poorly targeted offer delivered in real time. That’s why, in addition to outbound channels like direct mail and catalogs, SAS solutions help companies to coordinate their inbound, outbound and event- and behavior-based communications. They do this by monitoring and tracking customer behavior and other events, and capitalizing on them appropriately to benefit both the customer and your business.

The Value of a Framework-Based MCCM Solution Powered by Marketing Automation

Capitalizing on these kinds of changes and trends will require ever-more sophisticated MCCM solutions that are flexible, adaptive and able to cost-effectively integrate with new data sources (such as new social data sources). Equally important, these solutions must be extendable, supporting add-on applications that will meet new needs over time. Point solutions will curtail what you can do in the future because customer data gets scattered across them, and they can’t support integrated, coordinated inbound and outbound communications. The only way to achieve this kind of flexibility, scalability and extendibility is to deploy an open, enterprise-grade, framework-based MCCM solution that supports and orchestrates both inbound and outbound communications.