March 2009

Campaign Management tools:
Do you have everything needed to make
the investment worthwhile? Tim Fewster

If you’re like me, you’ve found yourself in a meeting room with a slick sales guy giving a demonstration on the latest and greatest Campaign Management tool. Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool in your marketing department to help manage a never-ending schedule of direct marketing campaigns? Just think of everything you could accomplish! Having your customer/prospect list at your fingertips to identify opportunities and determine the number of records that you can contact… Being able to design and manage the development of your programs through collaboration with your internal team and external suppliers… Executing your programs without having to talk to that IT guy down the hall and the results of all your efforts would magically appear on your desktop in real time.
Is this too good to be true? Often times it is – not because these tools can’t deliver, but because there is a significant amount of work required to realize the functionality that the sales guy is showing you. In this article, I will review the key building blocks you need to have in place before you should consider investing in a campaign management tool.

The current set of industry leading campaign management tools provides excellent reporting capabilities on the back end to help you measure the results of your campaigns.

Data...data...data
I recently attended a marketing conference in the US and had the opportunity to speak with one of those “slick” sales guys at his company’s booth. During our conversation, I asked him what types of organizations got the most benefit from his campaign management solution. His answer? Organizations that had the data to take full advantage of the functionality.

The underlying data is the backbone of any campaign management tool. You must have (or be willing to develop) a data source that contains everything you need to execute your campaigns. This includes a complete set of contact information on your customers/prospects and all of the available characteristics required to target names for your campaigns. You will need to be able to identify the products/services that the customer has (both current and lapsed), detailed transaction history, channel usage and geodemographics. If possible, the system should also incorporate any additional data sources required to execute your campaigns such as do not contact lists, suppression lists, lists of managed customers and clean address information.

If you’re lucky, you already have a marketing data warehouse that provides all the required information and the campaign management tool can tie into this system. For most, a significant amount of data work will be required to source all the required information and compile the raw data together for the campaign management tool. By far, the data component of any campaign management tool deployment is the most important step, requires the most time and resources, and is the key reason behind success or failure.

Several years ago, I worked with a financial institution that deployed a campaign management tool with the objective of significantly reducing its turnaround on campaigns. Although the client had high hopes initially, it turned out that only about 50 percent of its campaigns could be run through the tool. Why? As the firm started to develop campaigns, it seemed that there was always some piece of information that was not available in the underlying data. Credit card campaigns required the current annual percentage rate on the account, which came from another system. Investment campaigns required instrument level maturity dates, and mortgage campaigns needed the current principal outstanding. Not having this information caused the financial institution to return to its manual process to run these campaigns, reducing the positive impact the system could have had.

Another client was moving down the path of developing a prospect database that would be added to the existing campaign management tool that was in place for established customers. This company’s acquisition efforts were based on targeting names from several rented lists. The goal was to simplify its campaign execution process, provide more timely campaign tracking, and understand contact history as a driver of response. This was all great, but there was one significant problem. The firm’s acquisition strategy was based on one-time list rentals. This type of arrangement did not allow it to keep the rented names on its systems. The company needed to have multiple use list rental arrangements to be able to store the rented names in its prospect database. With the additional list costs, the investment to build the prospect database did not make sense.

Campaign management tools = process?
Before you embark down the path of investing in a campaign management tool, you must establish a solid campaign execution process based on your current execution steps. The key benefit that a campaign management tool provides is the automation and streamlining of an existing process. If you have a bad process, the campaign management tool will simply make that bad process run quicker. Even worse, if you have not established a solid process based on your marketing requirements, you may select the wrong campaign tool.

If you need to develop an execution process, a good place to start is the work back schedule from your last campaign. Outline all the required inputs that you need to execute your campaign. This includes everything from the data to the offer, message and the creative. Understand all the key players in the process (including your external partners) and identify the role they play in the execution of your campaigns.

Still need the right people!
Despite what the sales guy may tell you, a campaign management tool requires internal staff to manage it. This includes technical personnel to maintain the hardware and administer the system, and data warehousing resources to manage the underlying data, which can entail maintaining periodic data updates that come from other systems within your organization.

As you go down this path, you need to understand that for most companies, the campaign management system will need to be updated/ expanded as your business evolves. The addition of new products and services as well as new sales channels may lead to changes in the underlying data that the campaign management tool relies on. These changes may require data personnel and may also impact your campaign process.

Don’t let the flashy user interface fool you either. Most advanced campaign management systems require a solid understanding of the underlying data, campaign execution processes and best practices in campaign design and measurement. Many organizations that leverage these tools have power users that perform the majority of the work in the system. These are generally the technical folks that used to execute your campaigns manually (Remember that IT guy down the hall?). Team members with a pure marketing background often use these systems as “view only” to understand the status of the campaign execution and next steps; or perhaps running a standardized campaign that has already been created in the past.

Finally, with the extensive profiling and reporting capabilities offered by most tools, users need to be willing and have the background to dive into the numbers to extract the key learning from the campaign results.

Closing the loop....measurement
The current set of industry leading campaign management tools provides excellent reporting capabilities on the back end to help you measure the results of your campaigns. Not only can you measure the response rate to your promotion, most tools allow you to enter your campaign financials to calculate key measures of campaign success, including: lift over control, offer/message testing to understand what generated the best result, cost per lead/sale, and return on investment.

You need to insure that the underlying data contains the required elements to track the behaviours that you are trying to elicit as a result of your direct marketing efforts. This can include data elements such as communication channel, source/offer/promotion codes, as well as disposition codes from your call centre — to name a few. For acquisition databases, this also needs to include an effort to match customer information back to the prospect list to identify which prospects have become customers.

Campaign volume/ complexity
At this point, I’m sure some of you are feeling very excited. You can get all of your required data together in one spot, you have a nailed down campaign process, your organization is staffed with the appropriate personnel… you’re ready to go, right? What if your campaign calendar amounts to a spring and fall acquisition campaign, both of which are through direct mail?

In this case, you likely do not need a campaign management tool. The main value that these systems provide is the automation and streamlining of the campaign execution processes. They help you get to market more quickly by reducing turnaround; provide a point of collaboration for all key stakeholders; automate your tracking and measurement procedures; and help set priorities to resolve conflicts in high volume, multi-channel environments. If you’re using a single contact channel and have only a handful of campaigns each year, you will be hard-pressed to get return on the investment that is required to deploy a campaign management solution. Before moving forward, you need to understand the cost/benefit of a campaign management tool for your particular situation.
Campaign Management tools can bring a significant amount of value to your marketing organization if you have the data, established processes, and people to reap the rewards. Just keep in mind the amount of work that is required to ensure success the next time that sales rep begins the presentation.

Tim Fewster is V.P. Database Solutions for CVM Marketing Inc., a consulting practice that focuses on the art and science of identifying which customers represent the greatest potential value to your organization and then helping to realize that potential. He can be reached at (416) 572-7680 or tim.fewster@cvmmkt.com.