A Marketing Transformation
Marketers face an unprecedented challenge to meet and exceed customers' expectations for superior relationship management while shareholders and executive management demand budget accountability and increased visibility to customer value, customer activities, and customer trends.
Customers expect to be recognized, identified, and engaged, if not rewarded with points or "special" acknowledgements at every interaction point with a company. The good news is customers expect to be "marketed;" the challenge is delivering superior relationship management, personalized product and service delivery, and relevant messaging while extracting greater value from each customer.
The recent technology explosion has caused an upheaval in marketing departments across the globe. Pervasive access to information elevates the marketing department's visibility by corporate outsiders, competitors, and customers as well as executive management, internal operations, and service departments. But while the combination of data warehouses, search engines, and advanced modeling and reporting technologies appears to provide a 360-degree customer view, marketers are faced with performing all of the marketing planning, product and program design, tactical execution, and performance analysis in time frames that have compressed from weeks and months to hours and days.
Marketers are challenged, unlike ever before, with urgent demands to produce and serve offers and messages through an ever-expanding network of channels, partners, and media while maintaining a high-value, relevant, measurable, customer-centric dialogue.
Demands for urgency, productivity, personalization, and accountability require marketers to leverage new marketing technologies while assessing the current marketing department's functional design and individual marketer's roles.
Marketing Urgency, Start at the Speed of 'E'
There is no more starting gun to announce the start of the "holiday" season or the "upgrade your computer" season as marketing is now "always on." Thank QVC, HSN, eBay, Amazon.com, and Wal-Mart for creating the market impression that something is always on sale and there is always a deal to be had if the customer just does enough research.
Expert marketers and their agencies and constituents have evolved systems and processes that build and execute product offers and promotions to meet the instantaneous demands of fickle consumers while fending off savvy competitors. But new marketing channels do not afford extended planning cycles, nor do increasingly nimble and savvy competitors allow companies to sustain differentiating offers for extended periods of time.
But the changes aren't only time-related. While customers were quick to adapt to new marketing channels for promotion and product awareness, few companies' marketing departments were prepared for the enormous demands posed by online campaigns, let alone coordinating promotions across all channels simultaneously. Clearly, advances in technology have brought about an entirely new set of marketing hurdles.
Marketers and the companies they represent must now be prepared for instantaneous customer demands - a simple push of a button can discount an entire product line, swamp a call center, or empty a warehouse. With these kind of technology-driven changes to the marketing landscape, it's only fitting that there have been so many recent advances in marketing technology.
In just three years, marketing departments' message volumes have exploded. Figure 1 shows how for just a single channel, messages per customer have nearly doubled from 1,132 in 2000 to 2,210 in 2003. Projections have the volume nearly doubling again over the next three years.
A marketing automation software suite, such as DoubleClick's Ensemble, provides a collaborative work environment for all marketing constituents within a corporate enterprise, as well as for all external marketing vendors and partners such as advertising agencies, third-party print production houses, and call centers - the entire marketing network.
By connecting a company's entire marketing network, this type of marketing automation solution provides technology for continuous and automatic selling at every customer contact point. As a result, each customer is served a strategically targeted offer in every interaction, regardless of channel. These interactions are part of an enterprise-wide corporate plan with specific investment, revenue, and growth objectives.
A Marketing-Centric Focus
This new category of marketing technology is designed to help marketers achieve their ultimate goal of identifying, quantifying, and ranking opportunities; designing and executing campaigns; and managing and measuring responses simultaneously across all channels and interaction points in a closed-loop process.
This common marketing view is shared by all marketing team members, vendors, and constituents while marketing and enhanced customer information is accessible enterprise-wide for use in reporting, analysis, and customer-centric applications. The platform is designed specifically to reduce the burden of repeating frequent individual marketing tasks, such as "selecting best targets likely to buy "X" by providing a process flow approach (see Figure 2).
This subsection of a campaign process shows how offer and channel allocation, customer and prospect selection, response and nonresponse management, quality surveys, and reporting are all treated as individual steps in a repeatable process. Each section and subsection can be reused and shared by other members of the marketing team. Additionally, each process contains performance metrics that determine pass/fail criteria for selecting what is the best offer to match to which customer group, while selecting the appropriate channel mix for execution and follow-up.
Marketing Automation Design
These types of solutions were designed to reduce the task-level work that previously was performed across multiple specialized software systems.
Marketing departments no longer have to create specialized customer lists just for direct mail programs and separate lists for email programs. They allow you to allocate customer offers, messages, and content all based on your customer profiles and channel availability. Available offers are decided by an advanced model-based decision engine as well as by business rules.
An Offer-Centric Platform
A marketing automation solution, such as DoubleClick's Ensemble, centers on matching the right offer to the right target audience while continuously and automatically reinforcing offers with highly probable customer prospects. This multichannel process design ensures offer consistency across all customer interaction points while automating cross-sells, up-sells, and customer relationship building objectives in each customer contact. No matter how complex the customer strategy may be, the marketing workflow framework can support its seamless execution across multiple customer contact channels.
This type of solution also allows for customer profiling, offer matching, and continuous offer performance optimization by embedding advanced, model-based decisioning into its marketing process design platform. And if your marketing department is already invested in advanced modeling or reporting tools such as SAS, SPSS, Microstrategy, or Business Objects, Ensemble's open system design easily works in tandem with virtually all marketing automation systems, providing you with a competitively superior marketing arsenal.
Automating Routine Campaign Decisions: Predictive Segmentation
Predictive segmentation dramatically reduces the time required to identify best prospects, highest performing offers, optimal campaign components (i.e., creative, price, etc.). Traditional model building requires expert systems, specialty skill sets, and prolonged data preparation and experimenting, which results in a prohibitive cost per question. So many companies and marketers choose to simply ask fewer questions or rely on instinct to make program and campaign decisions. New technology reduces the cost and time burden per question while providing equivalent results. The result is the ability to test many more business hypotheses and multiple customer scenarios, and to free marketing to test more concepts and variations.
