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Effective Campaign Management

Effective Campaign Management solutions need to provide you with enough bang to support the strategic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives of your organization. Getting a glitzy campaign module and then trying to figure out what to do with it is, frankly, what I see in most mid-market companies. If you have cleared this hurdle, then I salute you!

For the rest, let's figure out how to break that pattern!

First of all, I tend to harp on the need for companies to develop a CRM strategy before they being investing in technology. Technology is a tool that just sits there without the proper direction. Large enterprises are more inclined to develop an acute customer awareness through this sort of planning process. However, it seems to get lost in the middle market.

Most SMB companies I've seen don't have a resource solely responsible for marketing, let alone a dedicated marketing department. It seems like all the marketing majors ended up somewhere else. As a result, we see the VP of Sales taking on this role, or worse, one of their assistants.

And since it's kind of an after thought, the vision they come up with is usually simplistic, disjointed and frantic. And I doubt it matches the vision that the CEO has failed to share. This is simply because they have other major responsibilities, so things tend to get knee-jerk when it comes to marketing. I'd really like to see some of these companies hire real pros, or at least engage a consulting firm that specializes in developing marketing strategies.

In order to put together a sound effective campaign management program, you need something to base your campaigns on. My typical response is that it's going to be based on a CRM strategy built upon a sound knowledge of your customers needs. And then, you need to find out who your most profitable customers are so you know who your campaign needs to reach!

Once all of this is in place, and boy is this another series of articles all by itself, then you can begin looking at the tools you need to set up a campaign, deliver an effective campaign, and capture the responses to the campaign. Analyzing the responses can be a separate effort. But, some of the responses can be anticipated and additional message branches can be spawned depending on data collected in your customer database.

The middle market products I work with have the following basic effective campaign management features:

The ability to setup a campaign; each campaign being a separate trackable entity.
The ability to use Customer Contacts or Leads as targets for the Campaign. It should allow to have none as well since advertisements won't be that specific
The ability to assign attributes and costs so you can determine response ratios and profitability.
The ability to launch campaigns whether it's a newspaper ad or a targeted email distribution.
The ability to integrate trackable passive responses from e-mail campaigns directly into your customer database. This is the ability to put hyperlinks in an email that write who clicked what and when right back into your CRM database. Then you can...

Determine what were the most attractive parts of your campaign to different segments of recipients and....
Respond to specific recipients or segments based on these responses at a later date or immediately.

The ability for resources outside the marketing department to facilitate the collection of this data from whatever avenue a campaign response may arrive (phone, email, meeting, etc).

Some middle market solutions have effective campaign management modules that integrate with 3rd party email fulfillment companies. Most of these services now track links so you don't need to have your own content management website. More importantly, they can track clicks to other sites as well (in case you send a suggested industry link to them, for example).

If you can find a CRM solution that has a effective campaign management module that integrates to one of these services (the way SalesLogix and Swiftpage do), that will give you a very powerful e-mail delivery tool. These services are great because they don't slow down your corporate email server and they track bounced e-mail addresses so you can clean up your database.

I've seen more elaborate solutions out there. For instance, I talked to a guy a few years back who developed a effective campaign management solution that created visual and voice campaigns. It also let you plan your campaigns with elaborate visual branching and ties to additional campaigns, etc. It was very cool and I would love to use something like that. However, since most of my clients struggle with defining a singular message to customers and delivering it over time, I don't see them sitting down and planning a 12-24 month timeline. I like them to take manageable steps given their place in the CRM evolution. It makes no sense to take leaps and bounds when there are people involved.

Keep it simple for now. You have to start somewhere.