Blog: Marketing Automation

What if not-for-profit organizations (NPO) thought more strategically and mirrored their marketing efforts to those of most for-profits in terms of customer relationship management?

Donors and volunteers are the lifeline of all nonprofit organizations. Yet few NPOs maintain a reliable database to extract such valuable information as age, gender, marital status, demographics, participation activity, etc. Information collected and stored by nonprofits most often pertains to fundraising events (eg. donations generated) and not the participants themselves.  Any information relating back to volunteers and donors are often limited and cannot be analyzed over a historic period because most not-for-profits haven't properly 'married' such data with the proper CRM tools (See 'Selecting Your Marketing Automation').  Although it would make this a different kind of love story, the same is true for NGOs. But for the sake of all that is wholesome, we will not digress.

Last month, I was on a keynote panel at the National Center for Database Marketing (NCDM).  The topic of the panel was "Evolving from Database Marketing to Customer Intelligence" and the discussion largely centered around the evolution of marketing into a bi-directional communication mechanism with customers across multiple channels and the challenges that brings.  An audience member asked the question, "Is technology the gating factor that prevents or slows marketers from embracing these changes?"   The panel differed on their responses.   Some felt, yes, technology was indeed an impediment to doing this well.     I and at least one other panelist disagreed.   

If you were disciplined as a child you are probably familiar with the following retort, "Yes, you can but you may not". What this expression relayed to the one being chastised is that just because you have the power to do something does not justify doing it. So how about we discuss something that I am sure weighs on the minds of you and your campaign developers. Should you let your campaign developers develop new campaigns in the Unica production environment? We can come back to that question in a minute. How about we first take a poll and see how many clients currently allow their campaign developers to develop brand new campaigns in the production environment, without first having them develop in a non-production environment. As the results come in I will share with you some of the arguments I hear regarding why clients develop in the production environment.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a series of product demos for Neolane.  According to their web site, Neolane is "the only enterprise marketing software specifically designed to manage, automate and optimize programs across traditional and emerging channels including direct mail, email and mobile".  The Neolane team did a nice job detailing out this functionality and emphasizing their ability to integrate easily with numerous outbound channels.

The demos focused on three main points:

1.       Overall product offering

2.       Campaign planning and execution

3.       Technical architecture

Have you ever seen the error displayed in Figure 1 in Unica Campaign V75? For this blog on Unica tips and tricks we are going to evaluate an issue encountered when loading flat files with variable columns widths into Unica. I will provide a solution so that you do not have to encounter this issue when loading flat files in the future.

Figure 1. Error caused by incorrect parsing of variable length fields in a flat file

For larger flat files, Unica's parsing capabilities are limited. So when you are connecting a select process box to a flat file, Unica may parse only a subset of the records in a flat file. For instance, if there is a longer field in a record within your flat file, Unica may not automatically create the appropriate field width for that record.

Part1: Goodbye multiple copies of flowcharts!

For my next few entries, I plan to take a high level approach to discussing and comparing the new features of Affinium Campaign Interact 7.5 and how they improve upon some of the pain points of previous releases. Along the way, I intend to bring some insight into the migration process highlighting any "gotchas" for anyone familiar with the 6.x platform and thinking about making the leap to the next major release.

Have you ever tried to get a Unica V75 mail list file to print out even when there is no data to print out (i.e. no records selected for the mail list)? If you said "Yes" to this question, what did you see in the output on the Unica Campaign server folder? We will come back to this question in a minute.

A favorite client of mine asked if I knew how to print out a "Dummy" row of data in a Unica Campaign mail list file when there were no actual records selected for the mail list. My response was based upon my understanding of Unica Campaign's functionality regarding empty mail list files. I told my client that you would have to use a shell script to perform this feat because I thought Unica Campaign didn't generate a mail list file if there are no records selected by the mail list process box. Boy, was I wrong! For this edition of tricks of the trade we are going to find out how to trick Unica Campaign into creating a dummy list pull file even when there are no records selected by the Unica mail list process!

So you are probably feeling pretty good about this topic regarding Unica Campaign V75. Everyone knows how to copy and paste in Unica Campaign, right? Maybe this is a not-so-tricky trick but let's talk about it anyway. Copying and pasting in Unica Campaign is simple enough. You can use the right-hand mouse to copy something that has previously been selected. So let's say for instance that you are working on a flowchart and you want to copy a select process box to another location in that same flowchart. In the flowchart you can highlight the select box by dragging your mouse over the entire process box (it will have a yellow outline when it is selected) and then use the right-hand mouse key to copy the process box. Once you have copied the box you can use the right-hand mouse to paste it. Sound reasonable? But that is not-so-tricky at all. Now comes the trickier part.

Research shows that people spend more time reading their emails than they do surfing the web. Email is one of the most powerful mediums that you can use to talk to customers and prospects and is an extremely cost effective channel and once the initial investment in infrastructure set up is complete.

In order to maximize the use of email marketing here are some best practices for marketers.

Is it worth the effort?

Do you think that building re-usability into your eMessage deployment is worth the additional effort? While working at a client site, we debated this same question. The question is whether or not one should implement re-usable eMessage document components in Unica's V75 eMessage application.

Unica's eMessage application enables the design of unique personalized email messages for each recipient in a campaign. The design of eMessage email messages may be done quite rapidly as the application allows for the direct pasting of HTML-rendered creative content into the application. Unica's eMessage application also supports the use of previously created eMessage components in a document. Thus, the concept of re-usability applies to Unica's eMessage application.

In part I of this two-part series, we discussed the two major types of upgrades - service releases and feature enhancements and identified key areas of consideration when making the decision to upgrade.

In this post, we'll assume that you've made the decision to upgrade and will talk through a few additional considerations that can help determine the "when" and the "how" of upgrades.  I'll also share a few best practices that might help you get started.

As the head of CSG Quaero's Marketing Automation practice, I receive a lot of questions about the various solutions available in the market today; but the most oft-asked question is, should we upgrade our current marketing automation software to the newest version? 

I usually answer that question with a question: Are there new features that you are interested in or have been waiting for?  Naturally, most users have an upgrade wish list, but what they are really asking are these two basic questions: Will the new features help me do my job better and are there any risks associated with upgrading?

In another post 'Netflix: What were they thinking?' I summarized how Netflix used online data, a prize and the analytic community to increase revenue. 

In this blog I would like to focus on the biggest barrier in turning online behaviors into actionable and optimized customer interactions throughout all channels.  Let's start by breaking down the components of online analytics:

For this post, I really wanted to bring up a topic that may be obvious to some, but a distant thought for others: consistent, unified messaging across all channels.

In today's market, it seems like there’s a new interactive channel or medium popping up every year from advanced web targeting to SMS to social media. However, many companies are not embracing the new touchpoints and in turn fail to deliver a consistent message to each and every channel that they utilize.

1. Control Group Series (Jim Novo) -- Jim explains why marketers should use control groups in their campaigns.
2. Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research (Campbell & Stanley) -- The book that any serious campaign designer should consult before launching a new marketing campaign. Defines and explains pre-experimental designs, pretest-posttest control group design, Solomon four-group design, posttest-only control group design, etc.
3. Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference (Shadish, Cook, and Campbell) -- In-depth book for hard-core marketers. Will help you understand how to design valid experiments, and how to draw valid conclusions from them.

1. Attribution Management (ClearSaleing) -- ClearSaleing has developed a very interesting technology platform focused on helping companies understand the path that customers follow before making a purchase.
2. A Framework For Multicampaign Attribution Measurement (Forrester - $) -- John Lovett presents a framework for quantifying marketing attribution.
3. Call to Action: Let's Define Standards for Online Marketing Attribution (shop.org) -- Anne Ashbey would like to form a group that will develop best practices for online marketing measurement.

Many times when sending out bulk emails we all might have noticed that the appearance of email creative is not consistent across email clients. Some emails may look good in Yahoo or AOL whereas the same email content may not appear properly in Outlook or Gmail. The reason is different email programs render HTML differently. They may display table, style, background formatting and other HTML elements in slightly divergent ways. Hence it becomes quite challenging to prepare email creative in such a way that it holds visual exactness across email clients. 

In the following sections we discuss several critical best practices that address this challenge in email design. 

Marketers at most companies choose their campaign management tool in one of two ways.    The first approach is to feel a pain around their ability to execute multiple, increasingly complex campaigns. They then figure that the right software can help ease this pain and go pick a software tool, have it implemented train their people and hope for the best.   Not the best approach but one it is a road taken by many.   This approach usually leads to regrets and recriminations, but that is to be expected.   The second way is a little more thoughtful and deliberate.    This approach takes the time to identify business requirements, develop a business case not only for the purchase and installation of the software but also for any other related changes in process, organization and skill upgrades that may be involved in this transformation.    See my colleague Joe Kelly's blog on selecting a marketing automation tool for more on this.  

I've been thinking a lot lately how to approach marketing executives about mobile marketing because it is still one of those things that is hard to grasp, especially in the pharmaceutical and healthcare space where patient privacy is so important.  A lot of marketers I speak with are interested in the idea of SMS, iPhone applications, etc., but wonder how to fit it into their overall strategy, never mind getting buy-in from management and legal.

While reading a blog about Social Media Marketing, I stumbled upon an article about Smartphone ad responders on Marketing Charts which had some staggering statistics that are well worth sharing.

Email marketing is fast becoming one of most favored marketing channels due to its cost effectiveness and efficiency to reach customers at a much quicker timelines. Email marketing has become increasingly sophisticated and strong marketing organizations understand the power of email marketing and the commitment that is needed to adhere to the privacy guidelines ensuring relevance and promoting the brand equity. A big portion of the email marketing in today's environment is transactional emails, which relates directly to something the recipient did either in the form of request for content or purchase or confirmation of a transaction.  The CAN-SPAM definition of a "transactional or relationship message" is any email "facilitating, completing or confirming a previously agreed upon transaction" between the customer and the organization.

In Part One of this series, I talked through the challenges associated with purchasing or enhancing your marketing automation solution. 

Part II:  Selecting the Right Solution

In this post, I provide the ten steps to ensure you select the right marketing automation technology to suit your environment, and more importantly, generate the expected return on investment:

When many of our clients  think of contact history, they think of reporting. Contact history is a table often joined to when creating marketing reports. Contact history provides the mailed-base for historical campaigns, and as such, it feeds reports that measure lift, response rates and other metrics. In this issue, I will talk about the reusability of contact history in Unica version 7.5. Below, we will explore how contact history may be deployed in order to actually extend your investment in Unica's Affinium Campaign.

"How do you marry Unica's campaign metadata with other customer information once you have implemented Unica's Affinium Campaign?"

It's a fact:  Those organizations that take the time to carefully assess the current state of their marketing systems and processes before developing plans to enhance or replace their existing marketing systems will see better and faster returns on their investment.  

In this two-part blog series, I'll discuss ways to ensure your marketing automation technology selection & implementation is successful.  And, it doesn't start with the software; it begins with a vision.

Based on recent studies profiled in eMarketer, 2008 would be the first year in decades in which spending and volume have decreased for direct mail; and moreover, 2009 is expected to see a decline of 8% in spending. A big part of the decline is due to the current tough economic conditions for the financial industry. However, this should not be a surprise to anyone, and in fact, is very much in line with the belief that analytics and customer knowledge should drive direct mail marketing. In the next few years:

It is axiomatic in marketing and customer management circles that it is much more difficult and expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer.   Estimates range from five to fifteen times as expensive, depending on the industry and situation.   This is a reason why companies ought to pay more attention to nurturing current relationships and ensuring that customers feel valued, whether by providing a great experience or by other means.    Incidentally, happy customers can also be a great source of referrals and can help reduce the above mentioned high acquisition cost.

So just when you thought you knew what you were talking about,  someone gives you a requirement for reusable offers in Unica version 7.5. Do you know how to make offers reusable in Unica? I asked some Unica representatives this very question, "What happens to an offer in Unica 7.5 once you assign it to a cell? Can you change the offer description?" Go ahead and take a shot yourself at this question. If your knowledge of Unica is pretty good, go ahead and try and answer the question. Here is the question again,

"What happens to an offer in Unica 7.5 once you assign it to a cell? Can you change the offer description?"

Measure once, cut twice.  I think this expression must have been started by a carpenter.  After all, making mistakes with lumber can wind up costing you a lot of money, and keep you from getting repeat business.

When I take the old adage and add those last three words (and execute flawlessly), it reminds me of some of the common themes I hear from my clients lately. 

As a consultant for a leading marketing firm offering our clients real-time multichannel customer interaction, I am continually asked to build things in Unica that are reusable. One of the ground floor tenants of automation is the ability not only to automate a process, but to ensure that what is automated does not require high maintenance. Reusability is the buzz-word for low maintenance and should apply as well to the automation of your Unica applications. This article is the first in a series of articles about how to take full advantage of your Unica 7.5 environment - that is, how to make things reusable.

At the highest level, reusability for Unica 7.5 would pertain to your ability to take the entire environment - for instance a production environment - and recreate that environment elsewhere. That is exactly an exercise which we recently performed for one of our clients. Below are the steps to moving your Unica application from one environment (ENV#1) to another environment (ENV#2).

Ron Popeil had it right when he used the above phrase on his infomercial for the Ronco Rotisserie.  The recent economic downturn shows how every business needs to be able to "Set it, and forget it".  Automation is extremely important during tough economic times, and can be extremely beneficial to any business.  How do you know what to focus on automating?  Ask the simple question, what is your biggest pain point?