CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT

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In discussing campaign management products, it is worth reiterating a point that was made in Chapter 1, which is that the most difficult part of campaigning is figuring out who are the customers, or prospects, whom we should be targeting in our campaign. This has absolutely nothing to do with campaign management systems. Most campaign management systems on the market do not provide much support in this area. For this we generally have to look to our query tools and data mining tools. The users have to provide the fulfillment agency with the names and addresses that the campaign applies to. Generally , the individuals are not held inside the campaign management system. Usually, it is the fulfillment agency that sends the treatments to the customers (a treatment can be anything, maybe discount pricing, store voucher offers, telemarketing, mailers, etc). Similarly, it is usually the fulfillment agency that handles the responses from customers.

Most campaign management systems are good at helping us develop the campaign itself, the design (treatments, responses, etc.), budgeting, identifying the overall number of people to be contacted, size of control groups (make sure yours handles control groups), etc., but they often don't help us at all with the CRM aspects. Campaign management systems are often sold as the cornerstone of a CRM strategy, whereas, in reality, they usually offer nothing to help us in this area. They are campaign management systems and they are not customer management systems. There are some exceptions, particularly the newer systems. When talking to vendors , we should question them closely about how much customer information is held in the campaign management system or if they expect the customer information to be held in the data warehouse.

It could be argued that, actually, the warehouse absolutely is the right place to hold the customer information and there are advantages in this, too. For instance, it is then possible for other systems to be aware of which campaigns each customer has been targeted with. That being the case, we need to reassess precisely what value a campaign management system brings us. You see, they don't even have a process for handling the responses from customers. If we were to send 10,000 customers a particular offer, the campaign management system would have the ability to record how many of those customers responded and which options were taken up, but only in total. Our customer-centric data warehouse will never find out how individual customers respond to the campaign. If we want to collect this priceless information about our customers, guess what? We have to build a system to capture it. So bear in mind that most campaign management systems have everything to do with campaigns and virtually nothing to do with customers and, therefore, nothing to do with CRM.

There are three main types of campaign that all campaign management systems should be able to handle:

Single-phase campaigns. These are kind of one-off, special offer types of campaigns. They often have a single treatment. Most campaign management systems can cope with this, as it could be seen as just a standard multiphase campaign that has just one phase.

Multiphase campaigns. These are generally much more complex with each phase potentially consisting of many different treatments and response options. Each response triggers another treatment and the treatments might vary within a single phase. In the example of a multiphase campaign in Figure 10.7, we see an initial offer of a free bottle of wine. The customer is able to respond by accepting either red wine or white wine. Depending on the response, the next treatment will be for a case of the same wine at a discounted price. The marketing manager is experimenting with different discounts. This is quite common because sometimes the smaller discounts are accepted with just as much enthusiasm as the larger discounts . This provides the marketing manager with valuable information for future campaign strategies. It is important when choosing a campaign management system that this flexibility in the design of campaigns can be accommodated.

Figure 10.7. Example of a multiphase campaign.

Repeating campaigns. These are campaigns that, as the name suggests, are repeated over time. An example of a repeated campaign is the registration service that is offered when we buy a product. These can be a good way of gathering more information about our customers that might help in constructing a profile about them.

There is a significant difference between the first two types of campaign and the third. The first two are targeting a single group of customers, in other words, a segment. This is a list of customers who might exist in our derived segments component of the GCM. With multiphase campaigns, the later phases merely target a subset of the original list. So the main component of single-phase and multiphase campaigns is the list of customers. Contrast this with repeating campaigns. Each time the campaign is executed, we are targeting an entirely different list of customers. These campaigns do not generally consist of a list of customers but instead consist of a set of selection criteria, what we might call a query, and one of the major criteria is a relative time period. We want to target all customers that purchased a certain product within, say, the past two weeks. In order to do this we need to repeatedly query the behavioral part of the GCM as the following query shows:

 Select name, address          From customer c, sales s, product p          Where c.customer_id = s.customer_id          And p.product_name = 'Case of Barolo'          And p.product_id = s.product_id          And 'system date' - s.date <= 14

It is worth questioning the product vendor to make sure they recognize and can cope with these varying requirements.

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