Solvis Consulting, LLC

Design Discussion: Marketing Automation

By Earl LaChance

As Marketing Automation implementations have matured over the last few years, we've begun to see the impact of their initial designs. Much like the customizations that have crippled enterprise applications like SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel throughout the 90's and early 2000's, flawed designs are impacting campaign management systems.

One overall consideration is that every component of a campaign should reside in it's proper application. Some key design elements that one should consider when implementing a campaign management solution:

• Keep the calculations and logic where they belong; ensure that the models and calculations are built external to the campaign management application. An example of this is to maintain models and their associated algorithms within a Data Mining application. The results of these models should be some of the first inputs when creating a campaign (or an offer stream within a large campaign)
• There should be a well thought-out information map, that translates the cryptic data that resides in the Data Warehouse or the Data Mart into business terms that the common marketing user can understand and relate to. An example of this would be the ubiquitous "0" or "1" for negative/positive... these types of flags should be converted to an obvious value for a marketing user such as "Client" vs. "Prospect".
• Keep the business logic where it belongs: the actual campaign management application. This application, usually graphical in nature, is where the Marketing Analyst can apply their business rules to determine the client or prospect list to be contacted for said campaign. Complex calculations and customer segmentation should have already been performed before the marketing user creates the actual campaign. This eases adoption for the business and enforces the use of the correct application for the proper purpose.

Of course, there are many other elements to a solid Marketing Automation/Campaign Management software design - the aforementioned are a few key elements that should be considered in order to maintain flexibility for future marketing requirements.

SAS Marketing Automation Tour

A SAS ®  Marketing Automation Interactive Tour is now available at www.sas.com. Click here to see the tour. The tour includes:

1. An overview of SAS® Marketing Automation
2. Links to archived webcasts related to SAS® Marketing Automation
3. A SAS® Marketing Automation Sampler providing glimpses of the solution
4. Access to a white paper about maximizing your return on customer communications

Complimentary CMO Guide

Download A CMO’s Guide to Mastering Marketing Measurement: Unleashing Performance Management’s Potential from SAS.

This new guide designed for CMOs will help you overcome marketing challenges and understand how to take advantage of opportunities. Learn how to successfully use performance management to objectively measure the impact of your marketing decisions and spending; identify your best customers and programs; and improve corporate performance through tangible evidence, not subjective opinions.

Marketing Automation Roadmap (Spanish)

This is a presentation prepared by our México Director, Jose Corona, about how to implement Marketing Automation using best practices and in a phased approach. The presentation is in Spanish.

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Marketing Automation - 10 Key Points

By Earl LaChance

We here at Solvis have been discussing some Best Practices/Key Points regarding implementing a Marketing Automation solution. Every MA implementation project is different, providing new and diverse challenges depending on the client and the industry. However, there are 10 fundamental points that apply to just about every MA implementation.

In the beginning of an MA implementation one can consider the following:

1. What is the overall CRM strategy? How does the Marketing Automation implementation fit into the overall CRM process? This can greatly affect the time frames and scope of the project, as certain business processes and integration points must be considered.
2. What kinds of campaigns will the initial pilot cover? Up-Sell, Cross-Sell, WinBack, Value Offerings, Retention, New Acquisition, etc.
3. Which Channels are to be used? Call Center, Direct Mail, Sales Personnel, Web, SMS, to name a few.
4. Which products will be integrated into the Campaigns? Products can be non-tangible items, such as services.
5. What are the typical responses that can be associated with each campaign or product? This is critical, so that reports can be prepared and campaigns can be measured appropriately. Also, have pre-determined responses may trigger interfaces to purchasing or product management systems.
6. Which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Reports that are required by the Marketing Executives? This is possibly the most important of the key points, as knowing the KPIs will allow you to "reverse engineer" your campaigns to emphasize the most important desired results (such as wieghing certain customer target selection criteria)
7. What are the data sources? Is the client using internal customer bases and augmenting their current data with purchased contact/lead lists?
8. Are there complex Calculations and/or Predictive Models to develop? This could possibly be considered a key point for a more mature or full-blown MA implementation, especially when considering the time and expense of building predictive models with a Data Mining tool.
9. What are the system integration points? Will the client target list be loaded into a Channel Management System? Is there a Sales Force Automation solution in place in which the results of the campaign must interface? Are there product management/back office systems to integrate with? As you can imagine, there are many possible system integration points..
10. Users and Training. No project is complete without it!

As I mentioned above, every implementation presents it's unique challenges. The above is just a "quick hit list" regarding some key points to consider when beginning a Marketing Automation project.