Solvis Consulting, LLC

Talking Marketing Automation in Santo Domingo

Last month, SAS Caribbean invites Solvis to present at a Marketing Conference in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, hosted by the La Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM). The topics that Earl LaChance covered were:

1. The goals of a Marketing Intelligence/Marketing Automation (MA) software solution
2. A review of the key concepts and goals of an implementation of SAS MA
3. Customer Segmentation and Statistical Predictive Models
4. The Marketing Automation life cycle and the applications involved
5. A demo of SAS Campaign Studio and SAS Web Report Studio

After the SAS demo, Earl fielded many questions regarding best practices and his experience implementing Marketing Automation solutions in Fortune 500 companies in the Americas.

Una Charla de Marketing Automation en La Republica Dominicana

La semana pasada SAS Caribe invitó a Solvis a dar una charla en Santo Domingo. Earl LaChance expuso ante mas de 60 personas en La Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM). Los temas tratados fueron:

• Las Metas de Marketing Intelligence/Marketing Automation (MA)
• Revisión de los conceptos claves y metas de una implementación de MA
•  Segmentación y Modelos Predictivos
• El ciclo de Marketing Automation con las aplicaciones de SAS
• Demo de SAS Campaign Studio y SAS Web Report Studio

Después del demo de SAS, hubo muchas preguntas acerca de experiencias de implementaciones de SAS, incluyendo los retos y ‘best practices’.

 

Earl LaChance con los estudiantes MBA y Marketing de la universidad (PUCMM )

Tweets from the Return2Customer Conference

Jesus Hoyos' tweets during the conference:

jesus_hoyos: Need to go to airport.  Return2Customer conference was great...good lectures as well as the networking...

jesus_hoyos: Customer Intelligence Panel - multichannel interactions and related data ... Key factors for customer intelligence... 

jesus_hoyos: Customer Intelligence Panel - managing unstructured data is the biggest challange for BI projects

 

jesus_hoyos: Paul Greenberg - the new CRM is no longer the 360 view of the customer. It is about customers that want a company like them...

jesus_hoyos: Paul Greenberg - the social customer - it is a social transformation NOT a business transformation

jesus_hoyos: Had a demo of Openspan - 360 degree customer view - check it out www.openspan.com

jesus_hoyos: FirstWave - lead management needs a scoring and nurturing processes in order to convert leads to sales

jesus_hoyos: Infor - customer mobilty is a crm trend as well as Green CRM technology

jesus_hoyos: Market2Lead - you need aligment with processes, systems, data quality, metrics and change mgmt in order for sales and marketing to work ...

jesus_hoyos: Socia Media panel: social media is collaborative CRM.

jesus_hoyos: Social Media Panel: understand your customers and objectives before jumping into social networking

jesus_hoyos: Martha Rogers - companies have no customer memory - Goldfish Principle.

jesus_hoyos: Martha Rogers - most business fundamental assumptions are wrong - these are rules to break in order to market customers

jesus_hoyos: Bill Price - Best Service is no Service - avoid confusion and mistakes in order to provide best service.. Check out his book...

jesus_hoyos: At the Return2Customer conference... I will be twittering highlights..

By Jesus Hoyos

 

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.

To obtain more information please fill the form in this request-info-link and a Solvis representant will contact you.