Campaign Tracking – Managing and Analyzing the Results

Campaign Tracking

With all the effort put forth to execute the campaign, a key point of failure for campaign effectiveness lies with the tracking and analysis.  Just getting the message out isn’t sufficient.  How was that message received?  What does the overall response to the message say for future campaigns?

Closing the Loop (part 3)

The right message at the right time to the right customers.

A major trade show has just wrapped up.  The databases are full of qualified leads.  The new marketing strategy is ready to launch.  Do you want everyone on your qualified list to get the same message or do you have a special message or offer for your repeat or high value customers?  Do you have special introductory offers for interested leads?  And if so, how do you know you’re sending the right message to the right customers?

Closing the Loop (part 2)

Quick wins on qualifying Sales Leads – How to make the sales team happy…

The classic struggle between marketing and sales:   how to provide the maximum number of quality leads from marketing to sales so that the sales teams can quickly and effectively close the sale without spending unnecessary time qualifying low quality leads.  It really comes down to a data quality questions – eliminate the chaff and focus on your most valuable accounts.  Here are just a couple of techniques you can implement:

Easy Email Scrub

When a web generated lead comes in, is a reply sent to welcome the lead to the site?  Besides providing more information to the lead, the email response also validates that the email address is a valid email.  If it’s a junk address, the message will bounce and that email can be removed.  Likewise, if the lead replies and requests to be removed from further communications, the record can be flagged so that going forward bad emails and ‘Do not contacts’ are continually being checked and excluded from the master list of actionable leads.

Name – Address Matching

Furthermore, is someone qualifying the leads to make sure names and addresses are correct?  Or if the volume is too great for manual qualification, is there at least systematic manual spot checking of leads?  If the volume of leads is too great for manual qualification, there are a variety of software tools and solutions available to help in the automation to do address and customer matching.   I will discuss in a later post some of the software tools and solutions available and their features and functionality.

As for the data quality improvements, closing the loop on your own organization is helpful.  Get feedback from the sales teams on their experiences with the improved data quality.  Listen to suggestions to continually improve the data quality process.

Data Closes the Loop

To many marketing professionals, closing the loop in your campaign management and marketing initiatives seems like trying to find the holy grail – never quite achieved and a lot of frustration goes into trying. With so many interrelated components and single points of failure, there are plenty of places to look to start diagnosing why the closed loop model is failing for your initiatives. There are also plenty of opportunities to plan your future initiatives to avoid common problems. Over the course of the next several weeks, check this location for a series of articles discussing ways to fix and overcome common closed loop marketing issues. Among many of the topics to be covered will be:

1) Source data lead quality – how to ensure and improve data quality to maximize effectiveness
2) Campaign planning and strategy – what are the best methods to get the right messages to the right customers at the right times – and what are some better ways to avoid getting the wrong messages to your customers?
3) Campaign execution – what are better ways to improve your response rates?
4) Campaign tracking – often a major point of failure at worst – what are common issues and pitfalls that can be avoided? What methods can be implemented to improve response capture effectiveness
5) Campaign and marketing analysis – what does all the data really mean and how can it best be used to build business? Again, another point of significant failure – how best can the data be reported and analyzed to provide business intelligence?