Martha Bush
If there’s any part of our database marketing practice that has been driven by the marketing of OTHER companies, it’s Campaign Management. This is a technology area that has exploded in recent years, with extremely complex tools promoted by very enticing marketing and savvy marketers. On so many occasions that I can’t count, we have met with clients who are either madly in love with a new tool and want to get it implemented as soon as possible, or they were in love with a tool, purchased it, and are very frustrated that the implementation just isn’t going as planned. The biggest issue we see with the success of campaign management is Readiness: Is there a skill level inside the organization to handle the data issues, the campaign design issues and the reporting issues that this category of tool is designed to support?
As we’ve been discussing in these Marketing Assessment posts, our first approach with new clients is to understand their business with a Five-step Maturity framework that ranges from basic to sophisticated – we hope to objectively rate where a client’s database marketing expertise falls on a scale of 1-5 and we provide a score and a roadmap for organizational improvement.
Let’s look at some of the questions we ask when it comes to Campaign Management:
20 Questions for Campaign Management Assessments:
- Do you have a practical way to interact with your customers individually?
- What channels do you use to interact with your customers?
- Do you currently drive different messages to different segments of customers?
- Are campaigns managed as one-shots or are you doing repeated, multi-touch campaigns?
- Are messaging channels (direct mail, email, SMS) managed in an integrated way, or by different departments?
- Do you create, and stick to, an annual campaign schedule?
- Are you using predictive models to drive campaigns?
- Are there reports or data tables that identify the different types of campaigns and frequency for the campaigns?
- How many and what types of campaigns are currently being done?
- Are there any triggered messages sent out to consumers through the year?
- What system performs the triggered campaigns? Is the data readily available for these campaigns?
- What percentage of the campaigns are email versus direct mail?
- For prospecting, what lists are used and do you have specific selection criteria?
- Is testing being done with offers, creative, etc.?
- What processes, procedures are in place in order to get a campaign approved and then executed?
- Is there a policy or practice on “managing the mail box,” frequency of solicitations, etc.?
- What is the privacy policy and how are opt-outs, do-not-mails managed?
With these types of questions, you can begin to assess your company’s progress in Campaign Management.
About the Author:
Martha Bush is SVP of Strategy & Solutions at SIGMA Marketing Group. Follow Martha on or connect with her on .
Related Posts:
Database Marketing Assessment: Data Management
Database Marketing Assessment: Targeting and Analytics
A good place to start: Database Marketing Assessment 101
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So glad to see more than just email in your list of mediums to use. Too often, marketers, beat email like a dead horse. Did you know that in Wikipedia, the ONLY entry for drip marketing is under email marketing?
Do you have a technology that you use (i.e. campaignmonitor.com or similar) to actually manage all the a/b splits and tracking that you describe?
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