One objective of customer relationship management is to continually refine an organization's insights into its customer base.
These insights drive how an organization communicates with customers, so that each contact is more intelligent and meaningful than the last.
Often, necessary data is not in place to draw meaningful conclusions from previous customer experiences. In order to drive towards information based, data driven business decisions, organizations must have a process and tools in place to complete all four components of campaign management.
Campaign Management is defined as the process of designing, executing, and measuring marketing campaigns through the use of applications that:
- Select and segment customers
- Track the contacts made with customers
- Measure the results of those contacts
- Model those results to more efficiently target customers in the future
The Common Mistake
The first step in the Campaign Management Process tends to be the primary focus for most marketing departments. Organizations spend a large percentage of their efforts identifying customers, defining the offer or message, applying suppressions, defining segments, and delivering the custom message, whether it is email, direct mail, or telemarketing.
Unfortunately, tracking a customer's reaction to a custom message is usually not given the same level of attention and planning as the execution component. This leaves marketing analysts and marketing departments salvaging bits and pieces of incomplete data information, from which they are asked to draw conclusions and define business insights.
Issues around tracking, sourcing and matching a customer's behavior must be evaluated and resolved during the planning phase of a campaign. In this article we will talk about clearly defining the customer-centric business questions that are to be answered, and some of the data sourcing issues that must be addressed in order to successfully learn from campaign efforts.
