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Starting Situation
Despite the functioning implementation of CRM tools, an efficient success reporting is essential for the evaluation and future strategic alignment of marketing measures. A well-known leading provider in the VoD (video on demand) field has already been using CRM measures for some time now, but due to a lack of monetary success measurement, there is no information about the performance of the campaigns rolled out so far. This lack of economically relevant data is thus similar to a flight without route and radar.
The CRM reporting in place at the outset of the project only insists of information provided by the email marketing provider, such as dispatch quantity, opens, clicks etc. and does not provide any information e.g. about a financial or qualitative success of a campaign.
The objective of this project is to draw up an existing customer campaign reporting which is as complete as possible and shows the campaign success in a customer-oriented and also monetary way in detail and, thus, provides the input on which campaigns are successful and which are not. The existing parameters on the dispatch quantity and recipient quota do not meet the requirements.
Thus, the added value of this project lies in the fact that a broad – but also efficient – range of campaign parameters is given to the department in order to manage future CRM/marketing campaigns in a more efficient and successful manner.
Solution Approach
For this type of problem, it is appropriate to use b.telligent’s reference architecture (see illustration 1) which shows how an optimal infrastructure for a functioning CRM and/or campaign management system must be structured. It consists of a total of 4 pillars which together constitute the closed loop in CRM:
- Customer Intelligence (data storage, data analysis)
- Campaign management (selection of customers, set-up contact history, reporting)
- Channel interaction (personalization, advertising media)
- Contact channel (inbound and outbound channels)
The information provided by the channel interaction and the customer reactions flows back into the contact history and the response history and thus closes the (data-) loop.
Click here to order the b.telligent reference architecture Campaign Management as a poster.
Approach
In the first step, the department’s requirements are collected and it is defined what is considered as response to a particular campaign and how this is to be measured. For the VoD industry, e.g. retrieval of a promoted movie via streaming is considered as response, but the extension of a movie package or purchases of a series or movie are also included.
Depending on the reason for the campaign (e.g. newsletter, win back or cross sell), it must also be defined when the retrieval or purchase of a particular movie (so-called hard response) or retrieval or purchase of any movie (so-called soft response) is included in the success measurement. The information on which customer has retrieved which movie at which time should already be available in the internal accounting system and the data warehouse.
If there is no clear campaign code, it is required to establish a connection between the receipt of a campaign and the retrieval of a movie. This connection is established by the campaign or observation period. If an addressed customer retrieves or purchases a movie promptly after the receipt of a campaign during the observation period, this retrieval is measured as campaign success. One can imagine that this is not the ideal approach, as one does not know whether the impulse to retrieve or purchase a movie resulted from the previously received campaign.
In order to avoid this, ideally, a clear campaign code is assigned to each recipient, which may be used to retrieve the movie in order to benefit from an incentive (e.g. promotional code for a free movie in the course of a win back campaign). This code is then used in the course of the success measurement in order to identify particular parameters:
- Number of responders
- Number of retrievals and purchases
- Total turnover of the campaign with movies or series
- Ø revenue per customer
The campaign codes are also an essential component of a complete contact history and should also be used as exclusion criterion for further win back or other campaigns (e.g. exclusion of win back campaign receivers of the last x weeks).
On request, the parameters are provided by a reporting tool; however, the reporting requires previously refined data on which it is based.
This necessarily requires the set-up of a so-called data aggregation (data mart) in which the following data are stored and updated on a regular basis (e.g. overnight):
- Campaign control data (type and period of the campaign, code, offers, channels etc.)
- Response data (hard and soft responses per customer and channel)
- Contact history (per customer and channel)
- Customer data (customer number, possibly customer characteristics at the time of the campaigns, such as e.g. locked)
In the data mart, certain parameters are calculated in advance in order to reduce the request time of the reports to a minimum. This includes, for example, the price per retrieval * number of customers in the campaign period or the calculation of the so-called lift (relative difference of the response quota between test and control group)
By means of the reporting front-end, the department is then able to compile the parameters and reports itself as needed, in a flexible manner and then e.g. dispatch them to further departments via e-mail.
Outlook
A complete success measurement is important for the measurement of the campaign success, but the options stated above only reflect an operative viewpoint. The situation becomes interesting if it is examined how customers develop in the mid and long term. In a next step, it should therefore be tried to answer i. a. the following questions in order to optimize marketing measures: Do the newsletter recipients have more retrievals than the non-newsletter recipients? Or, do the customers won by a particular affiliate new customer acquisition campaign behave differently than the customer won via an offline competition? Are there differences in the response rates between movie purchasers and retrievers? If so, I may have to adjust the communication and incentives of the customer segments accordingly.
Thus, a complete success measurement is not only important in order to show the operative success parameters, but also to strategically align and refine the marketing measures. b.telligent has the appropriate consulting competence and the experience from numerous projects to support businesses in this regard and to provide the infrastructure with professional and field-tested methods for a functioning and future-oriented CRM. Put in plain terms, this means: clear view, a clear route and no more blind flying.
