Business Problem
An international financial organization was held back by inefficient and inconsistent offer management and campaign attribution methodologies. New offers, response flowcharts, and response staging tables were being built for each campaign. As a result, the client experienced the following problems:
Duplication of Work | Lack of Visibility | Inconsistent Attribution |
|---|---|---|
Building new offers and response flowcharts for each campaign, when analogous campaign assets already existed, led to the creation of many similar campaign objects. This consumed valuable time and effort from the campaign development and analytics teams. Creating response staging tables for each campaign did not follow industry best practices. This exercise required unnecessary data processing and the development of ad-hoc response flowcharts for each campaign | Further inefficiencies resulted from having to make customized response flowcharts for every marketing campaign. Developing ad-hoc response flowcharts was so time consuming that response analysis could only be measured after the campaigns’ response windows were closed. Consequently, there were no interim reports to gather insights about a campaign’s mid-lifecycle performance for the marketing team to react to and/or adjust. | Campaign attribution was processed upon request. There were no overarching business rules in place to standardize its calculation. Rather, customers were attributed subjectively to the campaign which ran its response flowchart first. This technique led to inconsistent reporting across campaigns. |
The Solution
To address these challenges, Covalent Marketing consolidated the duplicate work that was taking place, created meaningful mid-campaign lifecycle data, and standardized the response tracking process through automation and use of best practices.
1) Standardize Offer Creation Covalent Marketing standardized the offer creation process through reusable offer templates within IBM Campaign. Offer templates utilized parameterized offer attributes, reducing the overall number of offers created. These attributes are dynamic and allow for different offer variations to be created within the same offer object. |
2) Standardize Response Tracking Standard response tracking sessions and response staging tables were built for reuse across campaigns. Six different templates were made to account for the most commonly used campaign categories. For efficiency, the response staging tables were scheduled to refresh monthly in order to manage table size and to remove responses that have already been attributed. Lastly, Covalent Marketing advised that a last touch attribution rule be put into effect in order to consistently attribute responses across campaigns. |
3) Collect Mid-Campaign Attribution Data By running the response tracking sessions on a monthly basis, data is generated while the campaign is still active, in addition to once the campaign is over. This mid-campaign data could be leveraged to gain greater campaign performance insights more rapidly than when waiting for the entire campaign lifecycle to finish. |
Benefits
As a result of the above solutions, the client now has an established progression through the campaign management process. Before, offer management, campaign development, and response tracking were done on a campaign by campaign basis. Now, with standardization and automation, the campaign developers and analysts know the information that is needed for each campaign upfront. This has helped to establish a more efficient and streamlined process that resulted in the following benefits:
Reduced Offer Creation
By creating offer templates with parameterized attributes, a single offer can be reused across multiple campaigns instead of creating a new offer for each campaign. Since instituting the new offer templates, there has been a 45% reduction in offer creation. In the six months prior to Covalent’s work, 90 offers were created versus the 50 offers created in the six months following.
Standardized Response Tracking
Grouping response flowcharts into single sessions by common campaign categories has alleviated the burden of creating a new response flowchart for each campaign. Today, 70-80% of campaigns fall within the common campaign categories, meaning that response tracking for these campaigns is automated by the response tracking sessions. This automation has allowed the Analytics team to focus their energy on creating more detailed and useful reports for the marketing organization. Adopting a standard last touch attribution methodology allows for consistent attribution across campaigns. This will make attribution data more reliable resulting in more dependable reporting.
Gain Interim Reporting Insights
With data now available during the campaign lifecycle, insights into campaign performance are gained sooner and more frequently. The client leveraged the out-of-the-box IBM Cognos reports to showcase the mid-campaign response attribution data that is now being generated.