BUSINESS PROBLEM
Our client faced a significant challenge – increase campaign velocity and accuracy while moving to a shared services model. They were moving to a new focus – Event-Based Marketing, to better align their offerings to the customer lifecycle and they had picked a new, Best in Class enterprise marketing management application. Their goal was to simultaneously change their processes to become more flexible, increase reusability of their campaign components and remove time from their campaign development cycle. This would lead to an improved customer relationship, increasing retention. It would also have benefits for the marketing teams: better operational execution across the many channels and departments involved in getting marketing communications into the hands of customers.
CLIENT PAIN POINTS
1) Slow campaign development lifecycle, coupled with slow execution. The Event-Based campaigns took the efforts of many different departments and from the time of the “event”, to when the vendor received the contact list, as much as a week of time transpired for some campaigns. This allowed the data to become stagnant and the “event” itself far less relevant by the time the marketing material reached the customer. | 2) Business rules were being left out, misinterpreted and were not transparent to the marketing managers who owned the campaigns. If there was something askew, it took a while to detect the error and then, to fix because of the number of departments involved. In one case a campaign was losing 33% of their potential customer contacts from coding inefficiencies and the IT group’s lack of marketing understanding! | 3) It cost tens of thousands of dollars to make modifications or add business rules. This process followed a very rigid, IT-oriented development lifecycle, not well suited to dynamic marketing. This resulted in slow speed to market. This was partly attributed to the large number of departments involved and the amount of steps it took to create (or execute) one Event-Based campaign. |
THE SOLUTION
Covalent Marketing's solution was accomplished using the following steps:
BUSINESS RESULTS
Redefined the campaign system architecture and process flow to eliminate inefficiencies.
Consolidated and centralized the campaign development and execution responsibilities to one group. As a by product this eliminated most of the IT development costs and they were able to focus on their core competency; customer data enrichment and application support/maintenance.
Created and implemented new, customized coding that reduced the campaign execution lifecycle to under 24 hours for even their largest and most complex campaigns.
Made the business rules transparent to those who created them in the first place ensuring nothing was “lost in translation”.