Blog: campaign management
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Imperative to Properly Train Temporary Holiday Staff
1/17/11Continue ReadingMost retail businesses make the majority of their sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In order to handle the increased orders, many online vendors will hire temporary\seasonal help. Many of these companies do not properly train the employees on their own customer service applications due to their short term status. This is a huge mistake since these representatives are the "face of the company" and, often times, provide the customer's first impression of the company. Giving a bad impression can guarantee a lost customer.
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Best Practices with Unica Campaign V75 – Should I develop in my production environment?
11/16/09Continue ReadingIf you were disciplined as a child you are probably familiar with the following retort, "Yes, you can but you may not". What this expression relayed to the one being chastised is that just because you have the power to do something does not justify doing it. So how about we discuss something that I am sure weighs on the minds of you and your campaign developers. Should you let your campaign developers develop new campaigns in the Unica production environment? We can come back to that question in a minute. How about we first take a poll and see how many clients currently allow their campaign developers to develop brand new campaigns in the production environment, without first having them develop in a non-production environment. As the results come in I will share with you some of the arguments I hear regarding why clients develop in the production environment.
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Thoughts on a Recent Neolane Demo
11/9/09Continue ReadingI recently had the opportunity to participate in a series of product demos for Neolane. According to their web site, Neolane is "the only enterprise marketing software specifically designed to manage, automate and optimize programs across traditional and emerging channels including direct mail, email and mobile". The Neolane team did a nice job detailing out this functionality and emphasizing their ability to integrate easily with numerous outbound channels.
The demos focused on three main points:
1. Overall product offering
2. Campaign planning and execution
3. Technical architecture
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4.0 Tricks of the Trade, Unica V75 – Solving Problems Loading Variable Length Records from Flat Files
10/22/09Continue ReadingHave you ever seen the error displayed in Figure 1 in Unica Campaign V75? For this blog on Unica tips and tricks we are going to evaluate an issue encountered when loading flat files with variable columns widths into Unica. I will provide a solution so that you do not have to encounter this issue when loading flat files in the future.
Figure 1. Error caused by incorrect parsing of variable length fields in a flat file
For larger flat files, Unica's parsing capabilities are limited. So when you are connecting a select process box to a flat file, Unica may parse only a subset of the records in a flat file. For instance, if there is a longer field in a record within your flat file, Unica may not automatically create the appropriate field width for that record.
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2.0 Tricks of the Trade in Unica V75 – Copying and Pasting in Unica Campaign
10/5/09Continue ReadingSo you are probably feeling pretty good about this topic regarding Unica Campaign V75. Everyone knows how to copy and paste in Unica Campaign, right? Maybe this is a not-so-tricky trick but let's talk about it anyway. Copying and pasting in Unica Campaign is simple enough. You can use the right-hand mouse to copy something that has previously been selected. So let's say for instance that you are working on a flowchart and you want to copy a select process box to another location in that same flowchart. In the flowchart you can highlight the select box by dragging your mouse over the entire process box (it will have a yellow outline when it is selected) and then use the right-hand mouse key to copy the process box. Once you have copied the box you can use the right-hand mouse to paste it. Sound reasonable? But that is not-so-tricky at all. Now comes the trickier part.
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1.0 Tricks of the Trade in Unica V75 – How do I dynamically add a date stamp to my list files?
9/28/09Continue ReadingToday's discussion will yield something that you can put to use right away with respect to your Unica V75 Campaign implementation. Have you wondered how to add a dynamic date stamp to your list file name using Unica Campaign? Let's say you want to create a list pull file with the date and time in the file name. Generating a daily file with the date stamp in the file name enables you to differentiate yesterday's file from today's file. Often your mail vendor will want to be able to differentiate today's file from yesterday's file as well. So it may be a requirement when working with 3rdparty vendors to include the date and time stamp in your file name. Using the date stamp in the file name enables both you and the vendor to differentiate files across multiple dates when this file is dropped off into a folder.
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Control Groups in Marketing - Three Essential Links
7/6/09Continue Reading- Control Group Series (Jim Novo) -- Jim explains why marketers should use control groups in their campaigns.
- Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research (Campbell & Stanley) -- The book that any serious campaign designer should consult before launching a new marketing campaign. Defines and explains pre-experimental designs, pretest-posttest control group design, Solomon four-group design, posttest-only control group design, etc.
- Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference (Shadish, Cook, and Campbell) -- In-depth book for hard-core marketers. Will help you understand how to design valid experiments, and how to draw valid conclusions from them.
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Call Tracking for Marketing Campaigns - Three Essential Links
6/23/09Continue ReadingTracking campaign performance accurately across multiple channels is one of the holy grails of marketing organizations. The links below illustrate how you can use Google Analytics to measure performance for voice-based campaigns.
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A Recent Campaign Response Attribution Success Story
6/23/09Continue ReadingRecently I had the opportunity to work with one of our clients on a campaign response attribution project. The client is a hosted solution customer using a popular campaign planning and execution tool with a focus on direct mail catalog distribution across North America. A savvy campaign management team builds complex campaigns with intricate segments at both the business and contact level. Campaign responses arrive in the database in the form of catalog orders generated by the direct mail campaign.
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A missed email marketing opportunity
5/21/09Continue ReadingEmail marketing is fast becoming one of most favored marketing channels due to its cost effectiveness and efficiency to reach customers at a much quicker timelines. Email marketing has become increasingly sophisticated and strong marketing organizations understand the power of email marketing and the commitment that is needed to adhere to the privacy guidelines ensuring relevance and promoting the brand equity. A big portion of the email marketing in today's environment is transactional emails, which relates directly to something the recipient did either in the form of request for content or purchase or confirmation of a transaction. The CAN-SPAM definition of a "transactional or relationship message" is any email "facilitating, completing or confirming a previously agreed upon transaction" between the customer and the organization.
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Selecting Your Marketing Automation Solution - a Two-Part Series (Part II)
5/19/09Continue ReadingIn Part One of this series, I talked through the challenges associated with purchasing or enhancing your marketing automation solution.
Part II: Selecting the Right Solution
In this post, I provide the ten steps to ensure you select the right marketing automation technology to suit your environment, and more importantly, generate the expected return on investment:
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Less Can Be More
5/18/09Continue ReadingAs Marketers try to do more with less, automation is typically at the top of the list of ways companies are looking to increase efficiency and productivity. In our role as marketing service providers, we're often asked to identify and recommend the right solutions for companies and to identify specific ways the technology can help them meet their marketing objectives.
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3.0 Reusability in Unica 7.5 – How to leverage Contact History
5/4/09Continue ReadingWhen many of our clients think of contact history, they think of reporting. Contact history is a table often joined to when creating marketing reports. Contact history provides the mailed-base for historical campaigns, and as such, it feeds reports that measure lift, response rates and other metrics. In this issue, I will talk about the reusability of contact history in Unica version 7.5. Below, we will explore how contact history may be deployed in order to actually extend your investment in Unica's Affinium Campaign.
"How do you marry Unica's campaign metadata with other customer information once you have implemented Unica's Affinium Campaign?"
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Part 1 of 2 - Selecting Your Marketing Automation Solution
4/28/09Continue ReadingIt's a fact: Those organizations that take the time to carefully assess the current state of their marketing systems and processes before developing plans to enhance or replace their existing marketing systems will see better and faster returns on their investment.
In this two-part blog series, I'll discuss ways to ensure your marketing automation technology selection & implementation is successful. And, it doesn't start with the software; it begins with a vision.
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Future of Direct Mail Marketing
4/13/09Continue ReadingBased on recent studies profiled in eMarketer, 2008 would be the first year in decades in which spending and volume have decreased for direct mail; and moreover, 2009 is expected to see a decline of 8% in spending. A big part of the decline is due to the current tough economic conditions for the financial industry. However, this should not be a surprise to anyone, and in fact, is very much in line with the belief that analytics and customer knowledge should drive direct mail marketing. In the next few years:
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Reusability in Unica 7.5
3/30/09Continue ReadingAs a consultant for a leading marketing firm offering our clients real-time multichannel customer interaction, I am continually asked to build things in Unica that are reusable. One of the ground floor tenants of automation is the ability not only to automate a process, but to ensure that what is automated does not require high maintenance. Reusability is the buzz-word for low maintenance and should apply as well to the automation of your Unica applications. This article is the first in a series of articles about how to take full advantage of your Unica 7.5 environment - that is, how to make things reusable.
At the highest level, reusability for Unica 7.5 would pertain to your ability to take the entire environment - for instance a production environment - and recreate that environment elsewhere. That is exactly an exercise which we recently performed for one of our clients. Below are the steps to moving your Unica application from one environment (ENV#1) to another environment (ENV#2).
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Three short links about the future of campaign management
3/15/09Continue Reading- What Will Campaign Management Be Like In 2020? (Elana Anderson) -- Elana speculates about future developments in campaign management. Key trends mentioned include:
- Improvements in response attribution
- Support of new channels, e.g. SMS
- Open campaign management, i.e. CM software that integrates easily with all other types of systems in the enterprise
- Campaign management services moving to the cloud
- What Will Campaign Management Be Like In 2020? (Elana Anderson) -- Elana speculates about future developments in campaign management. Key trends mentioned include:
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Silver lining in very dark cloud?
3/12/09Continue ReadingThe Winterberry Group recently published a research study on trends in direct mail. http://www.winterberrygroup.com/research/wp/ The study found that direct mail spending in the U.S. declined by 3% in 2008 and volumes declined dramatically by about 4.5 overall, 12% in some verticals. This is unprecedented, after more than 30 years of steadily increasing streams of direct mail. What is more, the study projects that volume will decrease a further 10 - 15% this year. So is this the death knell for direct mail or will growth rates resume once the economy bounces back? The study actually predicts that direct mail will not resume its high growth rates, because the current tough economic conditions have forced direct marketers to innovate by focusing on more targeted approaches, less expensive online channels, etc.
