Marketing Operations Management
Our client is the customer relationship marketing (CRM) function within a large, Fortune 100 retailer.
The CRM group supports execution of more than 400 distinct real-time offers across the retailer’s ten marketing channels. The CRM group is comprised of over 100 marketing users from five distinct teams representing several of the retailer’s business units.
After a successful implementation of an enterprise-wide real-time marketing function, the retailer found itself in a position where it had very little structure to manage the unique challenges of a sophisticated and rapidly expanding real-time interaction process. All of the projects, approvals and communications were managed using email. The average project had between 50 and 100 email communications between the various teams and stakeholders. They had limited ability for tracking and accountability of the current team workload. This lack of visibility and discipline was creating duplicate efforts and inefficiencies.
The team understood they needed to:
Pinpoint consultants worked with the retailer to apply the discipline and automation of a Marketing Resource Management system (Teradata Aprimo) to the real-time offers and interactions process. This solution included a central repository needed to house all offer documentation, offer decision rules, history of assigned and completed tasks, process notes and activity.
The processes needed to be automated within the software and standardized in the Teradata Aprimo system. It also needed to be flexible enough to manage a continuously changing set of offers and decision rules in a real-time interaction environment.
The solution provided improved communications, streamlined and automated campaign instructions, enhanced processes, training materials and reports for better insights and analytics.
Create VisibilityA weekly meeting with the business units would provide a snap-shot of the offers needing to be deployed. This block of 300+ offers was added to the intake sheets and parsed out among the developers. Once distributed, the marketing operations team had no visibility into task owners. For example, once a job was submitted by email to the developers, the only way to know if the current owner/step of a job was on track was to send an email and manually chase down the job to determine owner and current status.
Pinpoint consultants assigned a role within Teradata Aprimo and created rules to automate the way they assigned the work. They also added a task to confirm that the offers are going into production and aligned it with a new process with greater visibility into where the developers were within the process.
Tracking was put in place for all jobs.
The graphic of the process tasks shows multiple activities—some in tandem—that needed coordination:
Improve Offer EffectivenessThe marketing operations team held weekly meetings with the business unit stakeholders to determine the real-time offer strategy for the week. Based on cross-sell/up-sell opportunities, there were excel sheets created for each business unit, based on individual business objectives.
The business unit objectives guided the creation of offers based on those goals. The marketing operations teams used reports from the previous offers in order to test the analysis and determine which offers would be deployed across which customers each week. These strategies were compiled for each business unit, but they needed a way to show the offers across the group to help avoid any potential duplication and for a better prioritization of the offers based on revenue goals. To do this, Pinpoint helped to create a "strategy grid" to better organize the goals and offers for each team.
Offers were determined by customer behavior goals to:
Pinpoint consultants created an offer platform where stakeholders could manage their offers and associated business rules. The strategy grid is updated as the offers are created and now an automated approval process is in place to confirm when offers are ready to go to the development team.
A prioritization process is also in place so the most important things get done in higher priority order.
Today, the process begins with a business review of offer effectiveness and the team can easily modify offer inventory and create, delete or deactivate offers. The combination of the business unit processes and production processes—as opposed to a traditional campaign process—now shows where every task is checked off the list.
The marketing strategists have tasks throughout the workflow: initiation of the process, build of their intake sheets and associated tasks so that a final sheet is completed at the end of the week. All the while the production team is able to make the updates as data is flowing back and forth towards the final and approved offers. The tandem activities all converged on a pre-determined timeline. This improved accountability and, consequently, the relationships between the teams were improved to eliminate “finger-pointing” if something went wrong.
Turning Negatives into PositivesThe old process included a negative list of issues. Metrics were in place for:
Today the team is able to measure the effectiveness of each of the offers in the queue.
Some of the improvements include:
The most valuable improvement has come in the number of offers deployed each week. Volume has nearly doubled. Previously, during the holidays the team could only accept 200 offers a week, then the team would deploy more real-time offers on the basis of “if you have time to get these added. ” Now they can deploy nearly double that amount, and not just during the active holiday season, but for each week of the year.
Today Teradata Aprimo is the central repository for all real-time offer documentation, activity, instructions and process notes history. Processes were built with an initial required upfront review step to quickly determine if there was enough information supplied to conduct a detailed review of the job requirements.
Workflow management provides: