Understanding the Importance of Sustainable and Scalable Processes
Do more with less – it’s a phrase every marketing leader has heard. You’re constantly being challenged to grow customer engagement, provide meaningful experiences, and consistently fill pipelines, all while decreasing expenses and resources. It’s a tall task – especially as marketing teams continue to get leaner and the day-to-day grind becomes more fast-paced and time-sensitive. But it’s a task that can be accomplished with a combination of the right tools, smart choices, and repeatable processes.
The Power of Marketing Automation
While you may never be able to eliminate all of the rework in your marketing strategy, leveraging tools like marketing automation can help eliminate repetitive steps that negatively impact performance. Rather than creating and recreating emails and campaigns from scratch, marketing automation allows anyone on your team the ability to clone user-friendly email templates and then make brand-approved adjustments.
Just think about what your creative services team might be able to do with all of that extra free time each week.
But when it comes to marketing automation, it’s not just about making your emails and campaigns scalable. Think bigger. It can help automate and elevate your social media, lead generation, landing pages, segmentation rules, and more. It’s a tool that can save you time across the board by creating repeatable processes and automated efficiencies, and has resulted in 1 in 3 marketing executives proclaiming it’s improved their department’s productivity and ROI.
Figure Out What Works and Repeat
The marketing teams that do the most with limited resources are the ones that understand what works and then replicates it. This goes beyond simple email campaigns and what marketing automation can do. This advanced tactic lets your team take entire programs – like an event or direct mail campaign for example – and replicate all of the content, workflows, materials, etc. It’s a great way to implement best practices and maximize your team’s time.
As the old saying goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Image this example. Each month, your company onboards several new accounts and part of the onboarding process involves them receiving a personalized welcome box with some company swag. It’s an easy way to say thank you and enhance the customer journey but it can be time consuming. Think about the effort and resources it would take each month to gather information for each new client, compile a mailing list, design each custom box, order the swag, print the boxes, assemble the boxes, ship them, and then finally track the results. If you’re not exhausted after reading that, I’m impressed.
Now consider this – if your team develops a process that can be cloned each month, the process becomes a well-oiled machine. They can use a CRM to house the contact information and lists, include personalized variable fields on the creative, and standardize processes for printing, shipping and tracking engagement. Or better yet, they can find a tool that can take care of the creative, fulfilment and shipping – further freeing up their time.
Reaping the Benefits
At the end of the day, if you’re like most, your marketing budget isn’t getting any bigger and sustainable and scalable processes and programs are going to become more important than ever before.
While it’s nice to relieve your marketing team from performing repetitive tasks, on a larger scale, the right tools and smart choices can do so much more. You’ll be able to regain hours, lower your operational costs, reach a larger audience, and measure concrete success. You’ll truly be able to reach the marketing holy grail – doing more with less.
Are you interested in learning about how Strata can help you scale your marketing efforts? Contact us today and see what we can do for you.
Get the Right Analytics at the Right Time for More Dynamic, Successful Campaigns
When is it time to measure your new mover campaign’s performance – when it’s over? With a multichannel campaign, of course it’s essential to keep track of the many moving parts. But what if you could do even more? A campaign dashboard should give you a detailed, up-to-the-minute view of your campaign’s performance – so you can course correct as necessary, improve cost effectiveness, and leverage successes immediately.
Feedback – Now
New residents make decisions quickly, and you’re delivering a lot of information in a brief period. Give your direct marketing campaign the best chances of achieving optimal response. A campaign dashboard worthy of your marketing strategy should give you feedback in real time. This offers two enormous advantages:
- Course Correction
If something isn’t working, you can recover quickly rather than learning only from hindsight. If you initially ran four or five different digital ads, but your dashboard is showing that engagement is coming mainly from just one or two of those, there’s your opportunity to pull the ones that aren’t working and double down on those that are. - See What’s Working and Do More of That
If your campaign is getting response from segments you didn’t anticipate, you can adjust to focus more attention on them. Let’s say you expected to receive responses from an even demographic distribution seeking a primary care physician, but your dashboard shows a surge in responses from women ages 24 to 34 looking for pediatrics. You can adjust your campaign to home in on those people and start building affinity even sooner.
Details, Please
A robust campaign dashboard will give you more than an overview – more than clickthrough rates or total of BRCs received. We now have the technology to quickly parse data to break down responses by age bracket, gender, income screen, neighborhood, and other demographic segments. You can also look at responses according to their interest in your products and services, whether you’re offering office supplies or ongoing healthcare.
In addition, you can learn a lot about which aspects of your campaign are working well. For instance, compare traditional business reply cards with electronic response. (Side note: Traditional BRCs are still highly effective in healthcare, where 69 percent of new-mover responses come through this medium.) Did Jane Smith access your website with the personalized URL on your direct mailer? Is your banner ad getting more clickthroughs than your display ad? All of this should be at your fingertips so that it informs not only your current campaign but future campaigns as well.
Consumers expect personalized service and relevant communications. To offer that you have to know, as soon as possible and in as much detail as possible, who’s engaging with your campaign and how. The sooner you get to know your market, the sooner you can convert prospective buyers into loyal customers.
SmartMove’s personalized campaign dashboard gives you a window into your new mover campaign. Contact us to learn more.
How to Give Your Direct Mail Lists a Good Spring Cleaning
Your mailing lists are the linchpin in your direct mail campaign. But just like closets packed too tightly with unused clothes or a basement overflowing with outdated equipment, a direct mail list rife with incorrect data, duplicate addresses or outdated information clutters your marketing efforts. Now is the ideal time to commit to “spring clean” your direct mail lists.
Data Becomes Outdated More Quickly Than Last Season’s Fashions
Mailing lists are the foundation for effective, targeted marketing outreach. Yet they’re incredibly difficult to manage. The clutter and disorganization happens subtly: recipients move, names change and lists aggregate from varying sources leading to misaligned data. Compounding the problem is the lack of centralized ownership dedicated to maintaining and cleaning up these fundamental resources.
The costs can sneak up on you as well. The obvious ones include wasted campaign dollars spent on purchasing duplicate or similar data as well as excess production, postage and execution. Less discernible are the costs to workflow and operations; time wasted by busy marketing managers looking for the correct, most current lists… and then correcting them.
The price is ultimately paid in the underperformance of your direct mailer; in unopened or returned mail, ineffective targeting, inability to properly segment and a lack of personalization. The solution, like cleaning out that cluttered closet, may not feel glamorous, but can be highly rewarding in terms of increasing in the efficiency and success of your direct mail campaigns and your data-driven marketing efforts overall.
If You Haven’t Worn It In The Last 6 Months…
Well, if you haven’t taken a hard look at your data in the last six months, chances are you’re due for a thorough list cleansing. Take these steps and you’ll be on the way to cleaner, more accurate mailing lists that save you time and money, and ensure optimum performance of your campaigns:
- Give The Job To One Person
By assigning ownership and management to one person, not only are the lists easier to update and control, the workflow is streamlined under one “roof” and everyone knows where to go to submit updates, and who to ask for what they need when they need it. Think of this person as your Data Ambassador and assign them the role of a dedicated Mr. (or Ms.) Fix-it to keep your (mail) house in order. - Define Or Update List Management Standards
If you haven’t already, set standards for managing mailing lists and how they will be maintained. If those standards already exist, now is the perfect time to revisit those standards and processes, to evaluate how they’re working and if they’ve evolved with your latest data optimization strategies. Ensure there are strict enough data entry and modification standards to inform and enforce compliance. Update standards as needed to lay the ground for more fertile direct mail efforts. And ensure that each time you purchase a new list, these standards continue to be adhered to. - Refresh Outdated Contacts
Tap into the post office’s National Change of Address (NCOA) service to ensure your list stays current, even when your addressees move. If you manage direct mailing in-house check to see if the software being used includes this service. Or, if you’re using a third-party list vendor, ask if they offer this as part of their standard services. Additionally, cross-check with Customer Service and Sales teams, as well as CRM software also used by your team, as there are times these sources have information that is more current than external data providers. - Eliminate Duplicates
With a proper merge/purge you can eliminate duplicates, but more difficult to detect are the tiny changes or errors that hide duplicate entries. For instance, you may have two records for the same person, but one of the records has a misspelled email address. Thus if you only de-dupe by email, then that duplicate record will remain. If you don’t have the expertise in your team to help rectify this, it is a great time to reach out to data specialists in your organization, find software that will automatically resolve it or ask your agency or list provider for help with this. - Organize And Align Your Lists
You have multiple lists, utilized across multiple campaigns, updated by different people all the time. And they each have slightly different organizational and formatting methods. As the number of people touching those lists increases, the potential for human error creeps up rapidly. Like lining up your shoes, employing naming standards, storage instructions and access and versioning rules are a handful of ways you can facilitate accuracy, consistency and hygiene across multiple lists and versioning. But at some point, there’s a limit to what even the best human practices can achieve. This is where technology and software solutions can come into play. - Utilize Software For Mailing List Management
When multiple users across different departments, locations and job functions need access to the same lists, keeping them in a central location reduces the burden on the list managers and expedites the campaign process. It also helps ensure that only the appropriate and/or most current lists are made available. Cloud-based solutions where you can store and manage your lists via one tool are well-suited for this purpose and allow you to maintain greater control of the data.
Often, third-party vendors offer hygiene and optimization as a part of mailing list services. If you aren’t currently working with a list vendor, or are unsatisfied with the hygiene and “current-ness” of their data, now may be the time to consider another source.
Additionally you could look into Marketing Resource Management software that includes list management as a feature, or a system designed specifically for web-based direct mail execution. The technology equivalent of the Ultimate Closet Organizer, these cloud-based applications can include all the benefits noted above as well as others you may not be aware of. Some applications allow you to house your direct mailers within the platform, and sync your lists directly to specific mailers, allowing you to execute the entire direct mail campaign within the application.
At Strata we have decades of experience in data-driven marketing, list and data services and technology solutions that support and optimize direct mail campaigns. Clients also choose to utilize our full-service production services, including variable data printing and mailing, so they have end-to-end support instead of having to coordinate efforts through multiple vendors. To learn more about how we can help you optimize your data-driven marketing efforts, contact us here or call 610-941-6100.