If I were a retail marketer planning this fall’s Back-to-School campaign one of my goals could be to improve next year’s media spend by identifying the most responsive media, and by taking the opportunity to use the information to compile a list of optin email addresses. Ideally, I would also like to run a couple of A/B splits on the creative and the offer to get a better lift next year.
The campaign I have in mind consists of various drive-to-web media ads in local newspapers. A contact who provides an email address will receive a drive-to-store coupon that he can print or show on his smart phone. At the store level, we need the point-of-sales system to capture the personalized bar-code on the coupon and the content of the shopping cart or, at worse, simply provide a count of the number of coupons redeemed by store.
Whether I like it or not, I need to talk to IT. I know what they are going to say, but hey, maybe I will get lucky this time and, at a minimum, get a count of coupons redeemed. That, at least, would allow me to calculate a rudimentary campaign ROI.
IT’s response is predictable: “We don’t do direct mail in-house. The web sign-up page is about a month away, and the point-of-sale coupon capture is feasible. The problem is that your marketing project needs to talk to three different computer systems: web, point-of-sale, data mining. A project manager will need to be assigned to the project in order to coordinate the project and get access to the right programmers. We will have one available in about three months”.
Unfortunately three month’s is Christmas, not Back-to-School!
What I need is a way to rapidly tie together the systems I need to achieve my simple campaign goals.
- I need to build a web form that captures email address, salutation, first name, last name and postal code. That should not take more than a week. Landing page solutions like Unbouce™ can drastically streamline this task.
- I can use the company’s current email system, CakeMail™, to store the email list and build the emails
- I need a flat file to capture the point-of-sale data set that interests me. This is a SQL query that IT can create for me.
- I need to dump this flat file into a report generator or even Excel where I can calculate my ROI by source, creative and offer code.
What I need is a simple and easy way to orchestrate the flow of data from source to destination in a low IT impact fashion. In essence I need a marketing RAD tool.
The marketing RAD tool I would use is Whatsnexx Designer™. It allows me to model my marketing scenarios quickly and easily. I do this by defining customer events and resulting actions. I have an easy way to track each individual customer and customer profile in my marketing ecosystem. I can easily connect to any application such as the company’s email system and flat files. I can dump data into any database or as a flat file.
In order to do this with Whatsnexx™ I need to create two scenarios: one to handle the list management, and one to handle the database update when a customer redeems a coupon.
This scenario allows me to manage the email list and the responses to the web sign up using the company’s current email system.
This scenario allows me to manage the coupon redemption from the flat file produced by an SQL query of the point-of-sale data. I will then use the campaign database to produce my reports and calculate the ROI for the various media, promotions and creatives.
So now I can go back to IT and ask them how long to do the project when all they need to do is:
- Host a web form that generates an XML ticket with five fields: Source code, email address, salutation, first name, last name
- Activate the campaign coupon function at the POS between specified dates
- Query the point-of-sale data and produce a flat file of coupon redemptions
IT’s response is two weeks for hosting any new web pages. Coupon activation requires two weeks’ notice, and the SQL query can be done with five days’ notice.
This is why I would use Whatsnexx™. Instead of managing an IT project I would now be able to focus on getting the team working on delivering the design and creatives for the web page, the A/B split promotions, booking ad space, and working with sales and merchandising to determine the final content of the Back-to-School campaign.
