The small shop
Every Monday morning Frank logs into the CRM system, defines a list of criteria and pulls a series of lists of contacts to send their weekly promotions to. Frank then loads the lists into his email management system (EMS), creates the email templates and then launches each promotion blast. Frank repeats the process for his mobile message blasts. On a monthly basis he does the same thing for customers with birthdays in the coming month. They will receive a special Birthday offer. Four times a year, Frank pulls a list of all customers who have not purchased in the last six months. They will receive a special Reactivation promotion.
The big shop
David is responsible for marketing operations in a mid-sized company. His team manages a variety of applications including a CRM, an EMS, an e-commerce application and a BI application. David spends much of his time creating rules and ensuring that all the rules are consistent from application to application.
Last year David learned the hard way what happens when you forget to synchronize the rules. Suddenly customers were receiving the wrong promotional message because someone forgot to update the CRM rules after they had updated the e-commerce rules. David is worried about what will happen this year when he goes on vacation.
Problem
Frank’s company cannot afford to implement a marketing automation solution. The money is just not available.
David, for years, has been asking his boss to invest in a marketing automation solution to simplify marketing operations. David argues that an integrated solution would be so much easier to use and would avoid costly mistakes and reduce head count (although he will not commit to it until he can assess the impact of the new solution). David’s boss consistently responds that there is no ROI to support the cost and effort involved to implement a marketing automation solution.
The Solution
Both Frank and David need a way to streamline what they do. Frank spends far too much time doing non value-added work such as pulling and loading lists. David’s team spends far too much time replicating rules between various applications.
The answer to their problem is simple: install one application to manage the rules and automate the communications – rules such as pull this list and send this message if the contact is in this state (i.e. meets the selection criteria); or whenever a customer is flagged as a churn candidate by the BI application then send them this mobile message.
What Frank and David need is a customer state marketing application like Whatsnexx. It would allow them to build scenarios that govern the flow of communications to customers and prospects on a one-to-one basis in near real-time. Each scenario contains the business rules that direct the various applications (e.g. CRM, EMS, BI…) to execute the required function when appropriate.
For Frank this means no more pulling lists from one application and loading them into another. For David it means that he only needs to manage one rule set rather than crossing his fingers in the hope that he did not miss a rule in one of the applications.
The solution is simple and elegant: Put all the rules in one application and use it to govern the activities of the other applications. In essence, one application to rule them all!
