But what if I told you that you need to take one step further to achieve commercial success? Only by successfully combining the customer’s interest in the ‘customer-centric’ personalized offer and the organization’s objectives - in terms of budgets, strategic goals, or current purchase strategies - can you create a sustainable commercial business strategy.
Analytics to the rescue
But, marketeers, there is no reason for despair: there are analytic solutions that can integrate the customers’ interest and your organization’s objectives into your campaign management. When you draw up your direct marketing plan, analytics will guide you and help you select the target and the offers that suit your goals best, while respecting the pre-defined constraints.
As a marketing manager, you are facing very different constraints:
- Budget constraints: “I don’t want to spend more then 100.000 euro in this campaign” or “I don’t want to spend more than 1 euro per contact”, ...
- Organizational constraints: “Our call center can make 1.0000 outbound calls for this campaign, not more”, ...
- Commercial constraints: “I don’t want to contact the same customer more than once within 3 months” or “each customer in segment 1 must be contacted at least twice a year”, ...
The business objectives, on the other hand, will be a reflection of the enterprise strategy put into its current context:
- maximize the customer centricity: increase the number of offers that the customer positively responds to, and increase the market share;
- maximize the revenue generated by marketing actions within a fixed budget;
- maximize the ROI by reducing the cost while increasing the margins.
- Simulate various scenarios
Using an advanced analytic solution allows you to control your direct marketing plan by trying out various scenarios:
“What if I increased my budget by 10%?”
“What if I allowed myself to reach each household 3 times a year instead of 2?”
“What if I limited my campaign budget to 2 euro for specific high-risk segments?”
The marketeer can thus simulate various scenarios and evaluate the consequences of certain choices before actually venturing on the field in real life. The results of the simulations will be presented in a visual or figure-based overview.
An optimization tool will supply them with an overview of the operational, commercial or budget restrictions that narrow down their opportunities. It’s up to them to modify or lift them altogether. But at least the decision will be taken with full knowledge of all the facts and possibilities.
Discover the excess spending
Finally, an analytics tool can also optimize the campaign by indicating, even before the campaign is started, if too much money will be spent or which part of the budget will have no impact on the final result. The marketeer can then react by simulating the result when the budget is reduced.
The CEO of a large retailer recently said to me: “In order to get rich, you need to sell well, but you also need to buy well!” Nowadays, I would reply: “In order to get very rich, you need to sell well - meaning as much as possible with the lowest possible cost - WHAT YOU HAVE BOUGHT WELL - meaning with the best possible margins...” It’s a small but significant difference.