Tocquigny

Marketing professionals are under tremendous pressure to produce results. In response, many are looking for a silver bullet to prove the worth of their marketing efforts.

Database marketing and quantitative marketing have become widely used and often abused terms within marketing departments and board rooms. A tremendous amount of literature has been written about developing a database marketing practice to improve and quantify marketing performance. As a result, many marketing professionals have been given marching orders to develop a database marketing practice, but very few have the experience, skills or time to successfully implement a database marketing practice within their organizations.

There is a tendency to approach database marketing with the misconception that creation of the actual database is the most important task at hand. Database marketing is the intelligent use of data and analytics to support marketing efforts. A database marketing practice integrates data, people, systems, reporting, analytics, statistics, strategy, and processes to improve marketing performance. It provides the platform required to support marketing performance measurement. It must support an organization’s mission and overall strategy. Misalignment with strategy, poor planning, conflicting goals, over-simplification of tasks, and limited resources lead to failed attempts and wasted resources.

Database marketing is not a stand alone practice – its reach crosses functional areas, processes and multiple data sources. To support a successful practice, an organization must:

• Dedicate the appropriate resources: data, processes, and people
• Create marketing objectives to support the overall company business goals
• Evaluate and perhaps change long standing processes
• Support database marketing activities across many functional departments
• Institutionalize the database marketing concept
• Practice patience

Implemented successfully, the end result will be tangible marketing intelligence in the form of reports, analytics and models that leads to improved marketing performance.

The most successful database marketing campaigns will include a variety of interdependent initiatives. While the process is often charted out in a linear fashion, it is almost never possible to implement in that way. However, with the organizational support described above database marketing can, over time, become deeply integrated into a company’s business and operate in a predictable scientific manner. A database marketing initiative will typically follow a three-part process.

1. Discovery/Insights

• Establish company alignment around business goals and marketing objectives
• Identify internal resources and evaluate functional competencies
• Recognize gaps and create a plan to fill the gaps
• Document existing marketing processes and critically evaluate each
• Create a process and functionality wish list and select only the most important
• Audit existing data sources, formats, availability, and quality
• Identify additional data sources to be included
• Assess each data source for usefulness and necessity. Take care not to store unnecessary data

2. Formulation/Validation

• Develop a database marketing strategy to support marketing objectives and company goals
• Prioritize initiatives using ROI metrics, resource availability, and dependencies
• Define database requirements
• Design a database
• Establish data hygiene and cleansing routines
  • Deduping
  • Householding
  • Merge/Purge
  • Standardization
  • Match codes
  • Migrating prospects to customers
  • Suppression
  • Coding for promotions
• Develop the marketing campaign
• Create metrics and measurements

3. Deployment/Optimization

• Launch and run the marketing campaign
• Capture campaign history and response data
• Develop meaningful, insightful reports
• Execute and automate campaign/event analysis
• Expand customer knowledge through profiling and segmentation
• Optimize marketing efforts through testing
• Utilize statistics, modeling, and data mining to improve marketing effectiveness and efficiency
• Implement a Marketing Performance Measurement system

Ideally, an organization would have the luxury of following this path as prescribed above. Though in reality, many of these initiatives must be addressed in tandem. In the beginning, campaigns may have to be analyzed in the absence of a database, lists have to be pulled before data is fully cleansed, and models are often built without complete data. Successful database marketing professionals will be able to juggle individual initiatives at different stages while simultaneously guiding the entire organization onto a smoother path.

Persistence pays off. Getting an initial database marketing practice launched and incorporated into the operations of an organization can be a long endeavor. Once this hurdle is passed, the benefits of maintaining discipline to follow the processes designed will have great benefits. The creation of a database marketing practice and a repository of marketing results are valuable assets for the company. They will provide the intelligence that marketing organizations lack to prove that company goals are being met. And if all goes well, restore credibility to the marketing team.