Test, Test, Test

You can test anything, but it hasn't always been cheap. Photograph by ewen and donabel.

When it comes to marketing campaigns, testing your campaign and segmentation theories—before unleashing them on customers—is a virtue, at least if you want efficient campaigns that result in sales, as well as satisfied customers.

Of course, testing any theory before you need it is a virtue. And perhaps we take this capability for granted, because really, isn’t the ability to test your business assumptions before acting on them quite revolutionary?

Failed Theory = Game Over (Historically)

Consider that throughout history, getting accurate feedback on an important supposition or strategy before putting it into practice simply wasn’t possible. Napoleon no doubt would have loved a dry run of the Battle of Waterloo. But he didn’t get it.

Or when highly accurate tests or simulations were available, they tended to be prohibitively expensive. The Apollo 8 mission may have orbited the moon, but astronauts died in an Apollo 1 test, and didn’t land on the moon until Apollo 11. In this case, practice made perfect, but it didn’t come cheap.

Marketing: Test, Test, Test

Unlike cavalry charges or moon shots, succeeding at CRM doesn’t require fanatical practice, and failure doesn’t mean sudden death—rather, the more metaphorical “death by a thousand cuts.” Namely, practice poor customer segmentation, marketing campaign management, lead handoff or sales territory design, and small mistakes add up to quite costly problems. Luckily, today we have marketing automation tools for quickly testing all hypotheses before unleashing them on prospects, customer or members.

The benefit of marketing automation software is two-fold. First, it helps marketing teams run customer segmentation simulations, to see which criteria produce an optimal number of hits. Second, these tools help you avoid slicing and dicing customers into overly small, statistically insignificant segments. Instead, design your segments, run some quick campaigns, see early results, and then apply those results to all marketing campaigns.

Nailing Financial Services Renewals

For example, one of our financial services clients operates in a country where, by law, their financial products have built-in expiration dates. Meaning, customers can choose to renew, or take their business elsewhere. It’s akin to health plans in the United States, with their open subscription and renewal periods.

Of course, the financial services firm needs to understand what makes clients want to renew, to track renewal dates and determine how far in advance of the renewal date they should contact people to sell them a new policy. So Innoveer helped this firm implement marketing campaign automation to test renewal campaigns at various points—one month before the expiration date, two months, and so on. As a result, the company has been able to maximize the number of members it retains, which from a cost standpoint is exactly what every business wants to do.

Data Gurus Need Not Apply

In the marketing realm, the typical company already has a sufficient quantity of in-house data to guide its marketing campaign and customer segmentation efforts. What can be lacking, however, are the in-house smarts required to see connections and correlations. In some organizations, this responsibility rests with an internal quant who can look at a set of data and intuit accurate, big-picture insights. But such people are rare.

So, rather than betting your business on finding a data-crunching superstar, we encourage our clients to develop those proficiencies through testing—as in, rigorously testing theories and refining them until they perform. Simply put, marketing automation software orders and wrestles your data into usable form, so that you can find the correlations you need to match up customers and prospects with products and services. It might not have the glamour of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, or battles with the Duke of Wellington, but it will get the job done quickly, reliably and affordably.

Learn More

To learn more about the best way to turn data into actionable intelligence for decision-making, see our six best practices for business intelligence.

We also have industry-specific advice about how to maximize marketing effectiveness: how medical device manufacturers can better apply targeting and segmentation; how pharmaceutical companies can benefit from data-crunching to craft a more customer-centric approach to sales; and advice for how high-technology companies can use precision marketing and other advanced campaign management strategies to achieve higher returns.

Also see our Executive Q&A with Monster.com vice president of CRM, Keith Landau, for insights into how Monster.com uses CRM to improve sales and marketing effectiveness, better segment and target customers and up- and cross-sell more successfully.