Blog

Each year, marketers are faced with the question of how they can increase response and conversion rates to drive revenue and at the same time reduce overall campaign and delivery costs.

In other words, ‘do more for less’. To achieve these objectives, organisations are re-evaluating communication strategies and deploying relevant marketing technology to drive higher returns on campaign investment.

Over the past seven years, neteffekt has worked with a large number of companies to help them achieve these objectives. From working with our clients we’ve built and a lot of experience and as a result we’ve created ten top tips for increasing campaign return on investment.

1.) Cleanse your data and keep it up to date

Whether you are marketing to businesses or consumers, the quality of customer data can directly impact the cost and performance of any campaigns you execute. Poor data quality can result in wasted & returned mailings, lower campaign response and conversion rates, damage to your marketing reputation and, in some cases, financial penalties.

Therefore, it is important for every business to ensure they have procedures in place to ensure the highest possible data quality and accuracy.

2.) Learn from what your customers do and how they react

The establishment of a clean and well maintained marketing database or single customer view is only part of the armoury in understanding customers and targeting them with effective campaigns.

Analysis of past behaviour - such as tracked responses, browsing patterns, transaction history and survey feedback is essential in understanding your data and informing you of groups and profiles of customers and prospects that are more likely to buy certain products or services.

Customer surveys deployed at the appropriate time in a multi-channel campaign strategy can of course simply provide feedback on customer satisfaction but, used in an integrated fashion, they can also allow customers to automatically segment themselves for later stages of a campaign. In other instances it is equally valuable to spread out the gathering of data across many campaigns – the key is to have a strategy to continuously engage your customers and learn from them. Information gathered directly is invaluable when it comes to personalising communications.

3.) Focus your campaigns using targetting

Having spent time and money on making sure your data is clean and usable; it would be a shame to then waste that investment by delivering the right message to the wrong group of people.

It is imperative that you are able to segment and target your audience correctly, as you are almost certainly committing two sins: sending valuable prospects inappropriate messaging that they will never respond to; and spending time and money communicating a good message to people who will never buy your product or service. You should consider the following:

Make sure you are always testing your targeting. Use control groups and A/B testing to constantly measure the effectiveness of your campaign ideas against each other, in order to fine tune your target groups and messaging as quickly as possible.

Always sanity check your segmentation and targeting. Select a few individuals from your database and physically check what they will receive. Is it relevant?

4.) Make it relevant and personalise your message content

No matter how well the message is designed and constructed, if the content is not relevant to the recipient, campaign response and conversion rates will always remain low. Personalisation is key to improving response and conversion rates as well as maintaining recipient loyalty and reducing opt-outs.

Message personalisation is not just about inserting a greeting at the top of the message. Think about how you read the news – you scan the page for headlines that interest you before reading the articles. If the headlines aren’t relevant you’ll turn the page, delete the e-mail or close the browser. Personalisation is your opportunity to put relevant messages in front of a customers based on your understanding of them.

5.) Give respect to customer channel preferences

It is extremely important to ascertain and respect the customer’s preferred delivery channel making sure that you are always aware of ‘opt-out’ requests. This requires an organisation to ensure they are constantly checking and managing this information in the database.

Give the customer the ability to opt-out of different channels and information services. By just offering the customer a global opt-out from communications, you could miss opportunities in your customer base. Many customers are happy to be communicated with on certain channels, while finding others intrusive, and better still you can let them tell you which ones they like.

6.) Avoid the junk mail folder!

Delivering e-mail messages to a recipient’s inbox is becoming increasingly difficult with ISP’s and large corporations deploying anti-spam measures. Such measures include IP-address blacklisting, which can result in reduced throughput, to recipient-side issues such as messages being filtered and categorised as spam and increasingly images not being displayed.

Here are some of the deliverability issues you will need to consider:

Permission: Confirm that the recipient who is asking for your information have actually requested to be on your list. This can be confirmed by using a double opt-in approach. Also ask the recipient to declare the message as ‘not junk’. This will ensure your domain is not blocked by corporate spam filters.

Data maintenance: Remove undeliverable e-mail addresses from your database promptly. ISP’s monitor e-mail bounces and can block your domain if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message content: When creating your message content make sure you choose the wording carefully (avoiding phrases such as medication, making money etc. that would be filtered), reduce the use of images in an HTML format message to a minimum.

Integrated spam checking can do this work for you.

Always consider how your message will look if the recipient has blocked images in e-mail.

Marketing reputation: – ISP’s use reputation services to check e-mail senders with regards to their e-mail practices and policies. It is worth registering your company with these services.

ISP whitelisting: – All of the ISP’s have programs that will allow e-mail delivery as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Compliance: – Ensure your delivery polices meet the rules of e-mail delivery introduced in compliance legislation.

7.) Continually measure campaign success

To measure the success of a campaign and the resulting changes to the revenue streams, various strategies can be assigned to customer responses within campaigns. Electronic channels especially offer low-cost methods of tracking responses back to their originating marketing activity. Online activities can be handled using ‘web’ tags - these web-tracking functions ensure post-click tracking for online campaigns (e-mail and web), and trace resulting transactions to demonstrate the financial impact of a campaign.

All the information collected (reactions, conversions, transactions, etc.) must be used to enrich customer and prospect profiles and inform future targeting, message relevance and measurement strategies.

8.) Automate campaign processes wherever possible

Companies are encountering real difficulties in improving productivity and increasing return on investment on their marketing activities. This is particularly noticeable for traditional paper-based campaigns, which typically involve a large number of people in repetitive manual processes: extraction and consolidation of customer data, address cleaning and validation, de-duplication (person or household), content creation, personalisation, routing, couponing, etc.

The consequences of these friction points are multiple: delays at each step, under-capacity, manual operations with risks of human error, unsatisfactory overall reactiveness and the inability to automate recurring or low-volume campaigns. The resulting bottlenecks impede your ability to run an increased volume of more targeted campaigns to drive greater response rates and revenue.

The answer is to provide the technological means to orchestrate the processes involved in both online and offline campaigns. This solution includes modelling, streamlining and automating all appropriate marketing activities to free up marketing resource to focus on “one off” events.

Here are some examples of marketing automation that our customers have benefited from:

Data cleansing: – often data cleansing is undertaken sporadically and is a highly manual process where data is extracted in bulk, sent over to a third party for cleansing and then returned for manual load back into the marketing database. Most major data cleansing companies now offer an online data cleansing service allowing automation of data cleansing on an ongoing basis. Such automation offers three main benefits; firstly cost savings for the cleansing - as only changed data is sent for cleaning rather than the whole database, costs are lower; further cost savings are gained as the automation frees up resources to work on other things; finally because the process is continuous the overall quality of the marketing database is increased.

Loyalty management: – loyalty programs require a continuous cycle of communications with customers at key times. Some communications (such as monthly statements) can be scheduled and come at same for each customer within the cycle. Other communications must be triggered based on individual customers actions, examples include: registration and welcome messages; targeted cross-sell offers; reactivation messages for lapsed customers; and anniversary messages. Automation of these types of communications is key to maintaining an individual relationship with each customer.

Subscription & policy renewal: – in cases where you are selling subscriptions or policy’s that are renewable monthly, annually, or after a number of years, it is critical to act at the appropriate time to retain each individual customer. Through automation these key events can be wired into marketing cycles to take advantage of these opportunities.

9.) Manage the leads you generate to conclusion

Once you’ve gone to all this trouble to generate activity, it would be a terrible shame not to act on them. Sadly an awful lot of leads fall between the cracks for a variety of reasons.

An integrated lead management process involves six steps:

• Nurture leads in the marketing pipeline
• Filter and qualify leads based on agreed criteria
• Distribute mature leads to the sales force based on assignment rules
• Ensure those mature leads are handed over to the sales pipeline
• Continue to incubate leads that are handed back
• Track and report on the outcome of those leads to close the loop

Putting these steps into practice allows you to be sure that all the hard work that you have done in marketing will have the greatest chance to be acted upon and turn into business.

What now?

We’re sure this will have has given you some ideas and you may even have a plan, but what comes next can seem a little scary.

Putting these tops into action may well be simpler than you think and f you want to talk your ideas through further, then please get in touch