Executive Summary
How can you consistently beat your profitability goals � and your competitors? On the surface, it�s not that complicated. Just understand your customers better and faster than anyone else, and use that knowledge to target them more effectively than anyone else.
If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, while information about customers is plentiful, actionable customer intelligence often remains elusive. Customer data pours in from every conceivable channel. Assembling a coherent picture of customers from all those puzzle pieces � a picture on which you can confidently build a profitable marketing strategy � can be a formidable challenge.
To tackle this challenge, marketing automation solutions must provide three key functions:
- Campaign and customer analysis. A comprehensive marketing automation solution provides quantitative tools to analyze customers and prospects to help craft the right offers.
Advanced systems also provide statistical analysis and modeling to tightly define target markets and continuously improve through �closed-loop� marketing, in which the system self-learns from information gleaned from prior campaigns. - Campaign management. At the heart of any marketing automation solution is the capability to effectively automate essential campaign processes, including managing all communication with customers across multiple channels, tracking responses, and consolidating and reporting results.
- Consolidated view of the customer through data warehousing. These campaign analysis and automation functions draw on a customer-centric data warehouse that pulls customer data from all appropriate back office systems, channels and third-party data. This data warehouse supports a customer-oriented, cross-functional view needed for creating truly effective campaigns.
The most advanced generation of marketing automation technology seamlessly combines these functions to produce a centralized, fully integrated environment for total marketing performance.
Marketers can leverage the breadth of this functionality to maximize campaign returns through the four essential phases of a disciplined marketing process:
- Plan the most effective marketing campaign offers with a top-down strategic focus.
- Target campaign activities to tightly defined customer segments, and manage each segment in a way that fosters improved response.
- Act on those plans in a way that increases campaign velocity, flexibility and return on investment (ROI).
- Learn by measuring campaign results and integrating new knowledge into refined strategies and future campaigns.
To view the White Paper, download the pdf