How do companies organise transpromo campaigns?
I came across an interesting question regarding Transpromo in a LinkedIn group – Susan Needham from NZ Post was particularly interested in how different sized clients organise their transpromo campaigns and whether it is usual for external consultancies get involved in this process.
This got me thinking about some of our experiences so I thought to share my response.A high level overview of the functions involved in a transpromo project are:
- business driving the why – defining the outcome, financial result
- marketing driving the what & who - defining the offer, message & targeting
- IT providing the how – data, processing, transfer mechanism and maybe project control
As the scale and complexity of the companies shrinks – the edges of these become quite blurry and involve fewer people with less specialist skills – as the complexity of organisation grows – the edges get much much sharper and additional bands begin to appear between them (specialist data mining and segmenting teams/consultants/designers etc).
We have worked with all the areas involved in this process so we would say that external consultants can be useful at any stage – but we try to always work our way out of the project. Once the people involved become experienced in what they want to achieve the role of the external consultant should start to reduce and the original need should for an external consultant will disappear.
The business probably has a clear idea of the outcomes they want to see and the marketing team will have an idea of how to turn this into an the offer that appeals to their client base – but designing for a dynamic transpromo statement is very different to what most designers get involved with – so some external help at this point is useful and usual.
If they have segmented their client base already and built their customer journeys then they can probably work with their IT people to flag each customer record with a segment ID and then simply tie that to some offer collateral to be added to the statement.
This is what we recommend most of our clients do – it removes a lot of the need for constantly re-engineering the actual statements and business rules and simplifies production of the statements. After all it is much easier to shift a clients segment ID as you learn more about them than it is to constantly tweak a statement design!
As for the marketing analytics side – that really depends on how the company operates! Our larger clients track response rates across call centres, branches, websites, IVR, SMS shortcodes, phone in numbers, offer codes etc. For smaller companies it is much simpler – watch the money!
The range and complexity of options for organisations is rapidly changing meaning that what was once impossible or too expensive for a smaller organisation is probably going to become available within 12 to 48 months in a more automated and simplified form. Think how CRM has evolved from complex in-house implementations to simple SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings like SugarCRM and Salesforce.com.
Happy to answer questions – just email me via the contact form or leave a comment on this post.