Marketing Campaign Strategy is all about fulfilling 4R’s requirement in order to keep your customer engaged and thus having more chances of conversion or engagement. Yes, the 4R’s – sending the Right message to the Right at the Right time on the Right channel.

Good marketing strategy revolves around getting these 4R’s upright, so we touch our precise intended audience on their preferred channel (means of communication) at their preferred time (without annoying them with over communications) and with audience’s specifically needed content/product (through personalization).

Here are some of the key things should be considered while devising a good marketing campaign strategy:

Pre-campaign analysis

This is the first and most critical step in Marketing Campaign Strategy. One should precisely answer the below questions:

1. Who should be the targeting audience for a Marketing Campaign?
2. Who should be excluded from this Marketing Campaign?
3. What would be the source of targeting? Is it an online system (like CRM) or data import on basis? Is that customer data coming from Website engagement behavior, Survey submissions, Social Media, DMP, ?
4. What type of campaign is that? Is it a critical operational communication and should be sent to all customers? or, if its just Marketing insights or seminar event-type communication and should be sent to a subset of customer that are opted-in for such communications?
5. What would be the success criterion of our campaign? Is it merely improved engagement on the website or actual conversions? Do we have any quantitative measures available for comparisons at a later stage?
6. What would be the mode of communication? Is it only Email or SMS or do we need to send direct mail as well for the ones whose email id is for example not available or invalid but the customer has opted in for direct postal email?
7. Should we send follow-up communications like last date reminders?

Personalization

Personalization is surely the key to the success of the marketing campaign. Every customer is special and they want brands to treat them in a similar way. Nobody wants to be treated like a stranger. Doing the background work and know customer before communicating them is need of an hour. The content or the product to be sold/upsell or cross-sell to them should be aligned accordingly. For example, targeting a customer already settled with a home loan product from Mortage company would not be interested new home loan product options rather cross-selling with mortgage insurance type of product would be more relevant and would have better conversion rates. So, the content of communication should be aligned with the journey state of each customer specifically.

Another key behavior is personalized links where user can directly see customer specific product information rather than asking user to input PII and then giving him/her information.

Follow up/reminders

Follow up campaigns like reminders should be well planned and must be consider the below factors prior to sending:

1. Re-calculating targeting criterion: It’s not always accurate to say that “targeting for the is the same as the main campaign as well“. Customers can switch to different journey or engagement state from the time actual campaign was sent and by the time reminders are planned to be sent. A fairly simple example would be a customer could get Opt-out from Marketing communication list or added him/herself to Do not contact registry (DNCR), now sending that person a reminder could land you up in the legal problem. Another example is if you send a seminar event communication to a person living in a suburb but it has now changed the State or is deceased. So, always recalculate the targeting may be with the same filter but you will get updated snapshot for sending.
2. Wait time: What should be the appropriate time for followup/reminder communication? At the time, the answer lies in business need centered around customers or and at other in technical implementation. For example, you won’t be sending abandon cart to follow-ups even after say 4 hours on the same day when your data feeds themselves are refreshed overnight from CRM systems.
3. Filter with previous deliveries: Do consider recipients of main or preceding delivery as a filter prior to calculating the final audience and sending follow-ups. Consider the fact, you have recalculated the audience and have an updated snapshot, but it includes new customers as well. So, you won’t be sending them an email when they haven’t received the main delivery itself.

Tracking

Based on your success measurement criterion, do ensure appropriate web tags or UTM or parameter are added to all CTAs on the delivery and are well trackable. Delivery label or code naming conventions should be consistent, so you can easily track them on Web Analytics as well as consolidate them with other campaigns in the future. For instance, if there is an annual campaign and you want to track and measure the engagement or conversion YoY data, its advisable to add prefixes like “Annual” and Year number alongwith type of campaign.

Control Group

Most of the time, previous data is unavailable and it would hence become difficult to do comparative analysis and visualize the success of . Control Group provides an efficient way to deal with the scenario. A control group is a subset audience which will not receive the delivery but extracted from the main target only. It is used to track post-delivery behavior and campaign impact by making a comparison with the behavior of population, which has received the delivery.

Option to Opt-out

Never consider Opt-out as a way to the customer being disconnecting to the brand. Loyal customers or brand advocates are earned and hence would come back based on customer experience rather than merely delivery experience. So, always keep a clean Opt-out list and use it as exclusion criteria for better success. As a best practice, you can maintain Opt-out lists or marketing preferences based on:

1. Channel (SMS, Email, Direct Mail or All Channels)
2. Type (Marketing, Seminar or Events)
3. Campaign level (specific to a campaign rather than global)

Maintaining Opt-out list has added benefits including:

• Do not skew the success of
• No legal penalities
• No point to spam un-interested audience
• Save time & money

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