For many years outbound marketing has been using a familiar playbook, create segments, create offer/content and then combine these into a campaign. Many marketers have been quite great at this model, offering many different segments and offers/content increasing ROI for companies 10-fold. But with new technology and additional "big data" starting to come into the stream, the campaign model has become outdated.
Brief Campaign History
The modern era of outbound marketing has not evolved from the same strategies we had when we were using brute force. In the old days, we compiled lists of customers, maybe in a database, but more than likely in a spreadsheet, which was populated by hand from signup cards or the like. From the spreadsheet, marketers would send hard pieces of mail to their customers, using the content as more of a direct response branding campaign. There was nothing targeted in the messages, because there was little known about these customers. Marketers would also have telemarketing teams calling these customers to follow-up, again, nothing targeted. That same customer might have just made a transaction with you yesterday, but there was no knowledge of this in the outbound channel.
As technology started to improve, so did the method of capturing data. With the advent of loyalty cards, customers would give information about themselves in return for rewards from the brand. As a result, brands started to track transactions tied to a loyalty account giving new insight into customer behavior. At the same time, email entered the picture and marketing to customers became a lot cheaper than direct mail, but not necessarily better.
So at this point marketers had a database of customers they could query along with their buying behavior with the brand. This is where the dawn of campaign management tools started to come into the mainstream. With these tools marketers were able to segment their customers more efficiently and create an ever increasing number of offers/content. Predictive modeling techniques started coming to the foreground and segmentation became more fine.
But through all this remained the notion of a campaign. Campaigns are the communication patterns and list pulls which marketers organize their outbound communications. There may be multiple campaigns, which include multiple segments within each, however the analysis and strategizing behind outbound has centered around the notion of a the campaign paradigm, the same as when there were just lists of names in an excel spreadsheet, just more complex.
Continuous Outbound Marketing
As we move into the age of digital marketing, technology is ready for outbound marketers to change their approach. No longer are marketers trapped using set communication schedules and large amounts of segments. Technology has enabled an opportunity for an outbound marketing change, not just in how customers are targeted, but how and when customers receive communication and how brands analyze the results.
In any brand customers are made up of many individuals, yet marketers tend to communicate to customers on their schedule. For instance, a weekly email blast to all customers communicating sales items for the week. Or if the marketers are more savvy, it's weekly to all their active customers and there are a few different offers based on their past behavior. However, in general marketers are not taking into account the customer relationship as a whole when designing these campaigns.
Continuous marketing turns around the process from being task specific, to customer specific. It takes each customer through a journey and respects their relationship with the brand. The beauty behind continuous marketing is every customer is on their own continuous timeline.
Define Customer Lifecycle
There are multiple layers to the continuous marketing process with the first layer being the customer lifecycle. Lifecycle can be defined as the different stages of a relationship between the customer and brand. This could vary from brand to brand, but in general there are new customers who hopefully become loyal and then eventually churn, and the marketer has to recapture them before they become dormant.
A simple example of a Customer Lifecycle
In the simple example above, a customer is new, then they go through a "dating" process called capture and then move onto retention. In this example, retention is the lifecycle where all customers should funnel. The ultimate goal becomes have as many customers in the retention lifecycle as possible as these are the most loyal. The strategy inside each lifecycle should be to change the behavior of the customer for them to become retention customers, your loyal database.
Define Each Lifecycle Workflow
Simple example of the Capture Lifecycle
In this example, a new customer, defined as their first transaction, receives a communication with content/offers based on the information obtained through the CRM/POS system and loyalty card. This communication happens the very next day, so this workflow (not campaign) is being run everyday. Therefore, each customer goes onto their own journey in a continuous fashion. In this example, if a customer redeems 2 offers (or has 2 additional purchases) they are funneled into the retention lifecycle. A customer will remain in capture until they either have 2 redemptions or a predetermined amount of time, which then leads them to either retention or recapture.
As you can see these workflows become extremely complex very quickly, but good planning can make this easy. Once the workflow is built, it runs automatically, hence the term marketing automation. To add complexity, within each of those communication boxes are multiple segments or behavior profiles enhancing each customer interaction based on their first purchase, a model using 3rd party data to predict what kind of customer they may be or any other multitude of other strategies. As behavior changes, customers move through workflows in real-time, there are no big campaign drops or weekly emails (those are for your dormant customers).
All customers begin to fall into their own communication patterns based on individual behaviors. As they move to retention, more understanding is gained such as increasing or decreasing frequency allowing for new tactics to drive purchases. Customers can have a multitude of different reinvestment strategies due to price sensitivity, where other customers may have upsell/cross-sell content/offers with no discounts because they have shown the proclivity to purchase at full price.
Releasing yourself from the confines of the campaign allows marketers to become even more customer-centric. The exercise of building the continuous strategy focuses on the customer experience with the brand. The workflows become more than just the outbound strategy, they become the customer journey with the brand.
Measuring Continuous Marketing
So how do you measure performance if each customer is on their own path and there are no big campaigns? Currently, most analysis looks at redemption % within the campaign as the KPI of choice. With so many different "campaigns" (workflows) running at the same time, measurement becomes the outcomes of the behavior you are trying to alter. For instance, if the intent of the capture lifecycle is moving as many customers into the retention lifecycle (becoming loyal), then the main metric for measuring success should be the rate of which customers move from capture into retention.
For example: 1,000 capture customers -> 200 move to retention -> 20% retention movement
Another metric that may be important is the average amount of time it takes to move a customer to retention.
For example: 200 move to retention -> 1,455 days in capture -> 7.3 Days to Retention
Also, the number of communications to reach retention would be a good metric.
For example: 200 move to retention -> 692 communications -> 3.46 Communications to Retention
Of course all of the other standard metrics should be tracked - revenue, cost, margin and profit. For instance, if profit margins are consistent, a change in the % of retention movement from 20% to 25%, by changing the offers/content or finding a model to predict behavior, increases profit for the brand as more customers are purchasing more often.
These metrics puts the focus on customers instead of nebulous campaigns or segments. It humanizes the outbound KPI's, speaking in terms executives can rally behind and understand. The byproduct becomes a customer-centric focus. Of course there are many more analysis of the behaviors for each of the customers as they move through the life-cycles. Questions such as why aren't customers redeeming offers in the 1st communication wave still happen, they just happen with the focus on how customers are moving through the life-cycle, all with the intention of driving the new and improved KPI's.
Continuous marketing is hard to wrap your head around at first, but once implemented, it becomes a new way of life. Testing becomes much pervasive and behavior of customers is much easier to understand as these are the drivers of the metrics. Another benefit are changes to tactics in the outbound strategy happen much quicker because a portion of the customers are constantly being run through the workflows. Changes take effect immediately instead of waiting for the next big campaign to drop. The outbound marketing program becomes agile, constantly evolving and improving. A true living and breathing entity.