A global clothing and accessory catalog company deploys hundred of thousands catalogs yearly. These marketing efforts serve as their strategic focal point in order to drive orders to their e-commerce website, call center and physical retail locations. The client desired greater independence when managing their marketing efforts including campaign selection, reporting and data mining.

The challenge came in the form of replacing the current, manually intensive, end-to-end campaign management process with a more flexible and efficient solution. The ideal state would include a master marketing database solution for housing customer segmentation, prospect modeling and other data insight results. The primary goal was to provide a trusted data solution that enabled the client to confidently target optimal populations in order to reduce cost and improve their return on investment (ROI).

The crux to the solution was establishing a single point of truth marketing database to serve campaign management, data analytics and business intelligence tasks.

Marketing Database

The database solution received data from several different data systems including point of sales (POS), email service provider (ESP), web data, product reviews & rating, call center and various prospect list providers. Transparent processes were developed to ensure data was current and accurate for confident team usage.

Referencing the base data sources, many additional components were incorporated into the marketing database:

• Segmentation – Based on purchase recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) values, the customer population was segmented into various bins referenced in reporting and campaign selection.
• Contact groupings – Contact profiles were audited, standardized and CASS applied to form various groupings that assisted in duplication identification. This established unique population selections at both individual and household levels based on mailing address and email.
• Campaign conversion – Referencing POS, promotion and ESP send log data sources, client business rules were incorporated to determine campaign conversion assignment.
• Prospect management – Multiple vendors provided lists in various formats and other varieties. The prospect load process automatically handled these volatile conditions to ensure the marketing database was populated with accurate population data in an efficient manner.
• Data historical tracking – The marketing database tracked data changes so analysts could view data snapshots from a given point in time. Analysts could then perform projection analysis and other advanced analytics.
• Change of address management – With direct mail being the primary deployment channel, processes were incorporated to satisfy mailing regulations, including NCOA.

Business Intelligence

Various third party software (i.e., Tableau, R and SAS) was configured to access the marketing database. Tableau was the primary business intelligence reporting application. Reports were refreshed and released according an automated scheduler. Primary report views included an interactive key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard, performance and forecasting snapshots, and production calendar. The analytics team, using R and SAS software, developed customer segmentation and prospect scoring to improve campaign performance resulting in reduced cost and conversion improvements.

Campaign Management

A project requirement was the ability to perform campaign selection and management independently. This provided the client freedom to organize campaign schema, adjust audience selection and deploy according to their schedule. Adobe Campaign was selected as the campaign management application. It was directly linked to the marketing database so the team could access the various aggregations and summaries while maintaining the single source of truth database requirement.

The primary benefit was establishing a trusted central database to provide the client the independence and confidence to improve contact strategies. Segmentation, grouping and other data insight activities supported more efficient population selection which was then paired with precise messaging resulting in optimizing customer contact management. The client’s preferred campaign management tool and email service provider were integrated into the solution to reduce learning curves due to familiarity with these tools.

Now, production tasks that required manual intervention are now automated, resulting in a more transparent and quicker to market process. Removing this time intensive responsibility, the client is ow able to focus on the business critical activities – building reports and other data insight activities for continued growth.

Overall, the solution provides a comprehensive and flexible solution to solve current business goals and grow with the business. ROI was immediately recognized as a direct result of the automated database solution in conjunction with the numerous segmentation data views that can be leveraged for decisive campaign selection and reporting.