In my last post, titled How to find the most profitable growth opportunities, I talked about the first of three main customer challenges that we solve with our Customer Intelligence solutions, finding the best growth opportunities, which involves using information and data management, segmentation, modeling and scoring, and having a good hold on value and sentiment scores. This allows us to see where the opportunities for growth lie inside our organization.

Now what? Now we focus on our second customer challenge, taking the best marketing action, which simply put is engaging the customer in the best possible manner available, given time, resource, and financial constraints. Let’s look at what taking the best marketing action entails, specifically focusing on relevancy, optimization, and automation.

Relevancy.

The first thing we want to focus on is relevancy. For a marketing action to be relevant, it must include the appropriate offer, at the appropriate time, via the appropriate channel. Seems simple, but can be very difficult for organizations to accomplish.

We can ensure relevancy by understanding the end customer--and then designing and creating campaigns for that end customer that are tailor made--not just generic and forced. Being able to deliver these campaigns or offers across multiple channels, while contacting at the appropriate frequency, will benefit both the organization and the customer.

Optimization.

The second aspect of taking the best marketing action relates to the optimization actions that you take. I’m sure you have heard the term “spray and pray,” where an organization sends out offers, a common example being a credit card offer from a financial institution. There are a lot of variables that can be optimized with relation to this credit card offer, including the offer delivery method, offer delivery frequency, offer terms, offer reply methods, etc.

The point is that optimization is important. If you can optimize these individual interactions and the variable associated with them, the overall marketing mix, and the investments you make with your customer, it will optimize your marketing action and in turn optimize the value derived from each customer interaction.

Automation.

The final thing that is important when taking the best marketing action is automation. Once your communications are relevant and optimized, let’s automate for greater efficiency. Automation can take many forms, whether it’s automated campaign execution, campaign optimization, or performance reporting and analysis automation.

When automated, we can execute faster, more consistently and with better accuracy. Automating will keep marketing costs down while generating more value for our organization.

In order to generate the best Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) we must take the best marketing action. This involves making sure the action we take from a marketing perspective is relevant, optimized, and ultimately automated. In my next post we will discuss how we tackle the third and final customer challenge that SAS Customer Intelligence solutions solve, which is maximizing cross business impact, or taking results across an organization.

Stay tuned for more!