The data supports the smart marketers approach.

About 8 years ago I was running worldwide demand generation marketing for IBM Software Group’s WebSphere Application Server and a number of related products.  Our job was to focus on the most important business problems our products solved and develop messages and campaigns that would drive a potential buyer from Awareness to Interest, Desire and Action.

At the time, I personally knew a great deal about our domain and the value that WebSphere was bringing to the complicated world of web applications.  And I had an amazing team working for me who were experts in taking a story and building the campaign elements that when linked together would generate suspects, prospects, leads and sales for our products.  It was an incredibly time consuming process to combine a compelling business value story with the right techniques for telling that story in such a way that we moved our potential customers along the AIDA cycle.  This sort of work never gets attention by most business media.  But it works.  It could have worked even better if we had been able to leverage real time data on message delivery as part of our multi-channel marketing approach.

That’s the finding of a study, “Personalized Marketing and Real Time Data” by David Daniels of The Relevancy Group, funded by my client, Intelisent.  You can download the white paper here, and I promise you it will be worth your while.  Here’s my favorite graphic from the study:  

Daniels is a former Jupiter and Forrester Analyst and his insights are really useful, here are some of the key findings from the study:

• Marketers who “orchestrate” their campaigns by delivering highly personalized messages via multiple messaging channels at precisely synchronized intervals can achieve nearly four (4) times the revenue and six (6) times the ROI of marketers who use less sophisticated approaches.
• Marketers who embrace segmentation and personalization experience fewer challenges and greater results than those who don’t.
• Ten (10) percent of consumers who receive relevant marketing emails share them on their social networks on a regular basis, a number that is as high as 22% with consumers in younger demographic segments.
• Contrary to common logic, the messages in most e-mail marketing efforts are far less personalized than offline direct mail messages.
• The majority of marketers have not integrated the disparate array of customer data sources into a centralized database for direct marketing purposes.
• Only 25% of direct marketers embrace essential testing tactics, such as control versus lift and multi-variant analysis

Check out the full study here.

You see, Intelisent knows a thing or two about message delivery – they are a spin-off of direct marketing leader Data-Mail.  They’ve been helping some of the most sophisticated companies in the world develop highly personalized campaigns that are delivered with precise timing.  Intelisent is now a separate company focused on helping companies leverage “Data that Delivers” as a Key Performance Indicator within a campaign and within the marketing function.

This stuff is the unsung hero, working data of marketing.  The wonky stuff that doesn’t seem to matter, until you are standing in your brand new store on the Grand Opening Day and no-one is there, even though you know you sent two big mailings out.   Intelisent customers would know that there was an issue with the routing of the mailing and could have taken steps to get that mail on its way – and shifted plans to have a “soft launch” with a bigger event in the future.

Here are some other benefits from the Intelisent platform:

• Track and leverage delivery and open data in real-time so that traditional direct marketing efforts can be reinforced by electronic tactics and vice versa.
• Use remittance mail tracking to manage cash flow.
• Use mail delivery information to predict store traffic so retailers can shift inventory and balance staffing.
• Create a call center script with similar custom messaging, based on the details known about that consumer – and only call the consumer when a specified set of campaign actions has already occurred.

I’m pretty sure we could have used a few of these tools back in my IBM Software Group campaign days.