NETTING IT OUT

Campaigns are a critical customer experience component. Marketing campaigns make customers aware of new products, product upgrades, and promotions. Customer service campaigns notify customers of service and maintenance expirations, new business policies, and product fixes.

Campaign management applications are software products and services that help you plan, design and develop, deliver, and measure campaigns. There are dozens of them available on market today. This report presents our framework for evaluating campaign management applications. Use it to shorten and speed your campaign management application selection process and ensure that you acquire the application that best addresses your requirements.

The Customers.com Evaluation Framework for Campaign Management Applications has eight top-level evaluation criteria. The most important are campaign support (channels, types, and schedules), campaign design and development, and campaign measurement and analysis.

CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING MANAGEMENT
Campaigns

Campaigns are marketing or customer service activities. A campaign delivers a message across a channel to a list of customers or prospects based on a schedule or on the occurrence of a business event. The message may contain an offer or a notification. If a campaign’s message is an offer, then the campaign is typically designed to achieve any of the fundamental marketing objectives:

•    Acquire new customers
•    Retain (the right) existing customers
•    Cross-sell, up-sell, or promote products
•    Improve brand equity and customers’ experiences with your brand

If the message is a notification, then the campaign is usually designed to make the customers in its list aware of new products, product upgrades, expirations, or fixes.

Campaign Management Applications

Campaign management applications provide tools and services to help marketers and merchandisers plan, design and develop, deliver, and measure and analyze campaigns. These applications are available as software products, software services, or outsourced solutions.

There are literally dozens of offerings out there on the market. Five or six years ago, when we last did research on and published reports on campaign management, there were maybe eight or ten of them. It was reasonably easy to differentiate them. But, with the rise in email and Web marketing, many more offerings have been developed. Selecting the one that’s best for your organization can be a daunting task. Our evaluation framework can help.

Campaign Management Suppliers

Campaign management applications are offered by these types of software suppliers...