Marketing concepts and terms

With iMIS Marketing, you can:

• Designate appropriate orders and donations as responses to the campaign
• Send personalized acknowledgments to the contact using their preferred method of communication

The following diagram illustrates the advanced integration that is possible between Campaign Management and other iMIS features.

Customer-focused marketing

Being customer-focused means that marketing efforts need to balance the goals of the organization with the needs of their "customers" (contacts, members, donors, prospects, legislators).

Customer satisfaction is a key metric that organizations seek to determine. Respect for the customer is the key to maintaining high customer satisfaction ratings. Ways to measure customer satisfaction include:

• Conducting a survey – Extract a list from your database, develop customer satisfaction questions, call or send the survey to your customers, record the responses, and analyze the results.
• Integrating short surveys into your customer service activities – Add questions to a donor reply device or a membership renewal package.
• Offering a survey on your website.
• Encouraging your customer service staff to ask questions when they are on the phone with your customer and to record the answers.

Closed-loop marketing

The closed-loop marketing approach measures the results of marketing and communication initiatives by tracking the response of targeted groups. The results of responses, such as completed surveys, are added to a database for tracking and evaluation to improve future marketing decisions. Simply put, marketers can develop and monitor targeted strategic campaigns based on a wide variety of customer histories and behaviors.

Closed-loop marketing involves a never-ending cycle of ongoing analysis, ongoing marketing, and ongoing response management. New market opportunities are identified through trend analysis. A new opportunity might address a weak area within a marketing plan or might identify a new group.

Closed-loop marketing refers to the cycle of:

• Developing metrics and benchmarks for the desired transactional behavior.
• Ensuring that business processes are in place to maximize the customer's experience and to build loyalty.

Using different types of data to enhance marketing efforts

Source Code assignments fall into three basic categories:

• Codes assigned to outgoing marketing efforts to track the incoming responses
• Generic codes assigned to the ongoing 'passive' ways in which a customer can support an organization, such as web transactions, social media interactions, or emails
• Unknown codes that are assigned to capture responses when the actual source code is not known

Source code tracking is important. To maintain the highest possible accuracy in recording the actual source code assigned to a contact's response, key processes must be highlighted.

Testing the marketing plan

It is important to test your organization's marketing plan. Review the following best practices:

• Test groups must be measured against a control group.

To accurately determine whether a test is successful, it should be repeated. Future campaigns should repeat the test on new groups of randomly selected records. After the test has produced similar results three or four times, consider increasing the size of your test groups and introducing your new tactic on a permanent basis.

The following terms and phrases associated with campaign management. See the Glossary for full definitions.