Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

CAMPAIGN-LEVEL PERFORMANCE TRACKING ON CONTINUOUS CAMPAIGNS

If you have used the decision tree in the beginning of this chapter (Exhibit 7.1), you were guided to this section since you want to know about how to set targets and optimize resources spent on campaigns that are executed on a continuous basis. It is a characteristic of these campaigns that you do not know which of your customers (new or existing) received the offer or the market communication. All you have from a data perspective is knowledge about your marketing activities and their effect. The effect could include the number of new customers, additional sales within product categories, and reduced customer churn. In the next example, it will be the number of new customers. This way of tracking sales performance is known to telecom operators, banks, insurance companies, magazines on subscription, and charity organizations with member subscriptions. All these organizations know the number of active customers as opposed to, for example, supermarkets, which typically track the effects as increased sales within product groups.

In this situation, you cannot be quite sure how well your campaigning activities work. If they work extremely well, often you will find that other departments in your organization will try to take credit for these results based on whatever their contribution has been. Success has many parents whereas failure is an orphan. The way to open this black box is to introduce, if possible, campaign codes, ...