Real-time analysis of marketing ROI (page 1 of 2)

The Siebel real-time analysis of marketing ROI best practice was developed to effectively measure marketing ROI. In following this best practice, the marketing team first identifies the type of campaign—for example, acquisition, lead generation, cross-sell/up-sell, survey, or retention. For each of the 11 campaign types, Oracle's Siebel Marketing Analytics application specifies a scorecard that captures key success criteria for that campaign type. For example, in a cross-sell campaign, relevant metrics would include change in average revenue per targeted customer and percentage of targeted customers that bought additional products.

Avoid the Three Pitfalls of Measurement

Due to shortcomings in technology and processes, marketers are often unable to measure ROI in ways that will enable executives to justify investments. They measure response rates and cost per response, but not the actual revenue produced by a campaign. Knowing that a campaign generated 100 leads is, by itself, not very useful information—the Siebel solution makes this information valuable by also revealing how much revenue was closed from those leads. Companies also fail to measure the success of a campaign's individual processes. As a result, they lack visibility into problems that could adversely impact the success of the campaign. With insight gleaned through the Siebel solution, they can take timely corrective action. For example, they can adjust sales response to telemarketing-generated leads before and at the end of campaign. A third limitation occurs in the planning stage, when companies do not clearly lay out metrics to define success for a particular campaign. Using the Siebel solution, they have a reliable way of gauging success based on predetermined criteria.

Measuring Milestones

Once a scorecard is identified, the business process then defines milestones that might affect each metric. Virtually all lead-generation campaigns include stages, such as message delivery, response capture, response qualification, lead generation, lead acceptance, and lead-to-order conversion. For each stage, the Siebel process specifies areas of analysis.

For example, to measure message delivery, one must analyze it against treatment aspects (for example, offer, message, and creative) and customer grouping aspects (for example, segment, target group, list, and partner). If analysis reveals that targets for an e-mail campaign are not responding by opening the message, the message might need to be revised to be more appealing. Or an organization may find, after comparing list vendors by number of undeliverables, that it should drop a given vendor or renegotiate the contract.

By enabling marketing to more easily and effectively collaborate with internal and external parties on campaign design, offer development, and targeting strategies, the Siebel high-velocity collaborative campaign design best practice significantly improves the speed and quality of marketing campaign execution. The results are stronger relationships among partners, greater campaign effectiveness, and higher return on investment.

Real-Time Corrective Action

Using Siebel Marketing Analytics, a marketing organization can measure every important aspect of campaign execution in real time and take immediate corrective action. Because the Siebel best practice enables the effective measurement of campaign activities, it gives marketers a better grasp of still-developing ROI, allowing them to better manage their spend, allocate resources, and justify their investments.