Success Stories
Enterprise Marketing Management Solutions
Not-For-Profit, Continuing Education Provider for Legal Professionals
Client
Their Mission is to provide the legal community and allied professionals with the most up-to-date, relevant information and techniques which are critical to the development of a professional, competitive edge. They achieved these goals through the highest quality Seminars held annually in locations across the United States, annually supplemented Treatises, Audio CDs and DVDs, MP3s, Live Webcasts, Course Handbooks, CLE Now web programs and Private Label Solutions all with the guidance of practice specific Advisory Committees.
They accomplishes this through the provision of CLE programs held in locations across the United States, the UK and online. They publish legal books in the form of annually supplemented legal treatises. In addition, they grant scholarships to legal aid and government attorneys, law professors, judges, judicial clerks, law students, employees of nonprofit organizations and attorneys experiencing economic hardship.
Situation
The client had an out-dated, complex, IT driven solution for identifying the marketing recipients for their targeted mailings. They were looking for a new solution that could provide an easy-to-use interface for the marketing team to identify and segment their target audiences and integrate their new campaign environment to their existing Strongmail email solution. The solution would need to support the multiple needs of their product marketing managers and control the communication stream to any one individual if they were identified in multiple marketing managers target lists.
In addition, the results of their marketing efforts would need to be tracked for their marketing return on investment analysis and provide a way for marketing to identify patterns that affected the return. A key requirement is to explore purchase trends along various customer, product, offer and key code dimensions.
Solution
Utilizing Unica Affinium Campaign, Insight, and Model, the RiverPoint team implemented an integrated EMM environment to satisfy their marketing needs. The data integration using Unica’s Universal Dynamic Interconnect (UDI) allowed connection to different database environments for their existing enterprise data warehouse as well as their email statistics database. A static contact history table was incorporated for all historical data prior to the new solution. In the new solution, it was important to capture specific “point in time” data where executing a mailing, so those additional attributes were added for tracking purposes to the contact history definition. The overall data environment for the new integrated EMM system allowed for tracking the planned effects of a campaign, the key segmentation criteria used in the campaign, optimized contact history, and integrated response history.
Although Affinium Campaign Optimize was not a component of the solution, RiverPoint implemented a solution to automate the current system of priority optimization to determine which campaign a customer receives if they are present in multiple email files on a single day. Each invidiual Marketing Manager developed their segmentation and selection criteria based on the goals of their campaign. This output contact list was written to a centralized “waiting to be optimized” contact list for their target mailing date. Then prior to the target mailing date, the Optimization Manager used a separate flowchart solution to prioritize the proposed contacts and determine which marketing campaign received their contacts by writing out the finalized list for Strongmail execution.
Similar to the “optimization” solution described above, there was a “Planning” requirement to track planned and actual costs/counts to provide the basis for Return on Marketing (ROM) statistics. The planned costs were able to be accounted for by using the addition of Campaign and Target Cell attributes. Real costs were more difficult as they were not known until after the campaign had been completed and the PO’s had been paid. RiverPoint developed a custom solution to update the real costs back into the data repository, thus closing the data gap and providing the basis for complete ROM analysis.
The integration with the current StrongMail solution is one of the key points for this project. The implementation of the Affinium workflow needed to mimic their current workflow so that the familiar process will allow us to cleanly and seamlessly integrate Affinium within this current architecture. Users will continue to develop the email templates within StrongMail’s Message Studio (or any other HTML/text editor). The personalization fields (e.g. email address, name, etc.) imbedded within the email template were connected to a Unica Campaign standard output file format allowing the segmentation logic to create the record set that will be used for the mailings. The trigger at the end of the successful flowchart run created the StrongMail configuration file that tied the email template and recipient database text file together. Finally the output file is created at the end of the run and this file is FTPed to a directory that StrongMail recognizes. The email process is ready to be executed at the time specified in the configuration file.
Benefits
The client would be able to increase the number of mailings handled by the current staff while decreasing the number of people mailed on each mailing providing lower costs and higher return on their marketing dollar. Also, they would be able to satisfy the individual needs of their customers more effectively increasing customer satisfaction and engagement.
Environment
• Unica Campaign, Insight, and Model 7.2
• Strongmail Platform and API’s
• Windows Server 2003
• SQL Server 2005
