Enabling Business Focused Marketing Processes

Background

Our client is a major retailer in a fiercely competitive market that is crowded with other similar retailers. In this environment, our client is focused on expanding sales growth while maintaining its industry-leading margins. 

               

Project

Our client had partnered with a marketing service provider (MSP) to supply turnkey direct marketing solutions. The client had a fairly large list (70MM) of customers in their database and  were deploying a direct mail campaign approximately once a month with the primary objective of driving traffic to one of their retail stores.  The client decided to bring the direct marketing operations in house for several key reasons:

Strategic

·         Desire to expand marketing programs and channels without incurring substantial incremental costs

·         Inability of the MSP to expand the use of strategic segmentation data

Tactical

·         Cost seemed high for the services rendered

·         Limited visibility into operations and data resulted in lack of insight regarding possibilities

·         Lack of control over how mailings were deployed led to flat reporting and unverifiable results

 

Argos Role

Argos has had past experience with migrating campaign management systems from one vendor to another. We were called to help our client transfer all of their data assets from the MSP and to help establish both business and technical processes to enable the in house groups to be self-sufficient in producing and executing direct marketing campaigns.We developed end to end business processes that directed marketing efforts in a clear and efficient manner. We also led the process of designing and developing a two-tier data architecture. One level supports the technical requirements for data cleansing, appending, normalization, and processing. The second tier, a specialized marketing data mart, drew data from the operational data stores into a repository that met the needs of the business communities by providing a marketing view of the data.

 

Results

Argos was instrumental in successfully delivering the project on time while upgrading the client to a newer version of their campaign management software.  As part of the process, Argos designed and developed end to end marketing process that allowed client to be fully operational within several weeks and was instrumental in expediting the expansion of marketing initiatives into additional channels.

As part of the data architecture process, Argos discovered and rectified several legacy data issues resulting in streamlined data processing, reduced duplicate mailings, and more reliable reporting.We also developed additional reporting that allowed the client to accurately track responses to marketing events across data dimensions of key importance to the client by fully utilizing their purchased third-party data. As part of this new reporting and data infrastructure, we were able to provide deep closed loop response analysis and exposed new target audiences that had previously been under promoted and under realized.