What is a Marketing Campaign?
A ‘marketing campaign’ is the name we give to any set of outbound communications sent to a group of targeted individuals, that can tracked and measured in terms of revenue generation. All of the following are examples of marketing campaign:
- A one-time email send to past purchasers of a specific product
- An automated ‘thank-you’ campaign triggered when a customer makes a new purchase
- A multi-stage loyalty campaign across email and social channels aimed at retaining customers
Take the first example above. In Audience Selector, you would build the list of contacts you’d reach by email using transaction data within the CDP and save that Audience for use when sending your email (or export that list to your email service provider). Once the emails are sent, the CDP would know who’d you contacted (via Audience Selector) and who ended up transacting as a result of the campaign (via transaction data sourced from your POS system).
Those two data points come together in the Campaign page, which puts revenue data at your fingertips when evaluating campaign performance.
How Campaigns Work
For starters, campaigns work to complement audiences and campaigns, but both audiences and campaigns can continue to be used without making use of campaigns.
To get started, you’ll work through the Campaign Wizard (Create > Campaign) or with your CSM to map automated campaigns and the outgoing email sends to their corresponding campaign "buckets". Transactional data flows into the marketing platform on a one-day lag, so revenue would be visible in the Campaign dashboard within 24 hours and automatically be attributed to the appropriate campaign.
How Revenue is Attributed to Campaigns
Here’s an example illustrating how revenue attribution works for campaigns:
- Suppose you send an email called “October Newsletter” to a consumer on 10/01/2020
- The next day, the consumer opens the email and clicks on a link in the email to browse your website
- A few days later, the consumer comes into your store and purchases an item for $100
- Based upon that stream of data, Ascent360 will attribute $100 in sales to the October Newsletter because the consumer opened and clicked on the email beforehand
Some settings are configurable (for example, the reporting window that the system would use for attribution), but the broad strokes of the process remain the same:
- Within the attribution window, clicks would be favored over opens over sends when determining which campaign should have revenue attributed to it.
- Revenue attribution will not use a fractional approach, in order to simplify the calculations.
- Note: If one person in a household receives a marketing communication and another individual (i.e. a spouse) makes the purchase, the transaction would not be attributed.
- Revenue attribution for campaigns is meant to be directionally accurate in order to facilitate decision-making based on available data.
Types of Campaigns to Leverage
Campaigns include a host of strategies that are tried-and-true drivers of revenue, including:
- Lapsed Customer: Re-engage your lapsed customers to win them back
- Post Visit: Generate reviews, brand loyalty and future visits
- Pre-Arrival: Lower cancellations, build brand loyalty and upsell customers prior to their arrival
- Post-Purchase: Build an automated stream to incentivize the next purchase
- Prospect Conversion: Build automated streams to encourage first time or repeat purchases
- Re-engagement: Re-engage customers and drive new purchases
- Renewal: Drive past purchasers to renew products and services
For a full list of campaigns, please speak with your Client Success Manager or contact the Help Desk.
