Direct Marketing Campaign Planning - Managing your Campaign Data

In our previous post detailing the basics of direct marketing campaign planning we highlighted the importance of identifying the USPs of your business, the objectives for the campaign and the necessity to define a target audience. With these planning elements complete however, it is also vital that you manage your campaign data effectively before, during and after the campaign.

The first step of effective data management for your direct marketing campaign is to source what data is available for your target market. This should include profiling information for the intended audience and in many instances will be available from data brokers. If buying data however it is vital that any data adheres to industry best practices, complies with ISO 27001 regulations for data protection reasons and is always the result of opt-in protocols.

With the data in your possession it is important to know how to use it; this means managing the data in a database which allows you carry out campaign activities and handle responses. At this point organisation is key; the data should be segmented into sets and cleansed to ensure that it is still relevant and timely. The cleansing and segmentation exercise should also install profiling flags which identify the specific profiles of a business or the customers (in B2B and B2C campaigns respectively).

If you have created intuitive segments they can then be used to run direct mail, telemarketing or email marketing campaigns which are aligned with the target segments and profiles, greatly improving the focus of your campaign and increasing the opportunity for gaining responses.

Handling responses is also a key element in managing your campaign database. As much as possible it is worth considering automated data capture by integrating technology such as IFrames into web enquiry forms as this has consistently proven successful. Additionally, it is worth instigating channel response codes in order to track and analyse the response rates for each communication channel throughout and after the campaign.

Setting up your campaign database correctly and implementing effective protocols for segmentation and response handling are both foundational elements in running a successful direct marketing campaign. Look out for our next post on creating the right message for your campaign to ensure it is targeted and focussed towards your audience’s needs.