Last week, I was having lunch with a former consultant colleague who specializes in eCRM and who has recently become the marketing director of a private bank. He is currently involved in a major digitization of the processes of the bank he works for, and he asked me a very simple question, but the answer, and especially the implementation, is far from obvious.
How do you implement an eCRM optimization culture in an organization that does not understand the world of digital marketing?
Evidence!
This may seem obvious, but what they will need first of all is to verify the effectiveness of the various actions implemented. But in order to provide proof, you have to measure. With digital marketing and eCRM in particular, there is no lack of data. Each channel has its own measurement tool (when there are not several measurement tools), databases are full of interactions that can be measured, there are internal sensors within the company, but also external ones, in every corner, and the list could go on.
This evidence must therefore be structured...
An analytics manager
More than additional analytics tools, what large organizations (this article is aimed at them) need to acquire is an analytics manager. This person will be the center of the world when it comes to providing evidence. He or she must have the freedom to spy, cross-reference, mix and match all the data that might point the way. A mistake not to be made, especially if your company is organized in silos, is to place him in a team mastering mainly one of the communication channels. Your analytics manager must be independent and be the best friend of all the teams dedicated to marketing (without being dependent on them).
The big task for your analytics manager is to turn these gigatons of available data into a coherent, readable and actionable set of key figures. Long live the KPIs.
Is this enough to generate a culture of optimization?
Probably not (and certainly not on your eCRM channels)!
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In general, optimization is seen as the Holy Grail, the logic behind it. Yet, when asked, organizations are generally unable to say what they have optimized in the last 3 months, let alone whether it worked.
The reason is simple, eCRM teams all work in a lean environment, projects follow each other and pile up, tomorrow's campaign always has a high priority and even with a lot of good will, optimization projects never move fast enough.
And even when these projects are moving forward, they are very rarely followed up with appropriate actions. Often, when they do exist, not even the analytics manager is aware of them.
For these reasons, when the means are there (but in general it is very important to go in this direction), it can be useful to appoint an optimization manager. A person whose focus will be entirely dedicated to optimization, its follow-up and its measurement (in good understanding with your analytics manager).
Agree to iterate
But to succeed in optimizing, we must also accept another reality. Nothing is perfect the first time, you have to learn to iterate progressively to get closer to perfection (without ever reaching it of course). This philosophy (yes, yes, philosophy) also allows us to deliver projects faster since they don't need to be perfect from the start (which is a utopia anyway).
Then, it will be up to the optimization manager to decide on the length of the different cycles. In any case, it is out of the question to use similar cycles for optimizations related to automated campaigns, which run in the course of time or for ad-hoc campaigns. The optimization of a landing page will not be done in the same way as sending an SMS reminder of an appointment.
Internal or external?
Whether your optimization manager is directly inside your organization or outside, an agency or a consultant, the problem is the same. If an agency, for example, is in charge of managing part of the eCRM campaigns, you have to dissociate the will of optimization from the implementation of new marketing programs. Project management and optimization are not compatible, the brains must be different in order to not only give priority to what we will call "everyday" production.
