Building A Snowman That Never Melts
28 Nov 2012With Christmas just round the corner the advertising industry sees its usual festive offensive in full flow. The big hitters such as John Lewis’ Christmas ad campaigns have become an industry unto themselves. This year’s campaign featuring a snowman couple is aiming big in a number of ways – the television advertisement is being backed by a social media campaign designed to create actionable results; a further tie-in being that the soundtrack to the ad will also be available for purchase. If you hear Frankie Goes to Hollywood blasting out of a car near you, chances are you’ll know where they have been shopping.
A campaign such as this functions on so many levels and requires some serious tracking and direct response mechanism putting into place to ensure that each component is well thought out, and contributes to the overall success of the campaign.
No doubt most of you won’t have the budget for a one-off television piece and associated support campaigns, but using your CRM software you are able to create, nurture and track a campaign such as an email or web campaign and any follow-up campaigns you might wish to use. By analysing your customer data you can set up an email targeting groups of people with a campaign tailored to match their tastes.
As well as being an attractively designed piece, this template is full of trackable and actionable links – each time a person clicks on a link that statistic gets added to their details and to the campaign itself. In this way you can follow the overall success of a campaign as well as creating a new list of people that express an interest in your products and services. You are then in a position to launch the next phase of your campaign, moving away from a generalised message and hitting these people with some more specific calls to action.
Of course having the campaign and sales cycle all integrated into a CRM solution such as OpenCRM means you have the ability to create opportunities and take them through to invoices in the same framework, managing all your data within the one platform. The following year, the cycle comes full circle as you already have a list of potential customers primed and ready to find out about the new goodies and offers you have available.
Long after the snowman has melted away and the theme tune has been replaced by the next smash hit you can keep looking after those campaigns and making sure your valued customers are still singing your song.
Before I got my start in the tech industry as part of Apple’s UK Mac launch team, I was a professional drummer (notice I didn’t say musician). But once I got in, I was hooked and I’ve been involved in the tech industry, primarily software development, for over 35 years. I founded this company and I now have the enviable title of System Architect (as well as Managing Director) here at OpenCRM.