Special Report: Seeing Clearly—Dashboards Help Marketers Identify Successes and Problems
Poring through spreadsheets to isolate underperforming elements in a campaign is a useful exercise for marketers with the stomach for plumbing the depths of rows and columns of numbers, numbers, numbers.
Which is fine, if one can wait for such reports to be run. But for in-campaign adjustments, for recognizing immediate problems or even determining the general efficacy of current campaigns, a marketing dashboard can offer real-time insight.
Consider what happened to an e-mail program launched by Kevin Kestler, director of communications for Kestler Financial Group, which markets a variety of wealth management and insurance offerings. Kestler had made some last-minute changes to links in an e-mail newsletter his company was sending to the independent agents who offer its products.
"A couple of hours later, we saw the open rate was about what we expected, but the clickthrough rate was significantly lower," Kestler says. "I realized I had mistyped the URL for a few of our links. I was able to go on our website and change the names of the Web pages to match the error I put out in the email."
Kestler caught these errors in hours, as opposed to the days it would have taken to receive a status report on the mailing, because his company displays marketing dashboards on two large screens located prominently within its office. They display both minute-by minute and aggregated results of how efforts being conducted through various channels drive engagement.
This side-by-side analysis in real time also helps demonstrate the interplay between marketing channels. "If you send an e-mail blast and see a jump in Facebook fans, you know it works," says R.J. Talyor, ExactTarget's director of project marketing, which developed Kestler's dashboard systems.
Long Term Planning
The role of dashboards in marketing can go beyond immediate corrections. They are often used to make operational changes.
Kestler has modified its sales practices as a result of its observations. One of the department-specific dashboards was used by its internal marketing unit, which had set a quota of 100 outbound calls per sales agent to potential distributors of its products.
But the company found there was a sweet spot within each call of around 15 to 20 minutes. Those of its salespeople who managed to keep prospective distributors engaged for that length of time were more successful in establishing Kestler Financial as a brand.
"If we can keep them on the phone for that long, there's a good chance we can do business with them in the future," says Kestler.
Because of this finding, the company has placed much less credence on the number of calls made, and much more emphasis on making calls to people who have demonstrated affinity, especially if salespeople can be prepped with relevant information.
How does the company determine that relevance? Through a sales lead evaluation dashboard, which tracks, evaluates and moves prospective agents through six stages of a defined lifecycle. As these prospects open Kestler Financial e-mail messages, click through items or visit the company's Web site, their likelihood of engaging score rises. Associates are able to grab leads when they reach a certain point and make outreach calls to them.
Watching Your Best Customers
In a similar vein, at fashion and apparel sale and swap site Designer Social, owner Francine Davis Ballard uses a dashboard from Dukky LLC to track the progression of consumers as they move along the prospect-customer-influencer continuum. Her system gives graphic representations as individuals move from requestors to advocates and influencers.
Effective use of social media is critical for Designer Social's efforts to recruit participants. One recent campaign involved giving away a bag on InStyle.com. Participants registered for chances to win on a microsite. The contest generated 50,000 anonymous impressions. Of those, 30% submitted their email addresses. In the Dukky dashboard, these now-identifiable people were represented by little figurines that migrated across differently colored vertical columns.
Nearly all of those went on to the next stage, which was completing a brief questionnaire about the brands they were interested in hearing about.
By the time respondents were asked to share the link to the microsite via a variety of social media channels in exchange for extra chances to win, only around 3,000 were left. But the company believed those individuals who shared the link were more likely to become influencers, and it was correct: Those individuals generated additional entries at nearly a seven-to-one rate. And each of those referrals, along with the people they themselves brought in, could be tracked back to the original participant through the dashboard.
"It's one thing to be a banner sponsor at Lollapalooza," says Davis Ballard. "I'll get tons of impressions. But I will have more success telling one person if it is the right person. If I tell something to Anna Wintour at Vogue, that is more valuable than telling 100,000 of the wrong people."
Tracking participant falloff at each step helped Davis Ballard be comfortable with putting survey questions in front of site visitors. Initially she resisted Dukky's suggestion that she augment her database by doing so. But the dashboard proved there was little dropoff when consumers were presented with the survey.
More than that, those willing to answer the questions turned out to be the ones most likely to share Designer Social's message—and through the dashboard Davis Ballard could prove this and be reassured.
Dashboards Guide What To Offer
There are other examples of how marketing dashboards can unearth knowledge about customers that contradicts held beliefs. Consider 48HourPrint.com, an online printing and mailing services provider, which had brought in Loyalty Builders to track customers as they moved through five customer segments: "loyalists," who are rock-solid customers; "nurturers," who spend well enough and are at little risk of defection; "underperformers," who may feel some loyalty for the company but have the potential to defect to another supplier; "faders," who don't have much loyalty to the company; and "winbacks," who are just that—lost customers who need to be lured back.
The dashboard tracks customers' spending changes and incorporates a system of messages and discounts if customers moved down the scale. By monitoring where they fall on the dashboard—customers are scored based on amount of spending and regularity of spend, among other factors—48HourPrint has modified what it gives in order to move customers who have slipped from a higher to lower category back up again.
Loyalty Builders, which monitors the dashboard for 48HourPrint, recognizes customers whose spending is slipping and turns their names over to 48HourPrint's sales team. Often, a phone call asking why the client is less happy with the service is enough to strengthen the relationship.
Sometimes, however, a little financial push is needed. But by monitoring responses within each customer segment, 48HourPRint has avoided giving away too much.
While the company started testing a 20% across-the-board discount, the dashboard showed this to be overly generous for some tiers. Loyalist clients who had slipped to a lower category could be brought back to their previous purchase level with a 5% to 10% discount, while underperformers were revived with incentives of between 10% and 20% off.
These weren't the only learnings from the dashboard, however. As 48HourPrint monitored the sales data, vice president of marketing and customer experience Kevin Plankey started noticing variances in client purchase patterns.
"Our customers range across several different industries, and our thought all along was that our loyal customers purchase every single week," Plankey says. It turned out that individual industry segments have specific purchase patterns, and 48HourPrint has taken these variances into account when making its customer loyalty calculations.
Much in the way Kestler Financial is able to gage the impact of other campaigns on sales, Plankey has also noted a channel's impact—or, more specifically, the lack of one. It seems that customers who make one purchase a year, whether that purchase is a $55 business card order or a $9,000 booklet, tend not to respond well to direct mail—even if the mail piece was customized with reference to their last order, or with tailored offers.
These once-a-year customers, Plankey further noted, tended to go online if they needed more assistance, or to e-mail the company.
"Eventually we would have realized they aren't responding to direct mail, but with the dashboard we found out much quicker, and we adjusted our marketing spend much more quickly," he said. "We have lots of initiatives going on all the time, and the faster we can react, the better off we are."
