I was recently asked what I thought Campaign Management software would be like in 2020. My quick (and somewhat flip) answer is to bemoan the seemingly slow pace at which marketing software has evolved to date. After all, as scary as it may be, 2020 is only 11 years away!

What were you doing 11 years ago? I was working on a project with Eddie Bauer to build a big marketing data warehouse and implement software to explore and mine customer data. Our business objectives? Better understand and drive cross-channel behavior, increase the effectiveness of EB's catalog marketing efforts, and increase the synergy between the direct (catalog) and and retail channels. Fast forward to today, I continue to see lots of projects that sound very much like that one.

Campaign-management technology has long been associated with the creation and deployment of outbound marketing campaigns. It's time to change that. Marketing can no longer afford to simply act as a bullhorn pushing the product du jour or blasting cross-sell and up-sell offers.

Marketing experts have been talking about ad overload for years now. Simply put:

• Consumers are overwhelmed with ad content.
• They are tuning the messages out.
• Response rates are declining while costs are rising.

Marketing organizations must evolve by shifting their communications strategy away from one-size fits all push marketing to a more customer-centric strategy that leverages the increasing proliferation of addressable channels and strives for responsiveness to individual customer behaviors. This shift requires marketing organizations to get beyond the old-style outbound campaign construct and seek to engage customers and prospects in a cross-channel dialog that builds upon their past and current behavior (I refer to this new style of marketing as interactive marketig). To do this effectively, marketers need technologies that enable them to:

For nearly the past 15 years, my career has been focused on helping marketers leverage data to better understand and more effectively market to customers on an individual level. In my early days in the industry, I worked primarily with marketing groups leveraging offline channels like catalogs and other forms of direct mail. In recent years, I’ve spent most of my time working with relationship marketing and database marketing groups and with online marketing groups. What amazes me (and is my key topic of my post today) is that while these marketers view themselves as so different they are really starting to converge.

Marketing Channels Are Evolving

There’s lots of change happening in the marketing domain. It’s a time of uncertainty but also one of opportunity. Marketing channels are evolving at a rapid rate:

I realize that the title of this post already has some customer service gurus cringing. No, my point is not to turn service interactions into one-way communication streams in which the customer's needs are minimized while CSRs focus on pushy "retention," cross-sell, or upsell efforts... And, if you are familiar with any of my prior writings then you know that I hold marketing responsible for customer experience. With that quick frame of reference, inbound service interactions are ideal for marketing because the customer:

I am very excited to announce the launch of my latest research, "Marketing Beyond The Status Quo." The research, sponsored by my friends at Responsys, seeks to help marketing organizations assess and address the barriers that prevent them from being more customer-focused, relevant, and integrated. The report unveils the Marketing Status Quo (MSQ) Model - backed by a diagnostic self-test and step-by-step program guide - to help marketers determine their relevance maturity and develop a realistic action plan to become more customer-focused.

The MSQ Model assesses the fundamental competencies required for marketing relevance:

Marketing organizations are contributing to customer experience initiatives by working to deliver more relevant content in both outbound and inbound channels. While technology is certainly no silver bullet, marketing organizations are turning to technology to help them:

Have you ever refinanced your mortgage only to be bombarded by offers to lower your mortgage rate for six weeks after you closed on your new loan? This happens because financial services companies are purchasing "triggers" from credit bureaus that indicate you have had a recent loan approval. The problem with these triggers is that they are not timely. By the time the marketing communication gets to the customer, it's too late.

Relevance = right message + right time + right place

Perhaps it is a cliché, but it's a good one. Too many marketers focus entirely on the message component of relevance. For these marketers, "place" is typically an outbound channel and "time" is based on the internal campaign calendar - not the customer's needs. To be relevant, marketers must step outside the confines of the functional silo that they are responsible for and think outside in - from the perspective of the customer. In addition to targeting the message itself based upon a customer's stated or implied needs, relevance requires:

One of the issues I am currently working on is to understand what it takes email marketers to move beyond "fire and forget" (or "batch n'blast", whatevah) marketing. I find that while marketers intellectually agree that more targeted, timely, and relevant email communications will be better received by customers and increase response, basic economics is a major barrier to progress in that direction. Why? Because email marketing is so darn cheap that every campaign delivers ROI - even if the campaign is totally untargeted (You ever wonder why spammers still spam? They make money doing it).

Relevance Isn't Free

I've spoken with a few dozen email marketing leads from large companies and strong brands in recent months. Their hearts and minds are in the right place. Broadly speaking, they:

• Are concerned about opt-outs, unsubscribes, and long-term engagement with their email programs.
• View email as a tool to develop customer relationships.
• Are working hard to employ tactics - like multi-layer targeting, segmentation, and event triggers - to improve the relevance of their communications.

Unfortunately, as these marketers strive to improve their email communications, they inevitably run into a series of challenges including:

In 2004, a Forrester colleague (John Ragsdale) and I published a report which we notoriously titled, "Why Marketing Should Own The Contact Center." Our chosen title was not aimed at changing reporting relationships. Rather, the emphasis and urgency we sought to establish was recognition of the fact that, for many companies, employees play an absolutely central and crucial role in establishing the customer's perception of the business and the brand. Our position in the report (which is still absolutely valid today) was that the purely operational metrics - e.g., # calls handled, average call duration, etc. - by which many companies measure the performance on contact center personnel run counter to the objectives that many companies have established around improving customer experiences.

Have you noticed an uptick in the number of robot marketing messages that you are getting? I have and it's making me crazy! For the last several years I have worked from my home office 2-4 days a week. In recent months, the number of calls that I am getting with robot marketing messages has increased dramatically.

Some of the messages are "transactional." For instance, we get calls from Blockbuster reminding us that we have an overdue movie. But most of the messages are pure marketing. Yes, my phone number is on the DNC list, but these calls are coming from firms with whom I have a "preexisting relationship." The company I bought my car from, financial services firms I deal with, etc. The most egregious, from my perspective, are the messages that come from my credit card company which go something like this:

Hello, this is Amy from your credit card company! Now, nothing is wrong with your card, but it is URGENT that you contact us immediately to discuss how you can lower your monthly interest rate....

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