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In the bad old days, a marketer who wanted to query a customer database would have to join the queue outside the IT specialist's door. He'd have to join everyone else in the company, from other marketers, to production and HR people, all of whom needed IT support to access the information they needed to do their jobs.

±±¾©Èü³µpk10 software has changed all that. Now the power resides at the marketer's fingertips. Modern-day software can interrogate a database to identify clusters of customers who share the same characteristics or buy the same type of products, then set up a campaign to target these customers, with automatic triggers to push them towards a purchase. If they received the mailshot yet haven't replied you can send them an email reminder, or schedule a call as an added incentive.

Best of all, at the end of the campaign, these software tools can produce a detailed analysis of how the campaign performed. Which offers worked for which groups of customers, how much it all cost, and how much profit it generated? Such software gives that magical ROI figure, without which you'll find it hard to funds the next campaign.

Keeping it simple

And not only are these software tools powerful, they are also easy to use, with an intuitive user interface that enables anyone who can operate a PC to carry out detailed analysis of their customers.

Emma Chablo, marketing director at SmartFocus, says the market has really opened up in the past 18 months. "Traditionally, it's the larger corporates who have used this type of software, but it's now filtering down to mid-tier companies who are seeking to improve their campaign planning and management," she says. "What's driving it is their need to deliver more campaigns than ever before, across more channels. In this situation, what becomes key is the ability to have an audit trail of who you are marketing to and how they respond, so that you communicate with the right people at the right time and don't start to over-market to anybody."

At marketing software company Alterian, managing director David Eldridge sees campaign software as the logical follow-on from marketing automation software.

He says: "Marketing automation software focuses on executing campaigns, and it has proved very popular with large enterprises. They can use it to automate the campaign process and so make considerable gains in efficiency, if not effectiveness. Now, we are seeing SMEs, and indeed departments within these larger organisations, looking to campaign software to help them work not just more efficiently, but more effectively too."

Making the right choice

Though it's still a relatively new sector, there are several companies out there making this type of software. So how do you find the right one for you?

"Think about what you want to accomplish, talk to industry analysts, talk to your peers, and then talk to the vendors," advises Carol Meyers, head of marketing at campaign software company, Unica. "Put out an RFP (Request for Proposals) and have the vendors show you their solutions. And make sure the software can do what you want to do today, and also accommodate your vision of where you want to go."

By their very nature these solutions are demo-friendly. With a few clicks, your database of hundreds of thousands of customers can be whittled down to a more manageable cluster of a few thousand, and represented as a pie chart, a graph, even a map showing where in the country they all live. However, Alterian's Eldridge cautions against being blown away by the whizz-bang nature of campaign software.

"It's easy to put together an impressive demo, but much harder to make it work in the real world," he says. "It needs significant investment on the part of the software and service providers to make sure, not just that the demo works, but that everything works in the real world, so don't compare competing solutions just on the features list, but on real examples and real customers, who can give you some insight into how effective the solution is and how easy it is to implement."

And here, to help you do just that, are three real-life users of campaign software, offering their own view on the merits of what they use, and why they chose it.

CASE STUDY: VODAFONE IRELAND

In recent years, Vodafone Ireland, the Republic of Ireland sales arm of the mobile phone operator Vodafone, has moved away from mass-market, acquisition-based campaigns, to more targeted campaigns. These are tailored around customer needs and the insights that the company has developed over time into its customers.

"We have a sophisticated customer base, and to match that, we have developed very sophisticated criteria for customer segmentation based on specific criteria including product/service usage, age, location, gender, and so on," explains Vodafone Ireland campaigns manager, channel operations and customer relationship management, Aoife O'Connor. "This is to ensure that our customers receive messages from us that are value-added and which enhance their lives and their experience as Vodafone Ireland customers. Research has shown that customers appreciate tailored contacts far more than blanket, mass-marketing messages."

To move this approach to the next level, the company identified a need for a campaign management system that would allow it to improve the customer experience through more timely and relevant communications.

"Having conducted research, we settled on Unica's Affinium ±±¾©Èü³µpk10, as we believed this would help us to do this, by enhancing our ability to deliver trigger and deliver event-based campaigns through a variety of different channels," says O'Connor.

Training for existing staff on the Unica Affiniium ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 system began in April 2004. "Within four months, all our old campaigns had been migrated from our existing system to Unica, and we were able to develop new lifecycle and trigger-based campaigns on the new system," says O'Connor. "This was a pretty seamless implementation period, considering that Vodafone Ireland was migrating from an Oracle to Teradata platform. Unica is a far less cumbersome system to use than our previous system."

CASE STUDY: JP BODEN

J P Boden & Co is a fashion retailer that uses direct mail extensively. It uses SmartFocus Viper 5.6, including a data-mining module, ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 Planner, and a CRM module. It is also using a Beta version of a brand new reporting module.

The software is used to segment large customer sets, using transactional information to conduct ad-hoc analysis on alternative creative treatments, special offers and on similarities and differences between customers who respond and do not respond to any given offer.

It is also heavily used in constructing mailing campaigns, including catalogue mailings and email calls to actions, mostly to existing customers. These, in the company's own words, are "company-critical" activities.

JP Boden first started using SmartFocus Viper at the start of 2002. Prior to that, it employed another system with only limited customer selections and a command-based user interface that required a degree of technical expertise to use. It was not the sort of system that the marketing team could use off its own back.

"To be perfectly honest, when we were first introduced to SmartFocus Viper 4, we were in such dire need of a system that relatively little thought went into it," says J P Boden sales & planning analyst Joe Pack. "It was only when we made the move from Viper 4 to Viper 5 in July 2003 that we really took a good look at the competition and had time to really think about what we wanted."

Marketing-focused software

By this point, JP Boden knew what Viper 4 could and could not do. They also had a much better idea of what they wanted Viper 5 to be able to do for them.

Says Pack: "We wanted the ability to self-administer the database, so that the marketing department, as opposed to IT, could make changes to the database at a structural level. We also needed the database to be able to link to different sources of data, including text files. Viper functions like a virtual database, linking information from other databases.

"We were also looking for the same sort of simplicity at the front end that we had with Viper 4. Something very point and click, and easy for anyone to get to grips with."

After evaluating Viper and the alternatives against these criteria, the company decided to stick with the SmartFocus solution.

"Of the two other solutions we seriously considered, one was web-based and, in our view, offered a less complete solution, while the other was a lot more expensive and also less intuitive," says Pack. "SmartFocus also convinced us that they had improved their business practices. The support we had for Viper 4 could have been better."

Customer support

By the time Viper 5 was released, things were a lot more professional, says Pack. "Where we have had issues, they have been solved quickly, and with Viper 5, we also have a client support portal where we can log any queries we have. Again, these are always answered quickly and accurately."

Having taken the decision to stick with Viper, Pack says he was impressed by the ease with which staff were able to pick up the new system. "We did not hire any new staff," he says. "We had three main users, who each went on two one-day workshops, and that was all they needed."

To help the company migrate customer data from Viper 4 to Viper 5, SmartFocus sent in a consultant, who worked with the company for a week to ensure a smooth transition.

"From the first training session to project close and sign-off took just 44 working days," says Pack.

The speed with which the database can be refreshed with new transactional details added in is also much improved. "We refresh the database once a week," says Pack. "With the old system, this used to take a whole weekend. With Viper 5, we do it in seven or eight hours."

So he's happy, then, with the choice the company made? "Yes indeed," he says. "Viper is very powerful, very intuitive and very easy to get to grips with. We made the right choice."

Case study: Applied Biosystems Europe

Applied Biosystems Europe is the European arm of the life sciences company, which specialises in instrumentation, molecular biology and small molecules, including mass spectrometry equipment for food and environmental applications, and DNA sequencers.

The company uses TEEC Pivotal MarketFirst software to run e-marketing campaigns. The software helps the company to segment the relevant database, create the email, and then broadcast it. It is also used for campaign modelling, where the campaign can be drawn up onscreen, and indicators placed to automatically trigger what happens next, such as a follow-up email to a customer who does not respond to the first one, or perhaps a follow-up phone call to a customer who does. On average, the company runs eight campaigns a month.

"The catalyst for buying the software came in 2003 when we started to hear about the legislation due to come in later that year that would require customers to opt in to receive marketing emails," says Applied Biosystems marketing communications manager, Europe, Tony Hardware. "We were just planning our first e-marketing, so we began to look for an ISP and for software that could support us."

The company was helped in its research by the fact that its US parent was already using MarketFirst and was happy to share its knowledge with the European arm.

Though the European arm had little experience of e-marketing, it had a very clear idea of what it wanted from the software. "We were looking for an e-marketing tool that could offer personalisation," says Hardware. "We also needed expertise, because we were new to this, and some sort of hosting arrangement, but one that would allow us to do some of the work and take control of our own campaigns."

Because of the company's relative inexperience, training was always going to be important. But so intuitive was the software that the main users of the system needed just three days training to get to grips with it.

"No one here knew anything about HTML coding, so we took the software on a part-hosted basis," says Hardware. "After the initial training, there was a longer learning curve of three or four months, but after that, we were up and running. The software is very intuitive and we now have one person who can do all the campaign planning without supervision, and a team of people who can do event invitations and the more routine things like that."

It took just 24 hours for the initial data load, and the system was operational within 14 days of deployment. In the initial 12-month period, the system was used primarily for basic email registration campaigns. Applied Biosciences is now using MarketFirst to create e-newsletters, and to segment these for different customer groups according to the interest expressed when they opted in to receive the company's marketing emails. The company is also using the system to develop microsites for specific promotions and events.

"We have an independent server at TEEC which means we can easily create microsites that feed off the database for things like online event registration," says Hardware.

Overall, Hardware says he's delighted with the software. "We're very pleased with the way it has worked out. There were just four weeks from us accepting TEEC's strategy to getting the first campaign out of the door, and when you consider how new this all was to us, that's a remarkable achievement."