An MX:Monitor case study

Operational insight for marketing teams
 
Identifying weak points in the execution of marketing communications processes gave the Marketing Director the insight he needed to make vital improvements
 
The Marketing Director for EMEA of a top global database provider had suspicions that there was an imbalance in the distribution of his organisation's outbound marketing communications. There was anecdotal evidence that some contacts were getting no communications at all, while others were being spammed.

He felt there was a lack of coordination between his teams across the region, but did not have access to the information he needed to fully understand what was going on. Plus, he was too busy to make the investigation a priority.

One of our channel partners was already engaged with this client, supporting them with lead and demand generation. On becoming aware of the suspicions of the Marketing Director, the partner got in touch with the MX:Monitor team to see if we could help.

Putting the trackers to work
The client provided us with a list of 150 named accounts, from which we generated a series of carefully crafted tracker email accounts, to enable us to understand how the customer's prospects were being marketed to in detail, throughout the buyer journey. These trackers were distributed across two industry sectors (financial services and public sector) and across three different senior level contact types in HR, finance and sales and marketing.

We obtained foundation insertions points from the client and completed web forms to subscribe the trackers to subscriptions and to register for events, to see how these interactions were handled by the client's marketing ops teams and what they did with the data they gathered from their prospects.

Once the trackers were properly embedded in the client's marketing automation system, we set up an automatic download of the emails which were being sent out in the scheduled campaigns, and commenced a programme of monitoring and analysis of the communications received.

In addition, we used the trackers to interact with the organisation, to understand how data protection aspects relating to the rights of subjects were dealt with, and to gain insight into how the client's system of progressive profiling was managed and how the prospect journey was affected by the interactions.

Preliminary findings
Within a month we had some valuable information.

Finding 1
We found that at the point where a prospect initially engaged with the organisation, through signing up for a newsletter for example, only their email and the country was captured. Whilst this was sufficient for the newsletter and registrations team to continue to market to the prospect, the central marketing people would not be able to communicate with the contact because their system relied on the presence of a job title for their segmentation.

Finding 2
It also became clear that there was not adequate sharing of information across departments and that even when prospects actively opted into communications, they were not always receiving them.

Further monitoring, analysis and findings
Over the next few weeks we noted the frequency of communications that our trackers received and the pattern of the various different types of communication and were able to build a picture of what the prospect journey was like for different segments of the client's data.

We found that the lack of coordination between the campaign waves from different teams was resulting in 'clumpiness' in the emails being received by prospects. In 15% of cases, emails from different campaigns would be received within an hour of each other, meaning that the different departments were effectively in competition. The messaging was confusing, or even contradictory.

Also limits on the numbers of email permitted within a month (according to the client's protocol) meant that a clump would cause the limit to be reached too early, and the rest of the campaign not communicated at all.

The trackers were also provided to a third-party data provider, with whom the client had taken out an annual subscription at considerable cost, to understand how this data was being used. Our analysis showed that there had been a failure in the load process and the data had not been made available to marketing since its purchase. Uncovering this information meant that the client could address this problem and avoid further delay in the use of the data.

We also identified several other issues relating to the client's marketing communications, including the fact that the general marketing department did not know that newsletter communications had ceased due to COVID19.

Data protection issues
We looked carefully as data protection aspects and were vigilant for data breaches. We established that no data breach had occurred during our period of monitoring, however we also discovered that there were some issues to do with data protection that needed to be addressed.

The double opt-in required by the German data authorities was not happening, and the opt-outs and access and erasure requests were only being carried out at a department level and not by central marketing.
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Benefits of our analysis
Our comprehensive report exposed a number of weak points in the client's marketing communications and gave the Marketing Director a wealth of information to help him realise that the situation was not how he had understood it. The recommendations in the report enabled him to prioritise actions to improve how the teams for which he was responsible operated.
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Having accurate information and direct recommendations from us was key to influencing the stakeholders and persuading them of the need to make changes to their processes, whilst also saving everybody time and effort.