You can’t kick back in this business. Over my many years producing software, I’ve learned that you can’t relax and coast on previous work.  There’s always room for a better version, even when you have produced something as game-changing as Longbow, our SaaS platform that aspires to be ‘direct marketing in a box.’ And of course we here at Loyalty Builders haven’t been sitting back; if you are a customer, you or someone else in your organization has been fielding calls from us as we try to determine what marketers need to do their job.

What we’re learning from our user community matches trends we see in direct marketing. They are telling us what they are trying to do and what tools they want to do their job. Here are the main requests of marketers who already use Longbow and are seeing double digit response rates in many campaigns.

First, as more and more marketers try to do true 1:1 campaigns, they are bumping into the difficulties of getting individualized campaigns ready for digital printing or variable information email. If the devil is in the details, this is the devil that is causing considerable frustration in marketing departments. Our customers are marketers, not IT people.  Because individualized 1:1 campaigns can involve ten or more variables and can be quite complex, they are seeking some technology assist on campaign execution.

Look before you leap

Next, marketers want to know how a campaign will do in the market before they launch it. They want to look smart for their managers and not be the target of opportunity if a campaign bombs. Longbow has long had the ability to predict campaign performance before launch, but what we’ve had is not good enough.  Customers know we’re accurate, but they also know we’re not perfect. It’s easier to predict response rates than revenue. What marketers want are confidence intervals — a range of values for predictions, upper and lower limits, with a given confidence level, all before they send a single email or mail a single postcard. They’re making us sweat so they can look good.

The third big group of requests can be loosely grouped under words like multi-touch and multi-channel. More and more marketers are realizing that effective campaigns are not isolated events. They understand the need to contact a customer multiple times in multiple ways to move the customer to make a purchase. They are looking for planning tools to set up campaigns like that, with logic that allows for branching based on a customer’s response. Naturally they want to predict how these complex campaigns will perform before launch, and they want all the help they can get to deliver the campaigns.

As you might imagine, we’re working overtime to meet user requests.  What does your company need to get double digit responses to your campaigns?

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