In a real time not too far off from our own, Wilen New York CTO Greg Dean envisions a beautiful world—one in which marketers can simulate a campaign and predict the response, all before a single piece of direct mail even makes it out the door.
We’re not there just yet, but real-time results and robust predictive analytics are “where it’s all going,” Dean says.
Learning from one campaign and applying that knowledge to the next is good, but that’s not the way forward. According to Dean, the so-called “market, measure, repeat” model will soon become obsolete, giving way to a more streamlined, strategic approach.
A new tool launched by Wilen today at the 2013 Direct Marketing Association show in Chicago, aims to take reporting and analytics a little further than it’s gone before by enabling marketers to optimize active campaigns in real time by appending demographic and behavioral data to existing customer profiles as it’s acquired from multiple channels.
Wilen’s tool, dubbed “Where’s My Marketing,” also claims to be able to determine a consumer’s preferred communication channel, as well as what the next 100 customers will do based on other like customers’ recent activity—all of which Dean says helps clear the way to conversion.
“As people respond during a campaign, we grab their records and expand them with whatever new information comes in; we’re constantly feeding the direct marketing engines,” Dean says. “Then, when you have that information, you can change the content for the next person to provide more lift, even up to the very last minute.”
It’s the kind of thing marketers have had to think more and more about as consumers become increasingly multi-screen and multichannel. This ever-connected environment necessitates what Dean calls “a constant ear to the ground during the course of a campaign.”
Learning from mistakes is an admirable trait, but one marketers will soon have to do less and less of as more powerful analytics tools become available.
“We all know how to gather and interpret post-campaign information,” Deans says. “But to me that’s reactive. That’s like a campaign eulogy.”
