Understanding iMIS Marketing

iMIS Marketing gives your organization the flexibility to support any marketing need, from basic to complex. Marketing in iMIS helps you manage:

  • Fundraising campaigns, such as donor activation, reactivation, and/or renewal
  • Membership campaigns, such as membership recruitment, reactivation, and/or retention
  • Events and conferences
  • Lead generation projects
  • Publications marketing
  • Public awareness campaigns
  • Legislative action initiatives

With iMIS Marketing, you can define and manage a coordinated series of marketing tactics, manage the responses, and analyze the results. Use iMIS Marketing to:

  • Plan and create campaigns that follow your organization's goals and requirements
  • Match the message to the target
  • Simplify campaign execution
  • Link packages to customer segments
  • Automate response follow-up tasks and move contacts to the appropriate stage in a multi-stage campaign
  • Track budgets at a high level or at a detailed level
  • Use analysis tools to monitor campaign success at each level

iMIS Marketing offers three areas that can work together to help you achieve your marketing objectives:

  • Campaign Management – Plan, create, and track single or multiple campaigns
  • Segmentation – Segment contacts and prospects according to demographic and behavioral patterns
  • RFM Analytics – Rank a contact's past transactions with your organization

You can use Campaign Management alone or you can use the three solutions together to take advantage of data analytics and advanced segmentation capabilities. This will help your organization target the efforts in the most cost-effective and customer-focused manner.

Use Campaign Management to plan, create, and track your marketing campaigns. You can manage basic campaigns with a single customer mailing or complex campaigns with multiple appeals and solicitations.

Depending on your organization's needs, you can choose to:

  • Define campaigns and categorize them by type
  • Define specific goals and measure campaign performance against those goals
  • Communicate with targeted prospects through a series of personalized solicitations
  • Track and analyze responses

Campaign Management uses a four-tier campaign structure, so you can plan actions and monitor results to the detail level you need. A default hierarchy is supplied with the system. However, you can rename the hierarchy to reflect your organization's or industry's terminology.

Campaign - A strategy to accomplish a single marketing goal, such as a membership drive, a fundraising campaign, an annual convention, or a legislative initiative. Campaigns are the highest level of measurement and are typically project-driven.

Appeal - Each major marketing effort of a campaign, usually associated with a drop date. An appeal can be:

  • A phase of the project, such as "First Request" or "Airwaves Blitz"
  • A portion of the campaign targeted to a specific group of contacts or prospects
  • A portion of the campaign assigned to an internal group (generating mailing lists, designing artwork, managing responses)

Solicitation - A series of communication pieces for an appeal. For example, a "First Request" appeal might direct different messages to previous donors/customers than to prospects.

Source codes - Numbers assigned to each communication piece to track responses. These numbers are associated with reply devices (email, website checkbox) so your organization can measure the effectiveness of each effort solicitation. Source codes are the most granular level of measurement.

Generally, basic campaigns are sufficient for small events, simple marketing campaigns, limited public awareness campaigns, and similar goals. For the purposes of this discussion, basic campaigns:

  • Contain few appeals and related solicitations
  • Probably use only one or two source codes per appeal

More complex campaigns require efficient management and tracking of multiple, multi-tiered campaigns. For the purposes of this discussion, complex campaigns:

  • Contain many appeals and related solicitations
  • Use many source codes
  • Often build on the targeting and analytical data generated by Segmentation and RFM Analytics

iMIS communications tools help you to efficiently build customized messages for your contacts and prospects. You can gain valuable information about the effectiveness of your campaign with reports about the campaign or a portion of the campaign. These messages and reports can be generated at any level of a campaign.

Default templates for messages and reports are provided and are easily tailored to your organization's specific needs. In addition, the following communications tools give you the power to construct custom communications pieces:

  • MS Word merge
  • Email merge
  • Crystal Reports
  • Broadcast fax

Many iMIS communications features help you perform efficiently:

  • Use saved report selections from other iMIS functionality for merge lists
  • Preview merged messages and edit them before sending
  • Combine email merge and fax merge into one mass mailing with timed delivery
  • Combine multiple queries into one mailing
  • Send merged event confirmations for a single event or for all events
  • Export source lists to external vendors, fulfillment providers, or listservs
  • Reprint event confirmations as needed
  • Send updates to the activity history display
  • Collect email bounce-backs
  • Ensure that broadcast email messages are not blocked as spam
  • Generate projects based on complex business rules or in response to a campaign

The most powerful feature of iMIS Marketing is its integration throughout the iMIS system. If you choose, you can:

  • Designate appropriate orders and donations as responses to the campaign
  • Send personalized acknowledgments to the contact via their preferred method of communication
  • Use responses to previous solicitations for future targeting and list segmentation

The following diagram illustrates the advanced integration that is possible between Campaign Management and other iMIS features.

Example of Marketing interaction throughout iMIS

There are many different types of marketing efforts used by a variety of different sectors, such as:

  • Retail marketing
  • Fund raising
  • Brand marketing
  • Membership
  • Issue awareness
  • Event marketing
  • Calls to action

Each of these forms of marketing uses a series of principles and practices to meet their goals. The principles discussed in the following topics reference database marketing practices for the not-for-profit sector. These are general, high-level concepts, but each organization performs marketing in a unique manner.

Being customer-focused means that marketing efforts need to balance the goals of the organization with the needs of their "customers" (contacts, members, donors, prospects, legislators).

Customer-focused organizations integrate their customer service department and website content with current marketing efforts to offer choices. By offering choices, they open opportunities for customers to respond to the call to action. That way, the customer chooses when and how they want to hear from the organization.

For years, these organizations have used focus groups and other consumer index information to help determine what their product offering should be. More and more, focus groups and customer surveys are being used to determine how an organization is perceived by its supporters. After the questions are asked and the numbers are in, organizations are changing how they speak to their supporters.

Customer satisfaction is a relatively new key metric that organizations seek to determine. Ways to measure customer satisfaction include:

  • Conducting a survey – Extract a list from your database, develop customer satisfaction questions, call or send the survey to your customers, record the responses, and analyze the results.
  • Integrating short surveys into your customer service activities – Add questions to a donor reply device or a membership renewal package.
  • Offering a survey on your website.
  • Encouraging your customer service staff to ask questions when they are on the phone with your customer and to record the answers.

A key component to being customer-focused is responding to supporters when they take the time to ask a question or express a concern. Respect for the customer is the key to maintaining high customer satisfaction ratings.

Measuring customer satisfaction is integrally tied to managing your key business processes well, particularly your customer service processes.

The closed-loop marketing approach measures the results of marketing and communication initiatives by tracking the response of targeted groups. The results of responses, such as completed surveys, promotional entries, coupon redemptions and purchase behavior, are added to a database for tracking and evaluation to improve future marketing decisions. Marketing campaigns can then continuously adapt to the customers' wants and needs, creating a true relationship. Simply put, marketers can develop and monitor targeted strategic campaigns based on a wide variety of customer histories and behaviors.

Closed-loop marketing process

Organizations do not leap into target marketing. Organizations that are working towards a targeted closed-loop approach plan the introduction carefully and over some time, beginning with developing a segmentation strategy.

Closed-loop marketing involves a never-ending cycle of ongoing analysis, ongoing marketing, and ongoing response management. As we market, we learn. As we learn, we develop new marketing strategies. New marketing strategies lead to changes in how we manage responses.

New market opportunities are identified through trend analysis. A new opportunity may address a weak area within a marketing plan or may identify a new group.

Closed-loop marketing refers to the cycle of:

  • Developing metrics and benchmarks for the desired transactional behavior
  • Ensuring that business processes are in place to maximize the customer's experience and to build loyalty.

In essence, once a customer is introduced into our loop, we ensure that they never want to leave.

Segmentation is the science of dividing up all of the records in an organization's database into small groups that can be marketed to and measured over time. It is the way in which we apply demographic, mood, and transactional data to our marketing activities.

Most organizations that have a segmentation model are able to provide detailed descriptions of what those segments are and when they approach them. Organizations without a segmentation model need to plan one carefully. Segmentation strategies change from organization to organization. This is because the mission of each organization is unique and the characteristics that make up its supporter base are equally unique.

Segmentation usually begins by defining broad audience groups. However, audiences should not be considered as isolated groups; they may support the organization in a variety of ways. By recognizing that these relationships exist, an organization can offer personalized targeted marketing.

A variety of data can be used for targeted marketing: Demographics, Psychographics, and Transactional data.

In order to be customer-focused, an organization's data segmentation strategy must include customer communication preferences and can include individual customer satisfaction rankings.

Demographic data helps identify groups based on information like age, gender, geographic location and marital status. Demographic data is core to understanding what groups may be likely to perform in what way.

Acquiring demographic data about customers may or may not be easy to do. Some organizations require that date of birth and other demographic information be provided. Other organizations may be bound by privacy rules that may make it harder to capture this information.

Demographic data can be acquired from outside sources. For instance, you can recruit the services of a vendor who has access to income tax data and other filed information.

Psychographics refers to how someone behaves: their likes, dislikes, interests, and key values. Although demographic data generally remains consistent, psychographics change. A key measurement of psychographics is customer mood. Customer moods change based upon how an organization interacts with a customer.

Psychographic data is usually gathered through polls and surveys.

Analyzing transactional data is critical to measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty.

RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) is a common way of scoring transactions and determining loyalty and value. By establishing a matrix of values, you can measure where a customer ranks within the matrix and the direction they are migrating.

RFM is the science of developing this matrix of scores based on values we associate with the scores. In the end, records are grouped together based on their rankings. They share their support in common. Because the rankings are standardized, it is a very statistically valid way of building a standardized segmentation model. The RFM scoring process inherently converts flat data files into three dimensional data files.

Other ways of looking at transactional data are available but they are one dimensional in nature:

  • Last Year But Unfortunately Not This (LYBUNT)
  • Second-to-Last Year But Unfortunately Not This (SYBUNT)
  • Third-to-Last Year But Unfortunately Not This (TYBUNT)

This data measures only one RFM characteristic: Recency. You cannot use a LYBUNT, SYBUNT, TYBUNT report for identifying your best customers; its purpose is to identify the erratic donor.

High-value customer reports are also common for measuring value, but judgments made solely upon value can be misleading in determining customer strategies. For example, should you spend time building a relationship with a customer who has given you a lot of money but not for the past five years? Or, should you spend time building a relationship with a customer who has given less financial support but given it very recently? Or, very loyally every year for the past ten years?

Reports and analytics that focus on only one element of the transaction can be misleading. The RFM approach is preferred because of its ability to slice data three ways.

RFM is also ideal because it can be implemented easily and regularly within a database. Ideally, data should be reviewed with a vendor/partner who specializes in understanding marketing statistics and segmentation, but this is not always necessary. Other more advanced data analytic services are also available, but can be expensive and difficult to implement and are best used to develop a predictive model.

A predictive model is used to consolidate all of the demographic, psychographic, and transactional data available to the organization into a data algorithm that can be used to target records that appear to be becoming a target market. For example, a "lapsing customer" model can identify customers whose loyalty is waning before they disappear. Or, a "planned giving" model can identify the point at which we've learned the two or three key criteria that we need to gather to qualify a planned giving prospect.

Predictive models generate leads for a different marketing strategy. Marketing campaigns/appeals follow through on those leads. Data underlies the success of these marketing efforts.

Source Code assignments fall into three basic categories:

  • Codes assigned to outgoing marketing efforts to track the incoming responses to the effort that recruited the support
  • Generic codes that are assigned to ongoing 'passive' ways in which a customer can support an organization, such as web transactions, social media interactions, email, general acknowledgment responses, or pass-to-a-friend
  • Unknown codes that are assigned to capture responses when the actual source code is not known

Assign source codes to outgoing marketing efforts to be able to track how contacts respond. A source code is assigned to each segment within an outgoing marketing effort and is printed on a reply device (the form the customer returns to the organization). Printing the source code on the information the contact receives allows for it to be data entered easily when an incoming transaction is received. Essentially, source codes should exist at any time that a contact is presented with a project to support. This opportunity is a call to action.

Source code tracking is important. To maintain the highest possible accuracy in recording the actual source code assigned to a contact's response, key processes have to be highlighted. Data entry staff need to know the importance of accurate data entry and, in a customer-focused closed-loop model, quick and accurate acknowledgments should be sent to the contact, thanking them for their response.

Entering the correct source code on incoming transactions is important for thanking the contact properly. An error might result in a complaint to your customer service staff or it might convince the contact to stop supporting your organization.

  • Campaign Management: The 'source' for the Campaign is your source code. The source code is your list of members/prospects that a campaign/appeal/solicitation is targeted to and the output is generated for. This list of members for a specific source code comes from a segmentation job or definition, a query or a group of solicitation responses.
  • Segmentation: When you generate a segmentation job consisting of 1 or more segment definitions you are creating a source list for your campaign/appeal/solicitation. A source code in Campaign Management can pull from the whole job or just one of the segment definitions.
  • RFM Analytics: You can use RFM analysis to generate queries to use in Segmentation to help create the segments. In this way, RFM helps create the segment definition that is used as a source list for a source code in Campaign Management.
  • Process Management: When you create a new opportunity, on the Definition you can select a Source Code. This is more informational than functional in that it lets you record which Source Code for a specific campaign/appeal/solicitation may have generated the opportunity.

The move from mass marketing to targeted closed-loop marketing is usually accomplished through testing. Best practices for testing include:

  • Test one thing at a time.
  • Determine a goal/objective for your test. It is important to know that you are doing what you set out to do.
  • Understand what makes for a statistically valid result. The simple rule of thumb is to include enough records in your test to ensure that you receive at least 100 responses.

Market testing within your own database requires that you use random segmentation selections. This means that you establish a group that you would expect to perform in a particular way and then randomly select the number of records you want to test against.

Statistical validity is measured not just by having test groups of the right size, but also by the use of control groups. Test groups must be measured against a control group. The control group will receive the same package as usual or be the same group as usual. This group will receive the usual expected result unless an outside phenomenon changes the outcome. The test group will perform differently than the control group.

If the objective is to “recruit more donors,” then you cannot say that the test failed because the return on investment is lower than the control group. Return on Investment is a different metric than percentage return. The percentage return better measures if this objective was met.

To accurately determine whether a test is successful, it should be repeated. Future campaigns should repeat the test on new groups of randomly selected records. After the test has produced similar results three or four times, consider increasing the size of your test groups and introducing your new tactic on a permanent basis. Again, vendors can work with you in developing tests, measuring their effectiveness, and deciding when the test has finished successfully.

Calculated as follows when Budget Level is set to Source Code:

(total insert costs x actual number of contacts solicited) + (overhead costs of source codes for which output has been generated)

Each major marketing effort of a campaign, usually associated with a drop date. An appeal can be:

  • A phase of the project, such as "First Request" or "Airwaves Blitz"
  • A portion of the campaign targeted to a specific group of contacts or prospects
  • A portion of the campaign assigned to an internal group (generating mailing lists, designing artwork, managing responses)

Total Revenue divided by the total number of all orders, gifts, and pledges attributed to one of the following:

  • Source code
  • All source codes within a campaign, an appeal, or a solicitation

A strategy to accomplish a single marketing goal, such as a membership drive, a fundraising campaign, an annual convention, or a legislative initiative. Campaigns are the highest level of measurement and are typically project-driven.

Object for organizing and grouping specific and similar campaigns. The following campaign types are available by default:

  • None
  • Annual – Campaign that occurs every year
  • Designated – Funds generated by the campaign are committed to a specific entity
  • Undesignated – Funds generated by the campaign are not committed to a specific entity. The organization decides how to allocate the funds, unless specified by the donor.

Equal to the following:

  • For each campaign, appeal, and solicitation:
    • (Actual Cost x 1000) / number of pieces mailed
  • For each source code when Budget Level is set to Source Code:
    • (Total Cost x 1000) / number of pieces mailed

Total records in an external list

Equal to the following for each campaign, appeal, solicitation, and source code:

number of responses received / number of pieces mailed

Date a contact first responds for each campaign, appeal, solicitation, and source code

Date a contact last responded for each campaign, appeal, solicitation, and source code

The definition of drop date depends on the media involved:

  • Direct mail – Date delivery begins
  • Telemarketing – Date calls begin
  • Media spots (TV, radio, webcast) – Air date
  • Newsletters – Date of issue mailing
  • Online campaigns – Date email messages are sent

Drop dates for other efforts can include:

  • Date the mailing list is generated
  • Date the creative concepts/artwork is complete
  • Date the response management process is set up

Practise run to verify counts. Many organizations run dummy or test selects prior to their anticipated mail date to see the final counts and to modify the criteria if the numbers are not what they anticipate.

During the production process, counts are usually required for:

  • Accurately determining postage costs (usually pre-paid)
  • Determining print quantities
  • Determining print quantities by package

Calculated as follows when Budget Level is set to Source Code:

(total insert costs x estimated number of contacts solicited) + (source code overhead costs)

Name of an external list

Maximum of all orders, gifts, and pledges attributed to one of the following:

  • Source code
  • All source codes within a campaign, an appeal, or a solicitation

Physical item sent to a contact such as a merge letter, pre-printed collateral, or envelope

Object for organizing and grouping specific and similar inserts. The following insert types are available by default:

  • None
  • Brochure
  • Envelope
  • Form
  • Postage

Files from an external source that have been checked for duplications and merged/purged with an organization's iMIS database and rented lists

Date of the last output generation

Method of grouping list members into general types. The default list member types are Contact and Prospect.

Method of organizing source lists by type. The default List Types are Query, Segment Definition, and Solicitation Response.

Minimum of all orders, gifts, and pledges attributed to one of the following:

  • Source code
  • All source codes within a campaign, an appeal, or a solicitation

Calculated at the campaign, appeal, solicitation, and source code levels as:

Total Revenue – Actual Cost

Costs for anything that is applies to the marketing effort as a whole, such as:

  • Lettershopping
  • Printing
  • Paper

A process-oriented task, for example, a Crystal report, MS Word merge, or query

The sum of expenses entered for each appeal (when Budget Level is set to Appeal) or source code (when Budget Level is set to Source Code)

Costs for anything applied to the package, such as:

  • Postage
  • Outer envelope
  • BRE
  • BRD
  • Telemarketing costs

Percentage estimate of contacts responding to each appeal (when Budget Level is set to Appeal) or source code (when Budget Level is set to Source Code)

The origin of an opportunity, such as email, web, telephone, or postal mail

Pre-defined stages in the source code so that a contact moves through campaign stages as they respond to solicitations

The configuration setting for including contacts in specific campaign stages based on response history:

  • Solicited – Contact has been solicited but has not responded.
  • SolicitedResponse – Contact has responded to a solicitation.
  • UnsolicitedResponse – Contact has responded  but was never solicited.
  • OptOut – Contact has opted out of the solicitation.

Equal to the following for each campaign, appeal, solicitation, and source code:

(Total Revenue x 1000) / number of pieces mailed

Equal to the following for each campaign, appeal, solicitation (Budget Level set to Source Code), or source code (Budget Level set to Source Code):

(Total Revenue – Actual Cost) / Actual Cost

Lists of individuals within the organization sending the campaign. These lists are often included to confirm the mail date and to distribute samples internally.

A series of communication pieces for an appeal. For example, a "First Request" appeal might direct different messages to previous donors/customers than to prospects.

Numbers assigned to each communication piece to track responses. These numbers are associated with reply devices (postcard, website checkbox) so your organization can measure the effectiveness of each solicitation. Source codes are the most granular level of measurement in a campaign.

Configuration setting to generate source codes manually or automatically

Indicates whether source code list sources are defined by internal data or by an external file.  Default source code types are Run Once, Run Many, and External List.

List specifying contacts to be solicited

Option that triggers the response recognition process

Monetary goal for each campaign and appeal (when Budget Level is set to Appeal) or for each solicitation and source code (when Budget Level is set to Source Code)

Calculated according to budget level:

  • Budget Level is set to Appeal – equals the sum of all overhead costs for an appeal and for all appeals within a campaign. Insert costs are ignore). The displayed Total Cost is always up-to-date with the current cost of all sub-items. Because Total Cost calculation relies solely on overhead costs, Total Cost is never estimated.
  • Budget Level is set to Source Code – Total Cost (Actual or Estimated) displays for each campaign, appeal, solicitation, and source code

The sum of all orders, gifts, and pledges attributed to all source codes within a campaign, an appeal, or a solicitation

A portion of the entire population that is the target for a campaign. The results returned by a selection filter are divided into a number (n) of segments, with the same number of contacts or prospects in each segment.

Portion of the entire population that is the target for a particular marketing campaign. A segment organizes customers and prospects according to demographic and behavioral patterns.

Specifications for an individual segment within a segmentation job. A segment definition can be a query segment or an n-Select segment.

A mechanism for establishing all of the segments in a marketing campaign. This allows segments to be added, deleted, and tested. The segments can then be assigned to individual source codes and created in one process rather than individually creating each segment.

Number of times a contact has transacted with an organization

Individual or cumulative value of a contact's transactions with an organization

Defines the population (contacts) used for RFM analyses. The population query references an IQA query that extracts users from an existing set.

Any of the four values that divide the items of a frequency distribution into five classes with each containing one-fifth of the total population

Period of time (in days or months) that has elapsed since the last transaction between a contact and an organization

Defines the transactions considered for RFM analysis. The transaction query references an IQA query.