Example Closed-loop Marketing Design Principles

Closed-loop marketing represents an evolving challenge for many organizations. While the promise of closed-loop marketing has been with us for over a decade, effective implementation can still be elusive – particularly for larger enterprises that have data and organizational complexities that can impact a smooth implementation.

As part of the architecture for a closed-loop system, it can be very helpful to agree a set of Closed-Loop Marketing Design Principles that can serve to guide decision making around applications, data, technology and processes. We often develop and facilitate agreement of a set of principles across marketing, sales, technology and finance teams. Below are a few examples of Design Principles that can serve as a starting point.  These need to be refined and tailored to your organization through a cross-functional facilitation process.

Example Design Principles for Closed-loop Marketing

Cross-functional Alignment

• The CLM solution should be agreed by marketing, sales, finance and technology stakeholders.
• Marketing and sales processes will be aligned to understand and track the life of the lead and continuously evaluate the sales funnel.
• Common requirements should be satisfied through common business functions
• Systems should support multiple business entities and stakeholders must understand & support the change
• The customer buying lifecycle and stages should be agreed by both marketing and sales
• Sales lead qualification should be a collaborative process
• Sales professionals should be equipped to engage prospects into marketing campaigns
• Business value will be achieved through a measured continual improvement approach
• Revenue conversion information should be tracked back to attributed marketing activities
• Analytical capabilities are cross-platform and help to calculate return investment
• Business groups should understand the cost of the IT resources  they consume so that they  can optimize resources and manage costs.

Customer Audience Engagement

• Audience engagement and communication should consider previous interactions and information
• The digital experience will include controlled and amplified content
• Web systems will help marketing track the life of the lead and be optimized to attract traffic and traffic origins
• Marketing Automation will monitor online consumer/ visitor behaviors
• Automated content delivery can be triggered for specific segments based on specific behaviors or rules.

Systems and Data Management Principles

• Data should be captured once and validated at the earliest possible point
• Ongoing data analysis takes place with each marketing communication
• Systems will support integrated management of multi-channel acquisition programs
• There must be one master source for each item of data
• Only changes made to the master data source are valid
• Changes to local replicas must be synchronized with the master.

Technology & Security Considerations

• We  promote technology / system reuse before buy-before build
• Access to IT systems and data should be controlled by role- and location-based authentication and logged
• Entities (users, processes, locations etc.) should be identified by unique credentials
• Components should be based upon open or industry standards and cloud technologies are preferred.
• We shall reject the “best of breed” approach in the interest of timeliness, and interoperability
• A cloud service should provide capacity on demand, from anywhere, on any device, and at any time.