Most marketers would agree that where program management is about setting the overall battle plans, campaign management is about loading, aiming and firing the guns. What seems to be a point of confusion for some though is that the term “campaign” can mean different things depending on a given marketers’ focus. For example, a traditional circulation marketer would define it as the segmentation and coding of a distribution list, while an online display marketer would consider it to be the varying flights of creative that are deployed to the preselected publisher sites. But as the walls between channels continue to erode and eventually crumble, marketers will certainly come to find a commonality in the term.
A common way to view campaigns is a visual workflow that depicts the various stages, treatments or flights of messages in their relative order. More sophisticated tools enable for branching decisions whereby different audiences receive a different message based upon scoring, firmographic, behavioral response or other segmentation schemes. Another aspect some of the tools support is the ability to respond to customers. As opposed to marketing to a pre-established list, in triggered-campaigns, customers self select into the campaign by an action, like completing a web registration, or redeeming a coupon at a POS at which point they receive a message, or series of messages, in response.
My colleagues and I recently created the Experian Marketing Innovation Report 2012 to help address some of the key issues, like campaign management, over the coming year. I hope you will check out our findings and let me know what you think.