Hi,
Last month we covered short-term vs long-term measurements (missed it? Read it here), this week we take on another CRM Marketing showdown as we focus on prioritization for message orchestration.
Although orchestration was initially born as automation (think rule-based journeys mapped by marketers), prioritization has become the preferred orchestration method for advanced marketing teams. This is because prioritization allows for greater flexibility in CRM journeys, avoiding broken and cross-firing journeys and messages.
In Optimove, you can combine your prioritization rules with our AI to ensure that customers both get the best experience possible but also receive the messages you need them to. This is one of the main reasons we have once again been named a Challenger in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs (read more about that here).
We love prioritization so much, our new Visual Stream Builder adheres to Optimove’s overall prioritization framework.
So let’s take a look at when you should be using manual (marketer-led) vs. auto (AI-led) prioritization.
BTW, if you are enjoying our showdown series, let me know!
Shai Frank, VP of Product
How Prioritization Works
Before we dive into the debate, let’s first define how prioritization works. You see, for the most accurate assignment of customers to target groups, and thus to campaigns, Optimove performs a centralized calculation of campaign eligibility per customer.
In simple terms, during your batch process, Optimove identifies all customers that match the criteria of more than one target group and ensures they are allocated to the campaign associated with the highest priority target group. If you are using exclusion rules, this means customers will only receive the highest prioritized campaign. This way Optimove helps you ensure that journeys don’t break, and campaigns don’t cross-fire.
This might sound like frequency capping to you, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Frequency capping is a defensive solution that functions as a “first-come, first-serve” mechanism (the earliest message(s) gets sent, even if there is a more appropriate one scheduled for later). Prioritization is a strategic decision that serves the most appropriate or important message for each customer at a specific moment in time, even if it doesn’t have the earliest send time.
Now that we understand how this works, let’s get to the showdown, but remember, this isn’t all or nothing, you can mix the below methods.
When marketers know best – Marketer-led
Let’s start with manual prioritization. Manual prioritization allows you to determine which target groups and campaigns are more important for you. By prioritizing target groups higher, you can make sure customers will receive specific messages even in cases where they conflict with other campaigns. In the aforementioned batch process, Optimove will run through your manually prioritized campaigns from top to bottom, assigning customers as it goes.
Classic examples include a customer’s birthday campaign, responsible gaming communications, and store hour updates.
When using manual prioritization keep these two recommendations in mind:
- Limit its use as much as possible since usually as the number of campaigns grows, the ability to distinguish between their importance drops. Our rule of thumb is ~10 manually prioritized campaigns.
- Place smaller, more granular target groups higher than broader ones to avoid “blocking” them.
By the way, some might even think of using this method for long-term, multi-campaign strategies like a dormant reactivation one. However, a recent experiment done by one of our clients suggests otherwise.
When marketers think they know best – AI-assisted
As much as we’d love to say everyone sticks to the two simple rules mentioned above, this isn’t always the case. That is where Optibot, and what we call AI-assisted or regulated prioritization, steps in.
While your campaigns take place, Optibot analyzes their performance, comparing it to others, and checking whether everything is OK. When there are options for improvements, Optibot will let you know through its cards (Spoiler Alert: soon it will do so directly within the Mission Control).
Take for example the following cards:
Stop Ineffective Campaign– ever heard about campaign fatigue? Well, this card identifies exactly that. Now imagine if this would be a campaign you prioritized highly, customers would be receiving this, instead of one that could work. One click and this campaign is automatically stopped.
Stop Paying the Price of Generalization– also known as “Focus your Target Group,” this card is the ineffective campaign’s cousin announcing that only a sub-segment of your target group is responding to the campaign. Following a single click, Optibot will redefine the target group to ensure that, moving forward, everyone outside the effective sub-group is freed to other, potentially more effective campaigns.
Validate Target Group Priorities– as straightforward as they come. When a large portion of a granular target group is “blocked” by a higher priority group, Optibot will alert you. The card will include the problematic target group names so that you can easily reprioritize.
Read more about Optibot’s cards here.
When marketers want to scale – AI-led
And then we have the rest. As we said before, manual priority has its place, but it is limited. Especially if you want to scale.
Why scale? Well, the more granular target groups and campaigns you have, the more personalized your CRM marketing will be. But while you can prioritize between the most important campaign and the 7th most important one, it’s quite harder to differentiate between the 50th and 85th one.
The only way you can scale your marketing without journeys breaking or cross-firing is if you use auto priority. Auto priority (AKA Self-Optimizing Journeys) turns your marketing strategy into an AI-led one, where Optimove’s AI maps CRM journeys to always serve the best campaign to each customer. In this case, Optimove identifies all the campaigns a customer is eligible for, predicts possible outcomes of each journey, and serves the next best action for each customer.
If you also have manually prioritized campaigns, Optimove will first allocate customers to those and only then proceed to auto-priority ones.
If you have one takeaway from this showdown between marketer-led and AI-led prioritization, let it be this: If you abuse manual priorities, you risk bad customer experiences. If you only use auto priority, you risk business-critical messages not reaching your customers. But, if you use them responsibly, and let Optibot guide you where needed, you will consistently delight your customers.
> From our blog
Methodologies of Orchestration
If you want to dive deep into marketing orchestration practices, our three-part blog series covers everything you need to know. But do yourself a favor and start with part 1.