Campaign Prioritization - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

So, you spent the last two years building a corporate wide, state-of-the-art campaign management system and you convinced all of the different marketing groups in your company to ditch their individual e-mail vendors and go through your centralized system.  The benefits of your campaign centralization pitch were certainly compelling:

• A history of all outbound customer communications can be stored, referenced and shared from a single location
• Centralizing campaign management operations for all product groups can create economies of scale for campaign design, execution and reporting
• Legal and corporate branding guidelines can more easily be adhered to
• Data for all campaigns can more easily be pulled from a centralized data repository thus reducing data errors and inconsistencies
• Recency and frequency of customer communications can better be controlled (via campaign prioritization filtering) thus reducing the chance of over communicating to customers and driving up optouts 

The last benefit often doesn't play out as well in reality as it does on a PowerPoint slide though, as internal clients can be disturbed when list counts are lower than expected due to prioritization filters being applied during the list selection process.  While this prioritization filtering is essential at a global/company level, to reduce the chance of over communicating to customers, tell this to a marketing program manager that still believes list quantity is better than list quality. 

To better deal with the inevitable backlash that will ensue when program managers see lower list counts than expected, I would recommend that you be prepared to respond with the following:

• The logic employed in the prioritization filter.  This helps program managers to better understand why certain people are suppressed from the final list.  This also helps to show that no favoritism is taking place when the prioritization filter is applied
• The danger of over communicating to customers.  This can drive up optout rates, thus reducing the number of "marketable" customers to market to in the future
• The concept of list quality versus list quantity.  If you have hard numbers available to demonstrate this benefit, this is even better

And if all else fails, tell the program manager to go complain to the CMO. :-)