Piloting an End-to-End Marketing Operations Channel Spend Optimization Process

In 2016, I led a cross-departmental initiative to become a more data-driven organization by reallocating Marketing budgets across channels to optimize MROI. My role represented the interests of the Marketing Analytics department, while acting as partner and liaison to merchandising, marketing strategy, channel planning, and marketing execution teams.

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Change Management

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Learning & Development

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Organizational Effectiveness

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Process Improvement

The Problem

Historically within a retail organization, merchandise business units (categories) had led their own marketing efforts to meet their quarterly sales goals using print media. But with the digital era, print costs had sky-rocketed and customer response was diminishing. Data also showed that customers shopped multiple categories, so ad spend for a single customer and the amount of marketing they were receiving was hypothesized to be excessive for driving a single store trip or online sale.

The Solution

The Marketing Analytics team had done extensive analysis to track customer behavior in both direct mail and digital media channels to understand who was most responsive to which marketing channels and how much category overlap existed for specific category customer groups. Marketing Mix Modeling was the methodology proposed to be “sold” into the business, which looked holistically at marketing budget spend and allocation across initiatives for a specific timeframe. I developed an end-to-end operational process for how to effectively test spend optimization for a category and scale across all efforts for a quarterly timeframe.

Actions Taken:

  • I organized and piloted a customer behavior-centric strategy with a merchandise category seasonal event.
  • I solicited and won stakeholder buy-in up through the SVP level to reallocate campaign channel spend identified as beyond the level of diminishing returns.
  • I worked with cross-functional teams to design and deliver an integrated marketing segmentation and targeting strategy that delivered curated marketing across digital and direct channels that aligned to past-purchase customer behavior.
  • I aligned stakeholders on goals, expectations, and measurements about what was known about the customer base and what the spend reallocation and optimization set out to learn.

Results Delivered:

  • Comprehensive integrated marketing (Men’s) category campaign was delivered in-market April of 2016. MROI was increased by reallocating a percentage of direct mail budget to digital channels for increased exposure to both past purchasers and potential customers.
  • A scalable process was developed to deliver a break-even analysis for all major category campaigns to maximize return across all channels.
  • A new Marketing team was formed to oversee budget allocations across all categories.
  • A comprehensive test-and-learn process was developed to define campaign audience segments based on past-purchase history and likelihood to shop given specific promotional incentives.