Optimizing marketing spend productivity can be achieved through at least four different approaches; list optimization, campaign optimization, budget optimization and customer optimization. Each approach addresses specific opportunities for performance improvement through proven data and strategic & analytic driven processes and methods that add predictive power.

List Optimization
List optimization focuses on sourcing of internal and external data for acquisition marketing. Organizations risk wasting time and money by repeatedly purchasing data from multiple and duplicative sources. This results in redundancy across product lines, departments and locations - all while there already exists untapped promotion history on the same prospect records that would further improve audience selection. Therefore, the timing and sequencing of offers is misaligned and disjointed. List optimization involves centralizing the sourcing, scoring, tracking and availability of prospect records, evaluating list performance across campaign history, creating innovative approaches to timing and sequencing of offers and building a historical analytical record for each prospect. This approach will improve individual list results and reduce cost per contact and list rental costs.

Campaign Optimization
Campaign optimization concentrates on improving campaign results in the areas of response rates, sales and conversions and cost reduction. Similar to list challenges, campaigns are often plagued by redundancy and disjointed timing and sequencing of offers. Campaign optimization involves analyzing longitudinal campaign performance to optimize the number of campaigns, the types of campaigns as well as the broad use of treatments and channels across and within the campaigns. Better predictive intelligence enables improved strategy and analytical insights and campaign simulation ensures optimized campaign strategies to eliminate wasted marketing efforts and enable improved timing, sequencing and prioritization of offers to improve overall marketing performance.

Budget Optimization
Budget optimization addresses another level of optimizing marketing spend productivity. Marketers struggle with how to best allocate marketing budgets across different activities. Marketing budgets based on a percentage of last year's sales or budget is not an approach that supports achieving an optimal return on spend. Budget optimization involves analysis of all marketing and advertising spend across a given time frame and evaluating media mix, customer profitability and lifetime value, customer asset value, market response and other factors to perform financial modeling and to determine the optimal allocation of marketing spend. Maintaining performance results at both the customer level and program level enables future performance measurement and adjustment to reduce total media spend, optimize direct to consumer budget allocations, and eliminate wasted marketing costs and ineffective efforts.

Customer Optimization
Finally, customer optimization focuses on maximizing marketing spend productivity at the customer level. Truly customer centric organizations select the right marketing campaigns for each customer versus the right customers for each marketing campaign. No matter how sophisticated your marketing programs are, customer optimization fundamentally begins with analyzing your best customers, evaluating patterns in the data, decomposing customer demand and performing lifetime value modeling to feed contact strategies that drive incremental lift in revenue and profitability for certain customers, while managing unprofitable customers appropriately.