Exclusive Interview on Kentico's Campaign Management Module

Last November, hot on the heels of the Kentico 10 release, our Media Reporter Laura Myers interviewed Karol Jarkovsky, Director of Product at Kentico, on the issues that Kentico addressed with the new release and the future roadmap of the platform. One of the new features particularly piqued our attention, and therefore, she sat down with Mark Raymond, Territory Sales Manager at Kentico, to inquire about the new Kentico 10 marketing capabilities: 

 

Kentico believes that there are three main goals that marketers are struggling with the most: 

• Converting prospects into customers

• Increasing existing customer value

• Gaining an ROI from marketing activities 

Achieving these goals is directly related to the success of marketing campaigns. However, Kentico saw the struggle was within the campaign process. To ease that pain point, the vendor has made a trench of enhancements to its Campaign Management Module with the new release. During the interview, Mark walked us through all the components of the module: 

Content Inventory

Allows marketers to manage associated campaign content such as landing pages, social channels, and downloads within a single interface. Users can easily create new landing pages or use existing landing page templates as well as classify and detail all of their content inventory ahead of time. The Campaign content inventory is designed to provide an overview of all the content that is involved and will be displayed to the visitors within the campaign.  Users can also reuse the content that was already created as well as create a new content page directly from the Campaigns application. 

Campaign Promotion

Promotional channels allow you to define sources through which you will address your target audience. Emails can be used as one of those sources for campaign promotions. In Kentico, when you create a promotional email and associate it with a campaign, the system will recognize visitors that come to your website by clicking the links in the email.  The system associates the email with the campaign and displays it in the Campaign promotion section.

With version 10, users can leverage both newsletters and email campaigns, where newsletters share a subscriber base, and email campaigns have separate recipient lists. Also, contacts are now the main entities that can be used as recipients of emails. Marketers can define target audiences for their email campaigns and newsletters. Additionally, they can easily target different segments with the email campaigns or send them a follow-up. 

Besides emails, there are also other channels for campaign promotion, including Facebook and Twitter. When visitors click on the links within your posts, the system will recognize the social network which they came from and logs appropriate statistical data for them. 

Campaign Report Setup

Any action performed by users can be identified as a conversion leveraging Kentico’s robust analytics engine and can be used for tracking visitors in campaigns.  

Here are the actions that you can track with Kentico 10: 

• Event booking: You can track booking of a specific event or any event.

• Form submission: You can track when the visitor submits a form.

• Internal search: You can track what the visitor searches for, using the search on the website.

• Page visit: As the name implies, you can track if the visitor opens a specific page. If a page is A/B tested, it is recommended that you only select the original variant of an A/B tested page.

• Product added to shopping cart: You can track a specific product or any product that the visitor adds to the shopping cart. 

• Purchase: You can monitor the orders made by the visitor. 

• Purchased product: You can track when the visitor makes an order with a specific product.

• Subscription to a newsletter: You can track the visitor subscribing to a specific newsletter or any newsletter.

• User registration: You can see when the visitor registers and becomes a user.

Campaign Journey

The campaign journey is a sequence of steps that result in the most important conversion. The feature identifies the ideal path for users as they progress through the campaign. To put this in context, let’s assume that you want to promote purchases of a product, so you add visiting a landing page, adding the product to the shopping cart, and then purchasing the product to the journey. The journey represents the ideal steps that the campaign visitor will follow. Then you can analyze this journey in the reports, which I will explain shortly, to detect the roadblocks for the visitors. 

Campaign Objective

When marketers roll out a campaign, they typically need to set some targets to measure the success of the campaign. This feature allows marketers to set a benchmark for conversions within the campaign. What’s new about this, you may ask. The feature has been enhanced to differentiate from the other marketing tools in the marketplace. The problem with many marketing tools available is that they don’t let marketers make any changes to a running campaign as they have to conclude the campaign and start a new one if they want to tweak the campaign based on their new findings. Which results in them losing data that they collected up to that point. In reality, marketers learn a lot throughout their marketing campaigns, and often, many assumptions made in the beginning get replaced with the facts over the course of the campaign. That’s where the new enhancements come into play as Kentico 10 offers a campaign management tool which allows marketers to make changes to a running campaign on the fly without losing any kind of data so they can immediately see what impact the changes have on their campaigns. 

Campaign Conversions

Kentico describes conversions as individual activities that users are interested in. Although conversions do not necessarily need to relate to each other, users have to set at least one of them to roll out a campaign. Conversions tell marketers which objectives have been fulfilled and which haven’t, how much attention was garnered from each source within the campaign, or simply something like how many times a product was purchased. 

On a side note, Kentico has two types of conversions. Conversion discussed here is a terminology that is used for online marketing only. However, there is another type of conversion that is called custom conversions which are used for logging specific actions for purpose of A/B test or tracking page conversions in general outside a campaign scope, according to Kentico’s website. 

Campaign Journey Report

As a statistics junky and a marketing professional, this is by far my favorite feature with Kentico.  Kentico calls it “campaign journey tracking” which is a type of analytics that allows marketers to see which particular step of their campaign gets the highest visitor drop out so they will understand exactly which part of the campaign failed and what needs improving. In this way, marketers can detect the problem much faster than ever, regardless of their skill sets and experiences in reading analytics. 

The reports are refreshed regularly to provide the most recent data. To be exact, by default, the reports are recalculated every hour until the campaign is finished. It helps marketers have a deep grasp of the visitor campaign journey and understand how many people actually proceed to the next step or how many people abandoned. Considering how much time marketers are spending on experimenting numerous new ways to figure out what is working and what is not, this feature also increases the productivity of the marketing departments. 

Ending Notes 

It is really exciting to see how marketing tools are evolving with every single release of the web content management platforms. The reason why I see this as exciting is not because they are cool features that marketers can utilize to find out the best way of audience engagement, but because these solutions help in reducing the cost attached to the creation and management of huge web-based content and campaigns, as they require so little IT support. As our Principal Analyst Gary Eisenstein, stated in his review of Kentico 10, the vendor is lagging behind the leaders in terms of machine learning elements and predictive analytics in their product line. Good news, this is one of the areas that Kentico will make serious improvements in the next release which Karol Jarkovsky told us that they have already started to work on the strategy of it.