Introducing Optimove’s Streams: Measure the Joint Performance of Multiple Campaigns

Many people continue to confuse tactics with strategy. The difference is simple: Strategy refers to the direction of our business goal, and tactics are the actions. Campaigns and offers to clients, for example, are tactics. And choosing the right tactics that support your strategy is vital to your business’ success. With many different client behaviors, campaigns and objectives, you can easily find yourself lost in a sea of information. Why are you using this tool? Sending this message? Offering that discount?

Even once we fully understand the importance of proving our assumptions by running all kinds of marketing experimentation, and simultaneously navigating complex journeys, it could feel impossible to manage the entire campaign flow.

While the ability to manage separate plans is essential for a clean experiment, keeping each customer to a single journey without overlap could turn into a three-month project. Without it, however, you will never be able to attribute success to your marketing efforts.

Testing and experimenting at scale has always been our way. As scientists in the CRM and marketing worlds, our main goal is to test and validate that what we’re doing really is effective. Often, we tweak and change our tactics according to the results. But how do we determine which campaign will best serve your strategy long term? Introducing the Optimove Streams.

Learning from your Efforts

Streams is a new Optimove feature that enables marketers to observe the results of how a series - a “stream” - of multiple campaigns perform together. Instead of analyzing a recurring single campaign in isolation, Streams empowers you to compare multiple campaigns with alternative campaign streams or a static control group.

Streams answers the following questions:

• Which customer journeys lead to the highest conversion rate?
• What is the best order when sending a set of onboarding campaigns?
• How much impact (in total) are all campaigns having on business?
• What are the best series of communications for a new target market?
• Are efforts resulting in short-term revenue at the expense of customer lifetime value?

Optimove’s Streams capability is designed to make it easier for you to receive accurate answers to these types of questions by comparing the long-term effects of various communication streams with customer behavior. By running this kind of test, you will be able to measure how each one of your strategies is performing in terms of meeting your business objectives, as well as the contribution of each individual campaign.

How does it work? First, you can either set your own objective or let Optimove’s platform make a recommendation for a KPI to improve. Objectives could be migration-based or to improve a KPI for a specific target group. After defining the test’s settings, Optimove will allocate customers to the two streams you’re comparing, making sure they are fully orthogonal with no overlapping. Once that’s done, you are good to go – and from day two of the test, you will already be able to analyze its results, and determine which strategy is winning, and its progress towards the test’s objective.

Once you've reviewed your results and see the best-performing stream, you should shift the entire target group into the winning strategy (i.e., not only the percent who were targeted with this stream during the test).

Adapting the Winning Strategy

It’s important to realize that using Streams is not an alternative, but another important viewpoint – a look from a broader perspective to better understand your marketing strategy and its results. It’s still extremely important to analyze your single campaigns, but now you can improve the ties and connections between two series of campaigns and the results of an entire series, while drastically increasing the scale of your marketing team’s efforts.

Streams enables you to get closer to the results and better understand your campaigns without a long complex setup. Just make sure this smart way to compare your activities is just another approach within the bigger picture.

To schedule an Optimove's demo, please click here.