Campaigns Aren’t Journeys: Why Your Customer Experience Management Strategy Needs More Than Campaign Management
How often do you scan your inbox and notice many of the emails aren’t relevant to you or interests? You’d think you weren’t being personalized to, and that the brands sending you these irrelevant messages aren’t accounting for who you are and what you want.
The truth is, some of those email sends were personalized—not to you, but to the segment you belong to. When you’re still receiving irrelevant messages from a brand, though, does that “personalization” even matter? (After all, there is a perception gap here: Brands say they personalize 61% of their customer experiences, while the actual customers recognize only 43% of their experiences as being personalized , according to a Deloitte study.)
Campaign management systems (CMS) are often used to send promotional emails to large groups of people. But those email blasts miss their mark when people don’t want or need the product or service, even if they “fit” into the targeted segment.
A CMS is an important tool in a marketer’s toolbox. But by itself, a CMS has limited potential to improve customer experience (CX). Your customer experience management stack needs something else to unlock it.
What Is a CMS?
A campaign management system is a software application that helps businesses plan, execute and track the effect of multichannel marketing campaigns. A CMS typically includes tools for creating and sending email campaigns, managing social media posts and tracking website traffic.
A CMS builds marketing experiences for segments of people based on shared traits like demographics, location or behavior. These systems are designed to automate content delivery across customer segments, delivering tailored versions of the same campaign at scale. For example, a bank might create a “young adult” campaign targeting recent high school graduates with a credit card offer, then push it through email, display ads and text reminders—all triggered by a shared age or life stage.
CMS Limitations
A CMS is useful for reaching a large, wide audience. However, when it’s used by itself, a CMS has limited impact on CX. Marketers often use campaign funnels to outline the most straightforward path customers take from awareness and consideration to purchasing the product or service. These funnels are frameworks designed to guide groups of customers through a marketing journey. But a campaign funnel isn’t the same as a customer journey. are rarely straightforward and linear —and they don’t end at the point of purchase. Real journeys continue long after the sale, shaped by a person’s ongoing interactions with your brand. Take telecom, for example. A customer might see a social ad, browse internet bundles, compare other providers, leave without buying, return a few days later to complete the purchase, call support for activation help, and later call again about a billing issue. That winding, multi-touch experience can’t be captured or acted on in a traditional campaign funnel. And here’s the bigger challenge: campaign management systems are built to understand segments—not people. They don’t adapt to individual customer behavior or intent in real time. So even if the message is technically personalized to a group, it may still miss the mark for the person receiving it.
