AUTOMATED BUSINESS RULES

What All Marketers Have in Common

In any fund raiser, membership kit, length of service award recognition package, residential real estate marketing initiative or sales and marketing campaign there are three critical components – creative/content, production and list/distribution.  While these components are the same across industries and business verticals, good marketers know that the one-size-fits-all approach does not work when it comes to the execution of a marketing or fulfillment program.  Many job management systems treat each program the same and do not allow you to address the specific business rules that you and your organization have developed to make a program run smoothly, improve quality and increase effectiveness.

What Sets you Apart

What makes your marketing campaign or fulfillment program unique – and successful - are the specific business rules and project nuances that create the customer experience and separate your company from the competition.  How do you incorporate these business rules into a program management system?

A comprehensive job management system should allow you to customize your unique business rules by incorporating them directly into the system – so that the system automates your marketing process.  The system should allow custom rules to be programmed so each time a job/project is loaded it will consistently execute the same rules to predictably provide your marketing program with your brand and customer experience. Consistency, consistency, consistency.  Some business rules that a robust job management system should be able to automatically handle include: 

Pre-flighting – when a project is uploaded to a job management system, does the system check to make sure that the job is complete?  Does it validate that sufficient information has been included in order to execute the campaign?

Proofing – do you require seeing a proof of the first and last record? Proof of every 25 records? Does the system allow you to reject a job based on what you see in the proof and add a note as to the reason why?

List Management - does the distribution list need to be scrubbed against a do-not-solicit list? Does the list need to be de-duped and pre-sorted for mail requirements?

Out-of-stock situation – does the system verify that all components are available in inventory in sufficient quantity to complete the job for non print-on-demand project?

Manage vendor service level contracts – from the time a project is loaded on the job management system, when does it need to be completed?  What is the turn time for a rush project?

It is critical that a job management system has the ability to allow you, the marketer, to incorporate your unique business rules.  Furthermore, these rules should be implemented automatically across all jobs that are loaded to the system.  This will ensure consistency across all your marketing efforts.