Closed Loop Marketing is the title I use to describe a business environment where two things happen simultaneously: First, where technology, analytics and marketing automation is brought to bear, along with people and processes to facilitate better engagement with and between customers and prospects through all marketing, communications, and interaction channels, and secondly, where marketing is aligned with the other key roles within and across the enterprise, including sales, service, operations, finance and IT.
Historically, Closed Loop Marketing has been used a term to describe a reporting environment where the results and impacts of marketing communications and campaigns can be delivered connecting the marketing activity with the sales and revenue figures, thus enabling ROI calculations and closing the loop between marketing expenses and revenue generated. And that definition is still valid, but I believe only tells a part of the story.
To truly create such a reporting environment, a company needs to integrate multiple different technology platform, reconcile differing data models and perhaps hardest of all, get different parts of the business like sales and finance to agree on common definitions of terms/metrics like customer, revenue, and costs. Definitions which sound simple enough, but from my experience take a lot of wrangling and compromise reach consensus on.
Also required is the ability to integrate various applications and tools like campaign management, analytics, CRM, content management and business intelligence. Properly connected, these tools along with a host of others create a means of supporting closed loop marketing. Dis-connected or partially connected often times present a worse data environment than completely independent systems that produce their own results.
Finally, closed loop marketing requires that the marketing department understands data, analytics and technology, sales understands customer experience and IT understands that systems can work fine and still not deliver at all what the business owners need.
So is Closed Loop Marketing possible in today’s world? Yes, I think it is. Bu that’s for another post.
