Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaigns in NetSuite can sometimes be a bit difficult to understand. So, I think the best way to really get to know them is to go through creating one in its entirety. If we go to Lists, Marketing, Marketing Campaigns, and click New, we can begin creating a new one. Let’s create a new television advertisement. First, we’ll provide an ID of chicago_tv_spot, though we do not have to provide an ID. Had we not provided an ID, one would have been generated for us when we saved this, however the generated ID would not easily identify the campaign in a human readable format. I will also enter a title of Chicago Television Spot. Below this, I will select a category of TV. Most of these categories are delivered with NetSuite. If you don’t like them though, you can delete some or all, and can add new ones. They are managed under Setup, Marketing and Categories. In fact, this entire Campaign Management section contains many of the lists of information that are used when setting up campaigns. Under Manager, my name defaults in, because I am the one creating this campaign. But, we could just as easily change this to someone else if we needed to. We can pick a start and end date for this campaign. The Start date will generally default to the date you are creating this. Let’s set the end date, to the end of this month. The base cost, is the cost of the marketing campaign, minus any specific events you will also track in NetSuite. In our case, we will assume the base cost is the cost to produce the television commercial. We’ll go ahead and enter $1,000 for this. We can also enter the revenue we expect to receive from this marketing campaign, and this is the total amount. Let’s go ahead and enter $15,000 in this field. There won’t be a URL for this, so I’ll skip this step. In description, I can enter whatever description I think makes sense. This is best used to communicate what the campaign is for, to other employees who may look at this record later. Or, even when you look at this record later. Let’s go ahead and enter a description here. Under related information, we can make selections that will help us, when we later want to review this campaign. Verticals allow us to group this campaign with others. These verticals are specific to marketing, and not shared with other types of records. They can be found under Setup, Marketing and Verticals. There are none of these by default, but you can create them as needed for your business. You should spend some time thinking about how you want them to work, and your marketing manager should definitely be involved in this. For this commercial, I’ll choose our millennials vertical. We can select a promotion code if we want. This is a code we provide to our customers, that they will use when dealing with us. This code could either be entered on our webstore, or provided to a sales associate, and it lets us track how well our marketing campaign is working with our audience. Usually these are associated with a discount, or there is some other incentive for a customer to remember them. In order for these codes to be effective they should be short and memorable, otherwise they are unlikely to be used. They should also be at least somewhat difficult to guess. So, something like TwentyOff2017 would be a good promo code, whereas something like discount would not be. You should also know that you cannot reuse promo codes. What I mean by this is that if you create a promo code called ManagersSpecial, and provide free shipping, you cannot, at a later time create another code called ManagersSpecial and provide a different type of discount. At least not with that same code. To create new promo codes, we can either go to Lists, Marketing, and Promotions, or we can select new from the drop down. Either one will open a similar form where we can enter a promotion code. I’ll provide a name of Television20, and we’ll start and end this on the same dates as the marketing campaign. You don’t have to start and end these on the same dates though. We could have the dates run longer or shorter, and we could use this promotion with multiple campaigns. We can enter a discount item here too, which will help us to track how much of a discount we have provided with this promotion and campaign. We talked about discount items earlier when we looked at setting up items, and this is one of the places they are used. We’ll leave this off for now, since I have not created a discount item for this promotion. The other information we will enter here is a discount rate of 20%, and we will make sure that this is set so that it can be used only one time per customer. We also need to provide the actual code that will be used, and we’ll set this to Television20 as well. If you are wondering about this Coupon Code Type, which shows multiple uses, this is for targeted coupons. So, you might have a script that sends coupon codes out to individual customers, in that case you might want that code to be used only a single time. There are all sorts of other fields here that you can enter to customize this promotion, but we’ll just save it for now, and go back to configuring our marketing campaign. Now that we are back at our marketing campaign, we can also add items that we want this campaign to be for. Leaving this blank makes the campaign available for every item. Whether you set this or not, is going to depend on how you want your campaign to work. We can also select an audience description, and select an offer if we want. These are just more ways to segment this campaign, similar to our Millennials vertical. In fact, depending on how you want to look at data, you could have used Millennials under the Audience Description instead. Both Audience and Offer are setup under Setup and Marketing. If our campaign had multiple phases, we could track those as events. We can also track just a single phase with an event, if we want to, or if we expect the campaign to possibly grow. Though we do not actually have to track these events at all if we don’t want to. These events allow us to dig deeper into our data and tell what worked, and what didn’t, about this marketing campaign. We can also keep track of their costs to tell if there are parts of a campaign where we are losing money. We can see that there are several fields, which are required for this email event. The data that would populate these lists, must already exist for us to use it. So, for example, the target group would need to be created before we can select it. So would the template, and subscription. This means that you would need to set these up before creating this email event. The title is free form text so we would just enter that. Since this is a television commercial, email really does not make sense. The event type that would make the most sense for this would be the, Other, category, so that’s what we’ll put this under. Let’s add a title of First 30 Second Airing, and choose a channel of miscellaneous. The channels are found under Setup and Marketing. We’ll set the status to in progress and the date will be today’s date. I also want to add a cost to this of $1,000, to track what the airtime cost. I know this is not much, but maybe it is a cheap spot in the middle of the night. Then, we’ll click add to add this event. I want to point out that these events, are not the same types of events that we saw under Activities and Events, in case there was any confusion. The rest of these tabs operate similarly to how they do on other records. Communication is just where we attach communication records to this event; these are files and notes. Keywords, provide us with the ability to categorize the campaign in more ways, and to set keywords or keyword families for the campaign. This is useful for online campaigns, but not so much for television ads. Now that we have this campaign setup how we want it, let’s go ahead and save it. Dropped back at the list of campaigns, we can see the one we just created. Now, as we do deals that relate to this campaign we can track those deals. This means that if we spend a few thousand dollars on our campaign, we can see if this generates at least that much in added profitability. In this case the way this is all tracked is through the promotion code we setup. Though, there are other ways to track this.