Not only do interactive campaigns outperform traditional outbound campaigns, but by improving your relevance to your customers, they lift the performance of your traditional campaigns and reduce your opt-out rates. Implementing an interactive strategy presents a challenge to most organizations because it requires change across the three dimensions of people, process, and technology:

1. People . A strategic initiative like this requires an organization to change its way of thinking from top to bottom. Traditional batch-outbound campaigns are typically discrete marketing events that are measured at a campaign level, comparing the performance of a given outbound effort to other, similar efforts. Moving to an interactive model requires a shift to understand customer behavior over time, since outbound volumes start low and build gradually as the campaign continues to run. This lacks the gratification provided by the immediate results available in a traditional batch effort. Many organizations simply do not have the patience to give up known performance of a batch effort for a new approach, even if they fundamentally believe in the value.
2. Process . The process of creating and executing a traditional batch outbound campaign is fairly straightforward: identify goals, select audience, design your creative and offer strategy, execute, then measure. Interactive campaigns are fundamentally different in that they require a greater investment to set up initially, but less to maintain over time. A well-designed interactive campaign is modular by nature. That is, the basic template for a given customer event can support changes to offers, products, and creative over time without redesigning or redeploying the entire effort. Creative images, different offers, or specific products can easily be plugged in to a well-designed template. This increases the complexity of the initial design, but is much easier to maintain over time. Many companies are not willing to make this investment, particularly considering the lower volume of messages produced by these campaigns. What they often overlook is that over time, the total volume of customers reached by these campaigns will far exceed a single batch effort—and their messages are far more relevant to the recipients.
3. Technology . There are two main technology requirements in order to be a successful interactive marketer. First, your data needs to be integrated with your email marketing execution engine. This has historically been a challenge because in many cases organizations have their marketing database separate from their email execution engine. (Here is a good test: If you are currently executing simple trigger messages such as abandoned carts or order status through a platform other than your email marketing platform, you will likely need to make architecture changes to support a more extensive interactive strategy.) Second, your execution engine needs an interface that makes the setup and execution of data-driven communications as simple and efficient as possible. Without this capability, it will be too difficult to test and evolve your interactive messaging effectively.

When you combine all of these factors, the overall challenge can be daunting. Unlike many organizational initiatives that can be solved with a simple technical change, training, or new process, moving to an interactive marketing approach requires changes to all three dimensions.

The day will come when interactive marketing is the norm, and every company will need to execute interactive campaigns just to achieve parity with the competition. For now, though, there is a tremendous opportunity to differentiate your company, because few are executing an interactive marketing strategy effectively. The rewards are high for those companies who make moving to an interactive strategy a priority, and become a leader in their space by establishing a customer dialog. The customer loyalty they generate will pay dividends for a long time to come.