Improve Strategic Analysis to Enrich Future Marketing Campaigns
Challenge
Jack Stack Barbecue wanted to more efficiently collect and analyze marketing information so it could strategically direct continuing marketing efforts.
Solution
It implemented Data Management Associates’ MACH software system as its process management software.
Results
The company has the analysis tools it needs to gather the timely strategic and tactical marketing intelligence necessary to measure and plan future marketing efforts.
Jack Stack Barbecue, a multi-channel seller of proprietary gourmet barbecue products, started using Data Management Associates’ MACH software in the summer of 2004. Jack Stack management had found its present system to be poorly designed for its growing needs.
With a base of three wildly popular and highly rated restaurants in the metropolitan Kansas City area, Jack Stack diversified into catalog and internet sales in 2000. Currently, approximately half of the company’s orders are received by phone, and half via the internet.
The current system was unwieldy, complex, and based on obsolete technology, particularly in terms of user interface. Marketing intelligence and analysis was too inefficient to provide the Jack Stack management with any meaningful marketing direction. A major requirement for the new system was a more flexible, easy to use means of tracking and analyzing the source of orders.
[quote style=”1″]“It’s difficult to justify marketing expense and planning when you can’t effectively measure the results of what you’re already doing,” says Dale Johnson, Director of Customer Service.[/quote]After a thorough search of mail order and catalog house software, the company chose and installed MACH. They felt the fully integrated on-line system which includes order processing, purchasing, inventory management, marketing and accounting, could meet their needs in marketing and other areas as they continued to expand their business. The implementation took place in the summer of 2004 over six weeks.
The benefit of the new analysis tools is evident. When the company begins a marketing campaign, Johnson sets up several special queries of the Jack Stack Barbecue customer and order history data.
Monthly and weekly reports of customers’ buying habits are easily retrieved as well as ad hoc reports on an as-needed basis. Jack Stack management can track the success of promotions down to the penny and can target specific categories of customers and prospects for special promotions. For instance they can analyze which groups tend to purchase larger versus smaller quantities, and at what frequencies.
It also can run reports on product returns, commissions, inventory movement, order type and other marketing statistics.
Jack Stack Barbecue is now relishing the results of their MACH purchasing decision.
[quote style=”1″]“Knowing where our marketing dollars are producing better results so we can spend them more effectively… now that’s a real benefit.” Johnson said.[/quote]