Have your staff ever feedback that they are unable to locate details of past promotions and campaigns? Usually the company’s official website would unpublish or retire the campaign page once it expires.
The problem is, expired campaigns would continue to receive inquiries from customers. Customers would always call or walk in to check on following…in which the staff would require to have full campaign details including the originally published terms and conditions:
1. Wanted to know full benefits and entitlement of a particular offer to clarify or they have forgotten about the offer.
2. Dispute and claim having being promised of a certain gift/ privileges as per the campaign but did not receive as promised and is now looking for compensation.
3. The customer could have participated in the offer and is supposed to receive a gift via mail but apparently it has been two years and the gift is still not received (so your staff needed to check is there such offer and the details)
If the information is not available, staff would need to go around, open email archives to search for the information.
What if the staff is a new joiner or there were some technical issue that the staff was not able to retrieve email, or the email gets accidentally deleted?
It is not good for company image to have the staff looking nervous scurrying to look for information. Long term of staff always having to be ill equipped to manage customers would result in high staff turnover. Seriously, it is more expensive to hire and train new staff than to retain existing staff.
One of the way to put your intranet to good use is to archive past promotions and campaign offers of your company. This would help your staff tremendously.
I know how these staffs feel because I’ve been there. During weekends and sometimes past midnite, we would get customers calling demanding to know details of a particular offer that had already expired. Or sometimes clarifying certain information.
At those hours, there were no one I could call as those who could provide an answer are probably enjoying themselves, out on shopping or fast asleep in their cozy bed.
That was why when I took over the role, I did my best to ensure that the staff in my division are equipped to handle these inquiries. I never wanted the staff to go through what I went through. Their job is already stressful enough as it is.
Archival system for past promotions/campaigns
It is very important to have a naming convention when you are dealing with the archival of huge amount of information. Really, really important.
Don’t just throw or upload these campaign in a folder and then name them whatever way you like. It will make searching for these information very difficult.
The naming convention that I use
Every custodian have a different naming convention preference. Personally, below is the naming convention that I find works best for me (that I came out with after some trial and error):
1. Sorting by product/ service category
2. Then another sub folder in the main folder that contains only the campaigns
3. The campaign files are all named by the year, followed by the month of the offer. The supporting documentation like product presentation slides, pdf copies of T&C also follow the same naming convention.
Case illustration
Example- let’s say you run an intranet based in a telecommunication company like Verizon, AT&T mobile.
Few times a month, the company would launch a campaign to attract new customers or as an attempt to upsell current mobile packages. The company’s corporate website is programmed to automatically unpublished offers right after they have expired.
In your intranet, you can create a dedicated section called “Promotions”. Divide the promotion page into a few subsection, for example:
A. Individual consumer packages:
a. Postpaid offers
- Mobile and tablet offers
- Mobile dongle
b. Prepaid offers
B. Corporate packages
At each section, you can perhaps set up a generic table that look like the example below:
| Promotion Name | Category | Start Date | End Date | Remarks |
| Samsung S8 bundle offer | Phone upgrade plan | 2 Feb 18 | TBA | |
| Free 3GB data for selected customers | Postpaid data plan | 15 Jan 18 | 28 Feb 18 | Cust must reply back via sms to indicate acceptance |
| iPhone X bundle package | Phone upgrade plan | 1 Jan 18 | 31 Mar 18 | Contract 24mths |
Note: The links above are not clickable by the way but to illustrate to you. Supposedly, when the staff clicks on the link, it will open to the promotion campaign details.
My suggestion is to make the table sortable (in wordpress if you use Table Press plugin you can create a sortable table) or if all fails, manually construct the table yourself like the table above. For me, I just insert the table and manually add/delete columns/rows and amend the information.
Naming the campaign files:
Let’s say you receive details of the campaign.
You would need to construct the campaign page in your intranet. You may use a new page to update the campaign details which is a main landing page on the campaign such as start date/end date, objective, target, mode of communication, mechanics, campaign fulfilment.
If you are using WordPress as your platform, you can use a page format (instead of post format) to sort the pages. Example the format would be intraneturl/promo2018/2018-01-SamsungS8bundle.htm, where ‘promo2018‘ is the parent page.
Then in the campaign body itself, you may link to other campaign collaterals such as campaign brochure, presentation slides and Terms and Conditions.
When naming collateral documentations to update in your document deposit folder, you may name the files in the following format:
- 2018-01-SamsungS8campaignslides.pptx
- 2018-01-SamsungS8campaignTC.pdf
- 2018-02-iPhoneXpackageTC.pdf
Continuous maintenance
In order for staff to use the intranet, the information must be continuously updated. No one wants to visit a site that is deserted and outdated.
If the company is going at a fast paced with new launches frequently and changes happening quickly, it is best to dedicate a full time resource to manage and updates the site. It is to avoid any issues of staff giving out wrong information from referring to the portal.
I do not recommend to automate the removal of old campaigns from the intranet unless it has past a few years as experience tells me that there would be always inquiries on old campaigns. However as the promotion listing becomes too long, it is a good idea to archive older promotions in a separate web page but to have link in the promotion pointing to the archives.
Hopefully this would give you an idea on archival of promotion.
To summarize:
1. Have archival of past promotion available in a designated section in your intranet as a source of reference and to help your staff manage customers.
2. Establish a naming convention in naming the files to make it easy to locate them in future,
3. To ensure the information is continuously updated.