Direct Marketing: Science & Art
If you had to prove how your direct marketing programs impact revenue, market share or customer value, could you do it? Measurement and analysis help marketers become smarter, give us the basis to set benchmarks, and ideas to test and optimize. The term “analytics” as early as the 1600s, meant applying logical analysis to discover and communicate meaningful patterns in data. Today it is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing market, customer, and marketing performance data to increase effectiveness.
So how do we determine marketing’s real impact?
At Strategic America we measure many things, among the basics are response rates, cost per appointment, cost per new customer, Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) and Lifetime Value of a Customer (CLV). We measure the halo effect of our entire media mix and support A/B split tests and multivariate testing to improve marketing performance.
We must look at the whole picture.
Data is easy to skew and interpret wrong if you are only looking at one measurement. What if response rates are off the charts? One might assume the campaign was a success. Not necessarily. If you are not setting appointments or converting new customers then there is a bigger problem with targeting or your offer. What if you have a low response rate and a high cost per customer, but your ROMI is high? We are in the business to make our client’s money. It is all part of the big picture – hitting a highly targeted list can be more expensive with less response but larger purchases. Salesmen have less work to do with more profit. What about high response rates with low ROMI? You might be targeting too broad.
“Today’s marketing … requires better data … analytics … forecasting … modeling, higher levels of accountability … performance dashboards …a wider embrace of Marketing automation … processes.”
CMO Council, Driving Performance
Looking at graphs on our performance dashboards help make correlations and to see patterns especially in the whole marketing mix. It is important to look for patterns; data analysis really isn’t helpful if you don’t gain actionable insight.
Turn your data into Insights.
Review and discuss each pattern and its potential implications. Marketplace A has a spike in sales and it appears to have a correlation with new movers, weather data, economic data, etc. Form a hypothesis and test it. Turn the test results into targeting strategies for the next campaign and share across the media mix. At Strategic America we love big data, but more than that we love results. Turn your data into insight and take action!
