The Evaluation Process Differentiates Direct Marketing from Digital Marketing

Written By Ted Grigg

The evaluation process highlights the primary difference between direct marketing and other strategies such as digital marketing.

Digital marketers as a whole do not evaluate their effectiveness based on financial data as clearly as direct marketers. Note the key digital media evaluators in the graphics below. Digital marketers -- especially content and social media practitioners must evaluate their efforts based on key indicators of results rather than actual sales data.

Let's begin with a sample list of the evaluation indicators used by digital marketers.









Notice than none of the evaluators incorporate evidence of incremental sales. These are useful for determining prospect and customer engagement. But no evidence of increasing sales or ROI are clearly evident.

Direct marketing strategists, on the other hand begin and end their planning based on sales data.  

This is not to say that these two approaches to evaluation do not complement each other, but that the approach to solving marketing problems between digital and direct marketers compliment each other.

I should mention that digital marketing is not a marketing strategy in the same sense as direct marketing. Digital marketing is actually a media strategy because it focuses on the digital channel.

In fact, the complete direct marketing strategy always incorporates the digital channel in the planning process. Social media, landing pages, email and web page support all contribute to the effectiveness of direct marketing.

Digital media marketing is no more a marketing strategy than broadcast marketing. That's why the wise marketer should use the direct marketing strategy to drive all marketing campaigns as a way to measure program effectiveness.

Ted Grigg

Ted Grigg is a direct response strategist who helps growth-focused companies reduce risk by identifying weak assumptions before they become costly mistakes.

Over the course of his career, Ted has evaluated several hundred million dollars in direct response testing across direct mail, digital, print, television, telephone, and other channels. His work combines direct response strategy, acquisition economics, customer analysis, creative evaluation, offer development, and disciplined testing.

Ted has worked on both the client and agency sides of the business. That experience gives him a practical understanding of the pressures facing executives, marketing teams, agencies, and service providers—and of the problems that arise when activity, media volume, or creative preference replaces a clear economic objective.

His consulting work helps organizations examine such questions as:

  • Are acquisition goals economically realistic?

  • Is the allowable Cost Per Sale supported by customer value?

  • Are targeting, offers, creative, media, and response paths working together?

  • Are tests structured to produce reliable business decisions?

  • Are unproven assumptions being treated as facts?

  • Is the organization measuring sales outcomes rather than convenient proxies?

Ted’s experience includes the development of direct mail and multichannel acquisition programs for insurance, healthcare, financial services, technology, nonprofit, manufacturing, retail, transportation, communications, government, and business-to-business organizations.

For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, he developed a direct mail format that defeated established controls and helped expand the productive use of compiled prospect lists from less than 10 percent to more than 30 percent of total direct mail circulation within one year. He also planned Medicare lead-generation programs for more than 60 regional and national HMO and PPO organizations, with some programs exceeding sales projections by as much as 60 percent.

Ted founded Wyse Direct, a direct marketing division of Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, where he developed acquisition programs and helped launch a new technology product for Seiko Instruments by generating a predictable flow of qualified sales leads for its national sales organization. As vice president of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, he helped broaden the agency’s strategic capabilities and pursue new commercial and fundraising opportunities.

He is the author of The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan—A Step-by-Step Guide, published by Executive Enterprises, and has written numerous articles and conducted webinars on direct response strategy, testing, creative development, and marketing economics.

Ted earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Abilene Christian University and completed two years of graduate study at Texas Tech University. He is the founder of DMCG, LLC.

http://www.dmcgresults.com
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