The Growing Complexity of Tracking Marketing Effectiveness

Written By Ted Grigg

With the enhanced sophistication of today’s multi-channel marketing and loyalty programs, there is corresponding pressure on established evaluation processes.

DMCG Results

How does one apportion the credit for a retailer who sells something online? Is it the retail store where the customer could see and feel the product? Was it the direct mail effort that drove him to visit the store? Was it the telemarketing group that answered objections or product questions before the customer placed the order on the Internet?

This evaluation challenge has existed for some time, but never to the degree it has today with the emergence of the Internet age.

What about CRM or loyalty programs? The increase in customer loyalty translates into share-of-customer growth and additionally, supports acquisition efforts. But what would have happened in the absence of any loyalty program?

All that is left is the option to isolate customers from these activities and set up control groups. But I have yet to see results that do not create more questions than they answer.

In today's multi-channel environments, it is almost impossible to isolate customers totally from their peers and other indirect influences.

As direct marketers, we may have to eat our words about lecturing to branders that they need to quantify their results to justify their enormous budgets. There are some things that no one can quantify.

Now that the distinctions between branding, direct marketing, sales promotion and other strategies are transformed by intense multi-channel marketing, we must create new ways of evaluating marketing efforts.

This is a good time to be a strategically inclined analyst.

New methodologies and testing structures must come to the rescue. To maintain our critical marketing budgets, we must validate their effectiveness with the scientific method and other ways yet to be discovered.

Is there something out there that will replace the simple ROI formula to reflect lost opportunity or the ability to keep customer’s happy with better customer service?

There are just some things that rely on common sense that will defy quantification.

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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