How Do You Know Your Marketing Efforts Are Working?

Creating a personalized print or multichannel marketing campaign takes significant investment in time, energy, and resources.

You want to get maximum return on your investment. How do you know what is working and what isn’t? You have to measure the results.

Measuring results goes beyond determining ROI. Sure, it’s important to know what kind of return you are getting, but it’s just as important to ask why you got the results you did. What factors influenced the conversion rate and value per sale? Why was this campaign more or less effective than the one before?
Say you give respondents a chance to win a sweepstakes for $500 if they log into a website and fill out a survey. The campaign generates a 5% response rate with 28% of those responses converting to sales of $200 each. It’s important to calculate the ROI on this campaign, but it’s equally important to test which parts of the campaign were responsible for the results and what happens if you change them.
For example, what if you increase the incentive to $2,500? Does the response rate go up? If so, does the dollar per sale increase, as well? Or does it not have a significant effect on the response rate or value per sale at all?
Don’t stop at one or even two tests. Analyze over time.

• If you increase the incentive even more, does the response rate continue to go up? Or does it flatten out?
• Does the effectiveness change based on the audience you are targeting?
• Does a sweepstakes to win a free mountain bike motivate one audience, while a Nintendo Wii motivates another?

Mix it up, and test, test, test. This is critical intelligence that will help you refine your programs over time and get the maximum results out of your marketing dollars.
Need help? Just ask!