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
What Ted does best is increase response by beating controls, applying multiple channels to target markets, profiling customer databases and generally improving sales results using deep direct marketing principles. Regard Ted as your personal “think-tank” for your direct marketing planning and strategy development. After analyzing several hundred million dollars of direct response testing in all channels, he brings with him the knowledge accumulated from seeing what tends to work and what does not. Having worked on both the agency and client side of direct marketing, Ted understands the unique challenges faced by agencies and their clients. Agencies need to sell themselves and deliver sales results. And clients not only require results, but need ideas they can implement while focusing on tracking response using a relational database. If Ted brings nothing else to the table, by profiling customer databases and creating response propensity models, he quickly becomes the clients’ expert on their own customers. His formal training includes a BA from Abilene Christian University and two years of graduate work at Texas Tech University. For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, Ted developed a revolutionary direct mail format that beat most standing direct mail controls for this company. He also generated more profitable business for this firm by expanding compiled list circulation of less than 10% to more than 30% of total direct mail circulation within a year. (Insurance business generated by direct mail demonstrated higher persistency than customers coming from other media such as print and DRTV.) Ted’s plan and implementation of Medicare lead generation campaigns for over 60 regional and national HMO/PPO organizations combined multiple channels that surpassed some sales projections by as much as 60%. Additional industry experience over the last 30 years includes B2B or B2C for finance, securities, home security, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, government, technology, nonprofit, retail, transportation, communications, and multiple categories in the services industry. As the founder of Wyse Direct (a division for Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, OH), he successfully launched and branded a new technology product for Seiko-Mead by supporting a nationwide sales team with a predictable flow of qualified sales leads. While a VP of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, Ted acted as the direct marketing strategist who refocused the agency’s culture to attract new commercial and fundraising accounts. At the time, Grizzard was essentially a direct mail fund raising production operation. His leadership and team building effectiveness prepared Grizzard for the eventual Omnicom acquisition and Grizzard’s successful integration into Omnicom’s large group of advertising agencies. An independent DM consultant, Ted continues to write numerous articles and conduct webinars on direct marketing techniques. He also wrote The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan — A Step-by-Step Guide publishing it through Executive Enterprises in New York City. During his youth, Ted was raised in Lille, France with his missionary family attending French schools becoming fluent in reading and writing French. Away from the job, Ted is a computer geek, blogger and science fiction buff!
http://www.dmcgresults.com
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