Visions, Dream and Marketing Goals
Marketing activities are conducted with two main goals…. to get a paid sale or at the least establish a permission to continue communicating with a client. Depending on your product, one of other goal could be more important.
A lingerie retailer tells me that she often have ladies that visit her website, makes a quick impulsive decision to buy and she never sees them again. Then there are those who visit it many times, interacts ask questions…breaks off the conversation then finally returns and lo behold becomes regular purchasers.
Knowing which goal is more important will help you to plan your service contacts and service touch points. This same principle applies whether you are operating an online or terrestrial shop.
Goals vs Dreams
Every business owner will have a long wish list of things they want to achieve. What differentiates between wishes, dreams and goals are that Goals are directional and measurable.
It is good to dream… to “blue-sky” which is the popular word today used to describe the creative activity of conjuring and brainstorming business and money making ideas. “Blue-skying” can certainly result in breakthrough, perhaps new to the world ideas, or a really intelligent adaptation of what already exists… but at some point of time, it must result in a set of activities that will result in some expected and measurable outcomes.
Until outcomes and the steps towards it become measurable, they remain dreams and wishes and not Goals.
Goals and Measurement
I have often in my corporate career been accused of being a “control freak” because of my insistence on monitoring and measuring all direct and even indirect inputs and outputs to the sales systems. This is largely due to misperceptions about the systemic nature of the organizations and its environment. In both my corporate and consulting career I have commissioned a great number of organizational performance surveys which in part measures the prevailing attitudes of the workforce. These surveys often reveal that a large percentage of employees perceive the concept of SYSTEMS negatively. They would rather not see the company operating as a system and are against any imposition of scientific management principles.
These attitudes have led to the rejection of the scientific principles of direct marketing which demands that marketing efforts and expenditures must be measured against their results. Just as recent as yesterday, a marketing manager of a fairly large multinational business proudly described to me a rather elaborate direct marketing campaign the company had just launched but lacked the ability to discuss the mathematics of the campaign. She was somewhat insulted when I mentioned that what she did was not direct marketing as she did not bother with the measurement!. I probably lost a client, but it’s for the better, for I cannot possibly coach anyone if they do not put emphasis on measuring their own performance?
Process/Output Measures A coach for a Sprint Champion does not only measure how fast the sprinter completes the 100 or 200m dash. In performance management language this is an Outcome measure. He would monitor how fast he gets off the block, his initial acceleration, and the speed at which he maintains his run over the different stretches of the distance. These are process or output measures.
He would analyze these time measures against the actions and styles of the sprinter to diagnose the performance and suggest modified styles and actions that the sprinter could test for improvement.
There are certainly more processes in a direct marketing campaign than in a sprint which is completed in tens of seconds. There are both pre-launch and post launch processes, which are both equally important, though the latter seems to have attracted far more attention.
Pre-launch Metrics. Pre-launch measures track the efficiency and productive rates of campaign launch effort. Did it make schedule? Were the hours put in more than budgeted? Was there excessive rework, delays…wasted time and materials? Were the hours put in spent in the right proportions between conceptualization, planning and execution? Unfortunately many advertising agencies and design houses tend to glamorize the deadline rush, the last minute work, the infinite last minute changes and adjustments to copies and artwork. To many in this industry these are the stuff that makes successful campaigns.
These attitudes have developed over the years when advertising campaigns were largely shallow activities created for a “blast”. Typically in a blast huge efforts go into creative activities to produce the messages…. integrated direct mail, email, SMS launch, TV and Newspaper launch that will happen on D DAY…. and repeated with some modifications over an established frequency pattern. Everyone then waits and watch if the cash register ring and what “Mr Neilsen” says about the impact the campaign has created. If it does not do well on one or both scores, the next campaign could likely be done by another agency team bringing in some fresh new ideas!
This type of short-termed blast mentality glamorizes the last minute rush and is invariably long on execution activities and short on conceptualization and planning and is not suitable for today’s campaigns which must besides building instant sales, aim at building long term relation, affinity and “a contract” with customers. Beyond a powerful creative concept that will turn heads and position the product, campaign managers and their agencies must conceptualize and plan how to best capture leads, responses and to create a series of messages aimed at both respondents and non-respondents over a period of time following the campaign.
Those of us who have gone through the relatively simply task of setting up a follow-up auto-respondent system for our email campaigns would realize that to get things right, much time has to be invested in planning and coolly thinking through the various scenarios and possibilities. There’s certainly no rush work here!
Post Launch Metrics. Post launch metrics track the effectiveness in which messages reach the intended audience and its effectiveness in directing the audience towards a series of activities culminating in the desire ultimate response.
The following paragraphs identify the steps the audience of different media would go through to interact with the messages and to respond to it.
Terrestrial TV
Each step in the process may be viewed as a hurdle. The effectiveness of the process may be measured as the percentage of the potential audience that undertook the step and crossed the hurdle. The Measures for Process Step 1 in the above table may assume the following:
Terrestrial TV. The percentage of people within a total targeted cohort who switched on their TVs as a percentage of the Total Targeted cohort that own a TV. Obviously if the TV is not switch on there is no chance for the message to be exposed.
Direct Mail. The number of households that bother to collect mails regularly as a percentage of households that have a post box . During summer holiday months, this percentage may go down as there is no one at home.
Email. The number of people that bothers to download their emails as a percentage of those that have email boxes. E.g I have a yahoo email box which I seldom do access. If you are sending emails to me on this box, chances are it will not be received.
Terminology and Jargon. The advertising and media industry have created commonly used nomenclatures for these processes and metrics. The REACH RATE, for example generally defines the percentage of people out of the total cohort that were contactable for the delivery of the message. This can mean different things when applied to different media.
For TV the term “exposure” is preferred and it usually an estimate of the percentage of people out of the cohort that were exposed to the advertisement based on some sampling plans established by authoritative agencies like Nielsen.
In Direct Mail it is the percentage of people to whose mail boxes were successfully stuffed discounted by the percentage that did not collect their mails. Like in TV there is no accurate measure of this. Direct Marketers tend to use a location index based on an estimate of the efficiency of the postal service and the types of neighborhood to which the mails were sent. I would for example use a 95% reach rate for mails delivered in Singapore and a 90% for mails delivered in the Federal territory, Malaysia.
For Emails it would be the percentage of people out of the total cohort who had the particular message retained in the inboxes after surviving technical difficulties in email deliveries, blocks and spam controls establish both at Email Service provider and those established by individuals on their desktops and laptops. The preferred lingo is “delivery rate” Whilst we often read reports about email delivery rates going up or down, these are rough estimates. Whilst it is possible to get a relatively accurate of the percentage of mails block by server gateways, it is difficult to measure those that were received but automatically redirected to trash bins.
Problems with Measures. Measurement can be a vexatious problem. This is exacerbated when launching integrated campaigns deploying multiple media types. The differences in terminology and definitions between media though slight can pose vexing problems when consolidating performance reports. It is no wonder that there today many global and in-country initiatives to improve and standardize the criteria for measuring media and advertising performance. This is particularly so for the digital medium which has only attain widespread usage in recent years.
Practical Solutions. It is not the purpose of this essay to go into the technicalities of Media Metrics. Direct marketers must be aware this area is fraught with debates, arguments and inconsistencies. YET this must not discourage from developing for their business a set of metrics that will help guide their performance. In fact it is utterly essential that they do so not only for measuring campaigns but also strategic measures like the life time value of customer earlier discussed.
These performance measures do not have to be veracious and precise nor does it need to be academically or scientifically proven. They only need to fulfill the following requirements:
About the Author
Alex Har is an Asian Direct Marketing Consultant dedicated to helping organizations achieve peak performance in their marketing efforts online or through terrestrial channels. More information about Alex may be found at His Website, ONE1-DM
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