[thelist] <s>Spam</s> Marketing Email Return

[Luther, Ron]

Jack Timmons (that bouncy overly optimistic guy) asked about mass mailing and metrics and such ...

(I don't think cabbages and kings were in there - but I didn't read too terribly closely either.)

>>unfortunately there's too much information on what I want to find,
>>which is, from a business standpoint, what is an acceptable metric for
>>determining how effective campaigns are. 


Hi Jack!  (Ooops.  Hope no FAA types are loitering around.)

A few other folks have weighed in on the mass mailing stuff so I thought I might eat up a minute or two rambling on about metrics.

Yeah, the 'did sales go up?' is always a good one - but it's _usually_ very VERY hard to isolate the impact of one mass mailing (or even a series of them) on sales ... because the impact of those efforts are generally 'confounded' with impacts from many other marketing efforts - some from your company, some from your partners, and some from your competitors / alternatives.

[Yeah, I *have* seen idiots claim their 4 color z-fold brochure was responsible for the $$$ sale to the client the multi-person, multi-department team had been working on for 2 years - because the customer placed their order 2 weeks after the mailing went out.  Hey, it must have been the 'last straw', right?  Who knows?  Could be.  We'll take credit for that!]


Primary research is how you get the answers to your questions.  I think I'd recommend an annual 'opinion' / 'citizenship' / 'ad awareness' combined Omnibus style survey of a random sample of customers and non-customers in a couple of geographies you care about:
	'opinion' - covering a number of the 'how do you feel about companies who send out mass mailings?', 'how do you feel about companies who sell mailing lists?', 'how do you feel about companies who don't publish privacy code info' kinds of questions.
	'citizenship' - covering the 'do you feel [my company] respects your right to privacy?', 'do you feel [my company] is trustworthy?', 'do you feel [my company] is responsible for the hole in the ozone layer?' stuff.
	' ad awareness' - {with aided and unaided content recall sections} prying into whether or not the customer got your message, remembered it, and remembered that actually it came from _your_ company kinds of things.


Good Luck,
RonL.

{Total guesswork based on experience from past lives here ... done right, I'm guessing this could run you maybe $60-100k a year.  Done in-house with an intern, a carrot, and a sausage onna stick ... $6-10k might start to get you a glimmer of what would be possible.}