Over the past few years, marketing professionals have had to overhaul their skill sets as the industry has evolved from one borne of creativity and communication, into an exact science. The explosion of digital media into our toolsets, combined with worldwide economic austerity, has created the perfect storm for measurement and analytics to flourish. Of course, professionals have measured activities for generations, but never before have we had such a huge variety of methods and tools at our fingertips to analyse the results of our campaigns in such great detail to ensure our budgets go further.
Increasingly, marketing professionals are running campaigns which integrate both physical and digital activity, and this presents a challenge when it comes to measurement. No-one wants to be sifting through reams of complex figures to identify a campaign’s success, especially when marketers have over 40 different marketing channels (Smart Insights) to hand. Conversely, lumping the results of all channels together for overall effectiveness doesn’t say anything about the performance of one over another, nor about the resulting customer behaviours.
The simplest and most accurate way to measure a cross-channel campaign’s success is to use a simple framework. Following this framework will help you determine and present physical and digital results in a clear and effective way:
1. Identify your objectives
2. Set performance metrics
3. Think about how best to present the results for impact
4. Decide on the performance measures – and stick to them
1. Identify your objectives
This should be straightforward. What is your primary marketing objective, and how does this fit with your campaign performance objective? Are you looking to generate leads, qualify your pipeline, increase customer loyalty or advocacy rates, improve brand value, test different messages or raise awareness of a particular product? Do you want to find out how each individual channel compares or present an overall picture? Are you trying to find out the channel with the highest ROI? Identifying your key objectives will help you decide on performance measures.
2. Set performance metrics
Measuring outputs is fairly straightforward. Measuring short-, medium- and longer-term outcomes is more complicated. Consider looking at customer behaviours, and identifying the touchpoints which contributed to the decision-making process.
Identify whether you want to measure effectiveness based on the overall campaign, or on a specific channel. Are you taking into account the halo effect of other activities happening simultaneously for a true multi-channel approach, or focussing on the results of this specific campaign? Do you need to look at the effects over time rather than an immediate response? The list of performance metrics is vast. For digital activity alone, performance metrics include:
- Cost per lead
- Click through rates
- Total visits
- Total page views
- Unique visitors
- Average visit duration
- Bouncebacks
- Conversation rates
- Amplification rates
- Applause rates
- Customer Satisfaction rates
For physical mail, popular metrics include response rates, conversation rates, cost per mailpiece and customer satisfaction rates. Increasingly, marketers swear by measuring attribution, using scalable algorithms to determine results of cross-channel campaigns. It can work at a granular level and identify the ultimate combination of channels. Net Promoter Score is another key metric, measuring customer loyalty by looking at the likelihood of customers recommending your business to clients or friends.
3. Identify how best to present the results for impact
Businesses plan to increase their spend on marketing analytics by 73% over the next three years but the analytics are of no value unless they are precise, accurate and digestible, and in a format in which trends can be tracked and fed back into business strategy. Do you want to present a visual snapshot of results in the form of a graphic? A simple ROI per channel in spreadsheet format? A written Executive Summary? Could you present the results in video format? Are you going to provide access to an analytics dashboard? How your C suite expect to view the results – and how much time they have to do so - will determine the analytics platforms you use, and your areas of focus.
4. Decide on the performance measures
Marketers delivering cross-media campaigns must combine digital analytics with the performance of physical campaign activity. Here’s where the worlds of physical and digital combine with truly great results. There is a huge array of tools and applications available to measure digital metrics, which provide a powerful, credible performance of digital activity, such as blippar.com which uses the camera function in smartphones to recognise images and return a response.
Measuring physical activity is equally as accurate and exciting: the evolution of physical mail has led to the ability to gain access to in-depth, precise analytics which provide accurate, detailed performance.
Call tracking, measuring of promotional codes and geographic data can all provide insight into the success of a physical campaign. Digital franking machines can track the performance of a campaign by identifying the whereabouts of each individual item, and mail can be tracked on the Internet, allowing the swift location of items.
Pressure is on marketers to measure results: more so than ever before. The greater the measurements, the more strategic impact they have on a business: campaign results are being absorbed back into organisations, providing intelligence and influence on the product or service planning and development cycles. Luckily, methods of measurement have never been as smart, varied, accurate, user-friendly or cost-effective. With 40+ channels at hand to engage with, excite and delight customers, and the right tools in place to identify success, marketing has come of age. The potential impact on both top and bottom-line financial performance is phenomenal.
By Andrew Ford, Vice President of Marketing and Communications Europe, Pitney Bowes.
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