Do Business Well

One of the unique characteristics of doing business online is the ability it gives you to measure and track the success of your marketing programs. Yet success, as we have seen, can be difficult to define. At the center is the continuous-feedback loop of tracking, measuring, seeking insight, and informing the program— a process based on both science and art. Science because we apply analytic techniques to the huge amounts of data and information in order to structure it and understand our customers‘ responses and behaviors. Art because lasting program success also depends on creative, out-of-the-box program design and interpretation inspired by the insight that we gather from the data.

When the marketers at eBags monitor the success of the My eBags email program, they focus on the numbers. They’re tracking changes in month-to-month repeat purchase behavior that they can attribute to their email communications. The results are looking good, with over 33 percent repeat buyer growth within the program’s first six months. At the same time, eBags is putting together a far broader perspective of its customers‘ future behavior by integrating customer service feedback, customer-driven product reviews, and member surveys with customers‘ transaction data and self- reported customer profiles. Coupled with a strategic, consumer- centric view of its business, eBags is leveraging this comprehensive customer knowledge to guide and shape its successful marketing programs.

The Internet provides marketers more data and hard results than ever before, yet the most difficult challenge is to understand what it all means. Measuring some things is easy: nobody’s going to argue that 10 percent conversion to purchase from an email program is anything but phenomenal. But tracking your success over time, understanding and being able to quantify the factors that impact your program’s long-term success requires patience, persistence, experience, and a lot of careful attention to the numbers. Sparks.com (www.sparks.com) the online service for buying real paper greeting cards, discovered that once a newly acquired customer opens an account originating from a sweepstakes, an email newsletter, or some other vehicle, the new customer will purchase Sparks greeting cards four times over the course of a year on average. Naturally, getting as many people as possible to give Sparks.com their email address is a key part of its success. Numbers such as these, phenomenal as they may be, don’t just fly off this. They require careful tracking of your customers‘ behavior. By making this investment, Sparks.com is now able to use the results to guide its marketing strategy and make informed decisions about how to effectively spend its marketing budget.

So who’s going to dig up the gold in your data? Do you hire a team of analysts and let them figure out how to design, implement, measure, and analyze your Internet direct marketing programs? Or do you partner with service and technology providers to help you build your program?

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