How Data-mining Can Help Drive Personalized E-mail

Measure Performance

Several catalogers have told me they had tried e-mail personalization once on a prior campaign, and it didn’t work. My question to them is: “How do you know it can’t work if you tried it only once?”

The long-term retention of customers is what relationship marketing is all about. Given this objective, return on investment isn’t necessarily the proper measure of success. While an immediate increase in open rates, clickthroughs, order conversion and/or catalog response rates at the campaign level would be desirable and might be doable, the true success of a CRM effort can be evaluated only in time.