MeritDirect Event Panel Heading Back to the Future, Part 1

Jukes, president of e-commerce software provider Ability Commerce, served as moderator, posing questions. In setting the stage, he noted that direct marketers “have to hold the expenditures they make in online to the same standards they made in mail over the past 25 years."

"Specifically,” he advised, “look at not just order dollar acquired, but also lifetime value and profitability of a customer acquired online vs. lifetime value and profitability of a customer acquired through a catalog. If we’ve done anything wrong in the past five years, we’ve been a little overenamored with the sexiness of technology and moved away from the disciplines and measurements of RFM and lifetime value that we’ve learned so well.”