MineThatData

Email marketing has long been viewed as the playground of marketers. In the next decade, merchants need to take a seat at the table, using analytics to derive merchandise intelligence that fuels effective direct marketing strategies.

To determine if multiple channels are a good thing, you first have to determine if multiple channels are multiplicative, additive or generate diminishing returns. It's wise to dive in to multiple channels when sales are multiplicative or additive; it's very costly to dive in to multiple channels when diminishing returns are suggested by your analytical results.

From a return on investment standpoint, it's important to segment customers based on pricing preferences. Once customers are placed into various pricing segments, carefully analyze year-over-year performance to see if they're willing to move from low-price item segments to discount/promo segments to full-price/high-priced items.

By segmenting your customers and analyzing future performance, you can better allocate marketing dollars across campaigns and customers that deliver the best long-term return on investment.

Marketers are told that they have to offer customers discounts and promotions on “Cyber Monday,” the Monday after Thanksgiving. By doing so, they create a lot of media hype. Let’s go through a checklist of attributes that you need to analyze to understand whether Cyber Monday was profitable or not, from a customer standpoint.

It's your job as marketers to realize that ROI is a nonlinear process, requiring strategic thought at each stage to yield success. Carelessly messing with a portion of the ecosystem causes the entire ecosystem to fail. Maybe it's always been this way, but with real-time interaction and measurement tools, it's easy to see how ROI can be suboptimized.

Next time you're looking for tactics that'll increase sales today, consider the role that actual, live human beings might play in increasing brand loyalty within your business model.

Retail direct marketers are blessed in that they get to observe marketing results that are somewhat different than what traditional marketers observe. Consider the retail direct marketer who sends catalogs to customers. While direct marketers segment their customer files on the basis of classic recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) parameters, retail direct marketers go one step further.

Marketers are experiencing an implosion similar to that of traditional journalism this year. Early in the decade, they crafted the “multichannel era,” reasoning that the rampant growth in e-commerce sales was because print advertising created demand. The collapse of the economy caused marketers to question every single marketing dollar they spent. Print advertising is expensive, so once again this line item in the budget was heavily scrutinized.

In the first part of this multipart series last week, I examined how a social media manager might be evaluated against employees who are directly accountable for generating sales and profit. This week in the second installment, I offer some metrics to track when evaluating the performances of social media employees.