Cutting firewood in summer

Over the past week, I have had several in-depth discussions with clients and team members about designing and measuring data-driven marketing programs, designed to increase engagement and revenue from Best Customers.  Boy, these conversations are not fun.

You see, discussing measurement structures and plans are the classic Stephen Covey “Quadrant II” activity — they are important but not urgent.  What is urgent is getting the program out in the marketplace and driving as much incremental revenue as we can, as fast as we can.  It’s drive, drive, drive to the finish line, with the launch becoming the end goal.

But then the program must eventually be evaluated and the CFO and the CEO are ready to hear about the results.  And do they have lots of questions?  As they say in Minnesota, where I live, “oh ya sure you betcha!”

Oops.

It strikes me that building measurement plans is a bit like cutting firewood in summer.  It sounds like a good idea, but until the first snow fall hits, it never sounds urgent.  Then it is a cold day, indeed.  You end up cutting firewood in the snow, from of whatever logs you have around.  No pretty answer here, just whatever you can piece together to keep warm.

A measurement plan is like firewood — everyone knows it is a good idea when weather is good, but when it becomes critical, you learn hard lessons from a lack of forward planning.  That is when the CFO and CEO ask questions like these:

1. How do you know that the program results were incremental?
2. What is the ROI of the effort?
3. Why did the program work well in certain markets/stores/segments and not in others?  And so on.

So if you know these questions are coming, AND you are short of time, here are three No Excuses Marketing down-and-dirty approaches to socking in some cut wood before the temp drops:

1. Set up control groups, No Matter What. Control groups help answer the Incremental Question in a consistent, accepted manner.  Get a statistician to give you 30 mins to make sure the control groups are sized right.  Not too small (hard to read) and not too large (wastes customers who can drive revenue).
2. Prioritize what you have to learn.  You can’t learn everything from a single test.  Make sure you absolutely learn what you need to, to prove the value of the effort.  Then pick the learnings based specifically on what you will do with the info.  In No Excuses Marketing, “nice to knows” get left on the cutting room floor.
3. Get the executives on board before the program launches. Absolutely critical.

Make sure your data-driven marketing program does not end up as splinters in the snow, and you will be able to take the first step in building a customer-centric organization — building credibility.

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Tagged as: bestcustomers, change management, Customer Centricity, customer data, Customer marketing, customercentric, Database marketing, Marketing, marketing measurement, marketing metrics, Measurement, Minnesota