The first result that came up is Maybelline’s website and is titled Maybelline New York: Products: Age Rewind The Eraser Treatment Makeup.  First of all, the name is just way too long.  I found out that “Age Rewind” is the collection name and “The Eraser” the product name.  Why not just say “The Eraser” and drop “Age Rewind” for simplicity?

The Maybelline website is not optimized for phone viewing, which is important these days especially for a consumer goods company.  Instead, the site comes up as several large buttons:

• Find Your Mascara << I was looking for The Eraser, not a mascara.
• Find Out More About Great Lash BIG! << I have no idea what this is and I don’t care.
• Wallpapers & Ringtone << What, are we in high school?
• Great Lash BIG Takes NYC: Watch The Video << I don’t yet have a phone that supports video, and I still don’t care.
• Sign Up for Text Alerts << There are no compelling reasons to sign up for text alerts.

On my desktop, the website does show information about the product but some of it makes me laugh and some things I would like to see aren’t there.

• They boast a “patented Micro-Corrector Applicator.”  The bottle looks like one of those glue bottles you get from an office supply store, that you squeeze to wet a sponge on top.  You know marketing has gotten a little out of control when a sponge is now a “Micro-Corrector Applicator.”  Just call things what they are and don’t get silly about it, please.  There is some concern about the sponge getting gross, but apparently most reviewers are satisfied by the “antimicrobial fibers” in the sponge.  I still would be concerned.
• On their site, they offer a “MyColorAdvisor.”  I simply click on my skin shade (light) and eye color (hazel), and (gasp!) they suggest my best color tones as all of the light tones.  What amazing powers of insight they have!
• I wanted to know the ingredients of the makeup but this is nowhere on their site.  I went to Target to see the product in person.  Looking at the ingredient list was like reading another language.  The only thing I noticed that is natural is water, and it was the second on the list.  It’s amazing what women will put on their face.
• It’s a “breakthrough formula with active ingredients!”  I looked at what “active ingredients” there are, and found it said 7% Octinoxate, an organic compound found in some sunscreens.
• The site could be more interactive.  Something that makes more sense than MyColorAdvisor?  Please?
• Where can the product be purchased?  I found it at Target, but where else? Why don’t brands tell people where to buy their products?
• At Target this product is $8.99 on sale but $10.99 regular price.  The exact same product in a regular bottle is $6.09 on Amazon and in a pump for $2.49 – $5.98 on Amazon.  Instead of paying such a premium for packaging, I’d rather go buy some good applicator sponges.

The next search result was a review of the product by Elke Von Freudenberg, who says the sponge doesn’t cover well and is too small.  She said the product has an oily feel to it, but after setting it with a powder this goes away.  On the positive side, she likes the coverage and long-lasting results.  A few more results down, another review of the product at Frugirl said she likes the product’s coverage also, and felt it absorbed into her skin rather than sat on top.

I then looked at their Facebook page.  Despite taking time to scroll all the way to the bottom, which wasn’t difficult as it was only a month old, there is nothing said about this product.

In summary, were I in the market for The Eraser, I would have been turned off when I couldn’t access the Maybelline website on my smartphone, by the price when the same product is available for much less in different packaging, by the lack of information on the brand’s Facebook page, and lack of interactivity on their website.  The couple of reviews I did see, however, might have made me reconsider.  It would be in Maybelline’s best interest to address these Fails and send influential bloggers in the beauty space a free sample for review.

At Digiday Social, a case study was presented by imc2 for Secret deodorant, a brand they have been working with since 2003.  The first type of cause marketing is finding something of marketing interest that resonates with the core values of the brand.  For example, Secret’s core brand value is “empowering women” so imc2 latched on to Lindsey Van’s petition to allow women to participate in ski jumping in the 2014 Olympic Winter Games (visit LetHerJump.com to sign the petition).  The commercial, which can be seen here on YouTube, resonated with the Digiday audience and received a round of applause, to which the speaker was unabashedly flattered.  Although the YouTube video has only received 1,500+ views, the company forwarded the LetHerJump domain to their Facebook page, which was smart.  The Page has nearly 40,000 Facebook Fans, which can be marketed to repeatedly (although this should be done well, which is a whole other challenge).

As a side note, another speaker at DigiDay pointed out how the advent of social sites such as Facebook has created the opportunity to constantly market to an audience, which on the plus side can increase Lifetime Customer Value (discussed in a previous post) but on the down side makes it harder to evaluate the affects of a particular marketing campaign.

In order to effectively implement the brand-alignment kind of cause marketing, several steps need to be achieved through primary research (if you need assistance, the company I work with, C.A. Walker, does this).  First, you must know what values you would like the brand to stand for, then you can use surveying to evaluate your brand’s values currently in the mind of the target markets (if any), and whether the values you would like to have associated with the brand would be acceptable in the mind of the target(s).  You can also ask what nonprofits, if any, they donate their time to so you can determine those you may want to evaluate if their brand values are in-line with yours.  From there, you need to create opportunities to attach the brand value to a particular nonprofit objective and market it.  Lastly, you should then re-test the market post-campaign to see what lift was created in terms of brand value awareness, brand loyalty, likelihood to purchase/switch from a competitor, etc.

In the instance of the Secret campaign, although I was one of the persons clapping for the video’s message at Digiday, if they were to ask me I would tell them it did not move the needle much towards me purchasing their product (this is why it’s always good to test campaigns!).  While it had some positive lift in my understanding and appreciation of the brand’s objectives,  there are other factors at play when it comes to my decision to purchase deodorant that, if I became a Facebook Fan based on this campaign, would still not be communicated.  The campaign needs to be reinforced by standard product feature marketing, including price, whether it goes on clear, effectiveness and possibly also scent.  Ways they could swing my vote are:

1. Allow me to buy a sample size before committment of the next several months of my armpits to their product, or send me a free trial in the mail or via in-store handout.
2. Package trial-sized versions of different scents together, so I could determine which of several options I prefer.

The second type of cause marketing is the more typical “sponsorship,” expected to grow 6% over the next year to $1.61 billion, according to a recent IEG Sponsorship Report.  Much marketing discussion recently has centered on the increase in “microsponsorships,” which is the giving, by a company/brand, of a few hundred or few thousand dollars to consumers to fund pet projects.  There are pluses and minuses to the trend, specifically (numbers correspond to sources at bottom):

Pluses:

• Well-conceived programs can be priceless, both in terms of the value they provide society and the business benefits they bestow on the corporations and brands that undertake them.1
• They can be a truthful, sustaining, committed approach to improving the environment and people’s lives.1
• More marketers are latching on to this, and rightfully so, because there is more transparency in where the money is going.2
• For some marketers, microsponsorships present a much-needed icebreaker in social media.2
• Sponsorships may be more market research than marketing campaign.2
• They build databases of those consumers applying for grants or voting…so marketers can reach out to them in more meaningful ways.2
• 79% of consumers say they would be likely to switch from one brand to another (when price and quality are about equal) if the other brand is associated with a good cause.2

Minuses:

• Too often we see marketers adopt causes just for the sake of having one, which often results in a mismatch between the cause’s purpose and the marketer’s [reason for being].1
• Causes appear to be a convenient charity upon which a brand can piggyback to goose its Facebook friend count or incite some quick blogger hits.1
• Just as consumers quickly saw through the rampant green-washing of the past decade, brand beware: They’ll see through your cause-washing, too.  And even if they don’t, they’ll forget about you and what your brand stands for when you move onto the next shiny marketing idea.1
• Too often companies view cause efforts as a tax they must pay.2
• Even tiny sponsorships have to be closely associated with your brand…whatever you decide to pursue can’t be an isolated campaign.  It has to tie into a bigger program that attracts people with similar values and those have got to be clearly stated.2
• Microsponsorships make it easy to “lose control of the brand,” especially when doling out small sums to far-flung strangers.2
• One downside of these programs is that they are “just pecking away” at big problems.2
• For people to be more engaged is generally a good thing, but what are the tradeoffs if people think, “I’ve voted for this; I’ve spent half an hour online looking at these projects and signing petitions, so I’ve done my civic duty.”2
• Often microsponsorships lack focus, and it’s difficult to determine ROI.  The most successful sponsorships are long-term, sustained sponsorships. Microsponsorships fly in the face of that. It’s the equivalent of unfocused granting. You want to have an impact on a cause and be given credit for that impact.2

One of the largest and well-known microsponsorship campaigns currently is Pepsi Refresh.  In order to address the issue of hard-to-define ROI, “Pepsi is employing a battery of diagnostics, including gauging of brand-equity measures that correlate with volume. The brand has also partnered with Good, Global Giving and Do Something, third parties that are on-board to ensure quality and credibility. As for getting the word out about the brand’s impact, there are plans to profile the grant winners and highlight what they’ve accomplished with the money later this year.”2

An upcoming microsponsorship campaign by Prilosec OTC is one to keep your eyes on also.  Read Prilosec Works to Become ‘Sponsor of Everything’ for more on their efforts.

1 AdAge -  Cause Campaigns Must Benefit Brand and Greater Good

2 AdAge – Cause Effect: Brands Rush to Save World One Deed at a Time

First off, you should watch their demo to see how Google AdWords Display Ad Builder works.  When I first log into Google AdWords, I am presented with  “create a new campaign.”  I enter a name for the campaign and then select where I would like the ad to be seen. What’s interesting here is that I can choose to target businesses if I am creating an ad for a B2B operation.  If so, I can then connect to the Google Local Business Center, if a business owner, or add addresses manually, if not.  If a B2C operation, I  can instead choose to target by demographics, male/female and age range only.

I then select the networks I want to run in and on what devices, desktops/laptops and/or mobile.  I then decide if I want to pay on a CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition), or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.  If I want CPA, it directs me to setup conversion tracking on the Reporting tab, meaning, I will pay only if there is a sale, signup, lead generated, or view of a specific page.  This step provides conversion tracking code that has to be added to the web page.  I then enter a budget for the campaign per day, if CPC I enter a bid limit, and start and end dates.  Lastly, I can also choose to cap frequency, meaning, the same person won’t see the ad or “ad group” more than once per day, per week or per month.

Once I have saved my options, on the next screen I can choose to create a text, image or mobile ad, or select Google AdWords Display Ad Builder.  I then enter keywords (and negative keywords) manually or upload a spreadsheet (see my blog post Free Keyword Suggestion Tools for help with this step).  Pressing the “estimate search traffic” button, I will see what Google figures my average cost per day would be, given the maximum CPC and budget entered previously.  Lastly, I can enter specific websites that I would like to show the ad (see my blog post Manage Your Advertising ROI with Google AdPlanner for help with this step).

Finally, I’m now at the step to create the display ad.  My options are: create an ad for a currently hosted YouTube video, place a 15 or 30 second video ad within video publisher content, create a click-to-play video creative, create a “roll-over showcase,” “tabbed showcase,” “scrolling showcase,” “peel effect,” or slideshow.  They also have various templates for seasonal ads or for companies that specialize in education, entertainment, financial, retail, technology and travel.  Lastly, they offer “people” ads with, what else, people in them doing things like pointing, running, hugging and dancing.  You can even select to see those ads that offer the highest click-throughs.

If you’re wondering where these ads will show up, there is information here on the Google Network, Gmail, Search Network (Google search results pages and the search results pages of Google’s search partners), Content Network, and Content Network Partners.  Also, remember you can specify locations in the earlier step.

A new development in Google AdWords Display Ad Builder you should be aware of is their recent acquisition of Teracent.  You will soon be able to setup “intelligent display advertising” to have multiple elements within the same ad that can be targeted to the recipient based on geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.  While dynamic ad serving is exciting, it will also create more work for those setting up campaigns and we will once again return to talks of multivariate testing (see my last post How To Test Landing Pages for more on this).

A couple of useful articles:

• How to link Google Analytics goals and transactions to AdWords Conversion Tracking
• How to import Google Adwords campaigns into Yahoo and MSN

Lastly, if you have website content that is new every day or can be used frequently, such as a blog, news feed, map, calculator, videos or games, you might consider creating a Google Gadget ad.  There are multiple ways to go about building a Gadget, including using their templates and wizards.  It says on their site, “To get started, all you need is a basic understanding of HTML. We will teach you all you need to know about XML to write gadgets. Later, as you write more sophisticated gadgets, you will probably want to learn some JavaScript if you’re not familiar with it already.”

If you use the tools that I have shared with you today, I’d love for you to come back and tell me your experience and how well it worked for you in achieving marketing ROI.

The upside for consumers:

• Earn 100 CREDITZ points for signing up, 100 points for taking their survey,  and an unknown amount for referring friends and family.
• Manufacturers may provide digital coupons for their products.
• CREDITZ contributes 15% of their transactional revenue to widows and orphans because of aids, and micro-loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.
• Purchase gift cards from retailers.
• Send CREDITZ to friends and family, even if they don’t have an account.
• Combine household member purchases into one account for a one-time $10 fee, as long as you have more than 10,000 points combined.
• At brick-and-morter retailers, look for the “GET PAID HERE” CREDITZ sticker on site.
• “CREDITZ Digital Currency may be inherited through a valid legal will.”

The downside for consumers:

• If you don’t read the below carefully, you may think that you earn 10 CREDITZ for every 10 cents that you spend, but that is not the case.

How long before I can start spending my CREDITZ?
Your initial redemption of CREDITZ is a minimum of 500 or more. Thereafter, you can spend any amount of your CREDITZ on goods or services at participating merchants and online sites.
10 CREDITZ = 10 Cents ––100 CREDITZ = $1.00 – – 1,000 CREDITZ = $10.00 ––10,000 CREDITZ= $100.00

• The Ts&Cs state, “Merchants will typically pay you one (1) unit of CREDITZ Digital Currency for every one or two dollars that you spend with them, after discounts and before taxes.”  Not only that but, “Each unit of CREDITZ® Digital Currency has a digital currency value of 0.01 of a US Dollar when you spend them.”

So what does this mean?  If you spend $100 before taxes, you may earn 50-100 CREDITZ according to the Ts&Cs.  Taking the conservative figure, 50 CREDITZ, if you try to spend them right away you can’t.  You have to have earned a minimum of 500 points (for your first spend only) to start using CREDITZ points to shop…meaning that you have to spend $1,000 before taxes to use your first $5 in CREDITZ.  That’s conservatively a 0.5% return for your money and effort.

• When registering, they ask for all kinds of personal information: the kind of phone you own, who your carrier is, who your Internet provider is, what kind of pets you have, do you give your pets Christmas gifts (?!), what kind of music you listen to, what types of movies you like, where you buy books, what is your favorite color (seriously!), and it goes on and on.
• There are spelling errors all over the site, which irks me.

More from the Ts&Cs…

• “Merchants will determine the conditions under which they will permit you to obtain CREDITZ Digital Currency and may change those conditions at any time and without notice.”
• CREDITZ is “not responsible if a Merchant delays or fails to make [a CREDITZ payment].”
• “No CREDITZ Digital Currency will be issued for the following: tobacco, lottery tickets, specific concessions and/or other items specified as exclusions.”
• “You may spend your CREDITZ Digital Currency either in-store or through other distribution channels made available by the Merchant, such as over the telephone, online, through wireless devices, etc. [but] participating Merchants have [no] responsibility for failure to accept CREDITZ Digital Currency at the particular point-of-sale that you choose to make your purchase.”
• “[CREDITZ] may immediately cancel your Account, forfeit all CREDITZ Digital Currency you have accumulated and permanently restrict you from participating in the System if…it is determined that…,in the case that you move, you fail to provide CEO with your new address within six months of your personal information changing; or your Account remains inactive for more than two years.”

Their current registered retailers are a bit thin as well:

Apple iTunes
Beauty.com
Blinds.com
Camping World
Cars Direct
CCS
Championcatalog.com
Computers 4 Sure
Davids Cookies
Enterprise Rent A Car
eToys
Fashion Bug
Fingerhut Direct Marketing, Inc.
Florsheim
Flower.com
FlowerStore.com
FragranceNet.com
Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation
Fuller Brush Company
Gaiam.com, Inc.
GiftBaskets.com, Inc.
GigaGolf, Inc.
Guthy Renker Corporation
HearthSong
Hotwire
ICE.com
InternetFlorist.com
JewleryWeb.com Inc.
Just Because Baskets
KB Toys
Lane Bryant
Lillian Vernon Online
Limoges Jewlery
McAfee, Inc.
Monterey Bay Clothing Company
Mrs Fields Gifts, Inc.
Netflix, Inc.
Office Depot, Inc.
Officefurniture.com
Onehanesplace.com
Overstock.com
Paul Fredrick MenStyle
PetSmart
Pitney Bowes, Inc.
ROOTS Direct
Sierra Club
SkyMall, Inc.
SpeedGear.com
SwissOutpost and Swiss Knife Depot
Tactics.com
Tech Depot
Textbookx.com
Thrifty
TigerDirect
Time Life.com
Toshiba
Veterans Advantage, Inc
Vision Direct
WalMart.com USA,LLC
Waterford
Wirefly
Wireless from ATT
Zales

What do you think?  From a consumer perspective, would this rewards program increase your brand loyalty to participating stores, or make you want to purchase at these retailers if you never have before?

They give several examples of how their products have been used:

• Pre-paid scratch cards used to drive traffic to a client’s website.
• Informing students of an sms competition (using cell phone texting to enter).
• Mini-brochure folds out to the size of a 40″ TV screen, to visualize how the TV would fit into a person’s home.
• A pocket-guide to a cholesterol-lowering eating plan.
• A mini-guide to shopping and experiences about town.

It’s not just about how the marketing tool is designed, but how it is distributed as well.  Z-CARD handles some that too, but it seems from case studies on their website they only provide this service in the UK.  Some of their ideas are worth noting, however, for US marketing:

• Dispensers or display stands at airport pre-security areas and departure lounges, including exclusive club lounges.
• Dispensers or display stands at railway concourses.
• Placed brochures on meal trays during outbound flights.
• “Tipped” into a mailer and sent out to potential clients, or newspapers.
• “Tipped” into airline publications.

Ways to track response include: having them enter a unique number off the card on the website to obtain their prize or discount, increase in call volume and online inquiries, and number of attributable orders.

I really like this concept because you can fit a lot of information in a small design, it’s easily portable in a pocket, purse or billfold, it doesn’t take up a lot of room at the distribution site, people like samples of products to try before they buy, and a lot of people are strangely excited by small things.

One good way of arriving at social media metrics is postulated by Heidi Sullivan of Cision Blog: “There are two basic types of ways to measure your impact on the Web: passive and active.” Furthermore, she attempts to break it down into the five senses: sight (where are you seen), sound (who’s talking about you), scent (do they stick around to “smell what you’re cooking”), taste (can they taste what you’re offering through search engines) and touch (are they taking the next step to touch others with your information).

Going back to the passive vs. active concept, here are metrics she suggests as well as from other sources (numbers refer to sources at bottom):

Passive

• Number of unique visitors to your blog.1
• Monthly site views aka page views.1 – Definition: Request to load a single HTML page.  Page views are only important to the degree they play a part in a site’s revenue model. If a site earns much of its revenue from advertising, then page views are important because of their contribution to ad inventory. If a site only earns revenue on sales, then page views are not a key statistic.
• Number of page views per visit.6 – Try landing people on an engaging page that funnels them through a messaging sequence that builds your brand and escalates sales. Measure the results and optimize the path that gets people to the end of the sequence. Also, measure the lift in total page views of your site’s high-value product pages.
• Monthly unique sessions.1 – Definition: In tabulating statistics for Web site usage, a user session (sometime referred to as a visit) is the presence of a user with a specific IP  address who has not visited the site recently (typically, anytime within the past 30 minutes). The number of user sessions per day is one measure of how much traffic a Web site has. A user who visits a site at noon and then again at 3:30 pm would count as two user visits.
• Number of return visits.6
• Search trends.7

Active

• Number of influencers (track who they are for targeting) that share your content through inbound links, citations, tweets, viral videos or other forwarding of information that result in transactions.1,4,6 – put a call to action in your campaign that will lift this metric.
• Number of company/brand mentions in blogs, on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, as gauged by a social media monitoring solution, especially when supplemented with sophisticated sentiment analysis that discerns positive brand mentions from the negative. 1,7
• Number of people clicking on your images, watching your videos, using your widgets, and spending significant amounts of time on your site.1 – by tagging videos and applications, companies can track each occurrence of sharing and estimates frequency of exposure to particular media.6
• Number of and which keywords/other sites referring visitors to your content.1
• How much money social media has saved or created for your brand: How many issues that you solved, questions that you answered, leads that you created, products that you sold, call volume that you decreased, etc., through social media engagement versus traditional resources.2
• Time spent across an entire campaign.3
• Click rate [on an ad].3 – not the best metric to use.  People can accidentally click and then drop off, or they can click and see it’s not for them and drop off.
• Interaction rates [with an ad].3 – may be influenced by the creative and not a true representation of their interest.
• Conversion rates – doesn’t take into account return conversions or other offline results, e.g. visit to a store for further research.
• Time spent throughout cross channel engagement with the brand – forecast the number of touches a customer can have with a brand and the resultant amount of time spent with the brand, e.g. total number of exposures, visits you’ll drive to the site, increase in total mentions that can be measured with social media monitoring tools.3
  • Once you understand the total touches, you can either measure directly or assume through general patterns what the time spent is across each of these vehicles, and then create a cumulative time spent for the campaign. When you break down the individual media vehicles, time spent is actually quite easy to report on.3
• Lifetime value of customers based on their purchasing activity, which could be higher depending on their level of social media influence, e.g. if a customer is worth $9 dollars alone, but that person has 500 Facebook friends, and is able to drive even 1% of them (5) to make a purchase, that individual’s value could be as high as $54 dollars.4
• Number of people who you capture data from – Eyeblaster has found that the ability to capture data within a banner is nearly eight times more effective at addressing conversions than click-through rates (CTR), revealing that consumers are more likely to fill in a banner than click on it.5
• Number of people who opt into your e-newsletter/email updates (e-newsletter metrics to be discussed under separate, future posting).6
  
• Number of people who download materials from your site.6
• Number of phone calls you receive and source.6
• Number of people that share comments and opinions.6
• The impact individuals exert on wider audiences – a combination of data obtained from buzz-tracking with data from surveying (see below), to determine the probability of viewing buzz by taking into account the volume of relevant posts and amount of time spent by panelists on a website.7

And there are also metrics that can only be obtained via surveying, which is what the company work with, C.A. Walker, does:

• Awareness.
  
• Interest.
• Desire.
• Lifts in brand awareness and attitudes attributable to a social media campaign.
• Various actions taken throughout engagement with the brand.
• Usage – may be of a particular website or of a product.
  
• Consideration – may also be inferred from measuring the things that drive people into your (or your client’s) stores.  Actions like store locator queries and rep searches should always be measured and are clear indicators that a future purchase may be imminent.6
• Intent to purchase – may also be inferred from Time spent throughout engagement with the brand. If consumers spend more time than the average, they must be interested in your product or service — and if they are interested, that is a measure of intent.3

If I’ve missed any applicable metrics, please let me know so I can grow this list.

Sources:

1Cision Blog: Five Senses of Online Measurement

2Mashable: Twitter Brand Best Practices

3MediaPost: Time Spent Is The Right Metric To Measure Engagement

4MediaPost: Marketers Search For Social Media Metric

5Eyeblaster: Conversions Remain Important Metric

6ClickZ: 11 Things to Measure Besides Clicks and Conversions

7MediaPost: Media Metrics: Let’s Get This Party Started

I came across a company today, Techrigy, with a product called TechrigySM2 that offers this service.  They offer free to monitor five search terms and up to 1,000 results…not per term.  If you want more than that, you’ll pay $600+/month.  I’m assuming they use a sliding scale depending on the size of the company that wants it.

They monitor the following:

• Blogs
• Wikis (Such as Wikipedia)
• Message boards/Forums
• Video/photo sharing website (such as Flickr and YouTube)
• Mainstream media blogs (such as the New York Times blogs)
• Microblogs (such as Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed, and Plurk)
• Social networks (such as Facebook and MySpace)

And, of course, they offer a whole bunch of additional options such as “Sentiment Analysis,” “Discussion Clustering,” and it all ties into their new parent company’s platform that includes Campaign Management, Web Content Management, Email Marketing and Marketing Analytics tools.

I’m checking it out myself to see what I can get out of it…you should too. One thing that I’ve found it’s great for is to find other bloggers and Twitters who are discussing marketing ROI, so I can follow them.  It’s just too bad they don’t offer a more limited package for small businesses at around $50/month.

“53% of marketing budgets for US companies have increased in the past year, in the face of slow economic conditions. This extra budget is being used to fund high-return Online Lead Generation campaigns, with Email Marketing the top area of spend, with 75% of organizations using it.”

Furthermore, they share a few open-ended responses, one of which is:

“Better comparability between online and offline Cost per Lead has enabled us to shift budgets from off- to online.”

In Email – the most accountable marketing going? the author claims that out of all the marketing channels available, PPC and email are the best to evaluate ROI.  Their reasoning is that other channels only show you the good – when someone takes an action to buy – but with PPC and email you can see who clicked but did or did not buy.  Furthermore, they say with email you can re-target those who did not open, who opened but did not buy, etc., which the author claims gives it an edge over PPC.

Here is the problem I have with these articles’ claims – both were authored by companies who stand to profit from their statements.   This is an important point.

The first article, a press release, includes research from two companies who specialize in and profit from eMarketing.  What is their relationship?  A search reveals that Econsultancy pays Clash-Media nearly $2,500 a year for a Platinum Level listing in their online vendor directory.  Furthermore, they are the ONLY marketing consultant/supplier with expertise in email marketing who is at that paid level.  Does this mean that Econsultancy might be able to be strong-armed by Clash-Media into publishing the parts of the study that best supports their position?  It’s not unheard of for a client to try that sort of tactic, but it’s not something that the company I work with, C.A. Walker, would ever allow.  We certainly welcome companies to commission studies that could be used for press, but facts are facts.  If study results do not support the client’s desired outcome, they know going into the study that this could happen and we will not change or tweak results to suit their intended purpose.

I’m not saying that the research in the first article isn’t accurate, however, the relationship of the two companies raises a red flag.  The other issue I have with this particular study is their statement that “Email Marketing the top area of spend, with 75% of organizations using it.”  The implication is that the most amount of money is being spent on email marketing, which is not what 75% using it means.  75% of the people in my office may be wearing sneakers right now with shoelaces in them, but that doesn’t mean that shoelaces are a top area of spend for any of us.

Lastly, regarding this study, I found online the results from their same study from last year, 2008, which states that “over 50% of marketers’ budgets now spent online.”  That would mean that online marketing is now equal to the size of ALL the money spent combined for broadcast and cable TV, outdoor advertising, direct marketing, magazines and newspaper, specialty advertising, events, and sports sponsorships.  Logically, it doesn’t make sense.  Once again, it seems they used a figure where 50% of the companies checked off that they are participating in online marketing, and they extrapolated that to mean that 50% of their budget is spend online.  Unless the survey asked respondents to share their BUDGET SIZE with them and how that was broken out, which is highly unlikely that marketers would share, this claim does not hold up.

The second article was written by Pure360 who sells email and mobile marketing solutions.  I thought it in poor taste for the author to say that TV advertising is his “pet peeve” because of its lack of accountability.  Television advertising is still one of the most successful marketing channels that there is.  More people *still* watch TV than are online.  The fact that it is difficult to evaluate ROI in no way diminishes the power of television advertising.  Granted, with the increase in use of DVRs the effectiveness of TV ads drops, but advertisers simply have to get more creative to overcome the desire to flip past a commercial.  The problem is not DVRs – the problem has been, still is, and probably will continue to be – bad and overly repetitious TV advertising.

The author really needs to have a larger view of engagement metrics across all channels before he could possibly ever argue that email is the best.  That’s actually why I put this blog together, because it takes a serious study of these matters,  over a great deal of time, to be able to draw any conclusions about which is best and what metrics to use for what channel.  What I plan to focus on next is exactly this – how do we best measure engagement across different channels?  What is the latest thinking from the top thinkers (including the researchers who I work with) in these areas?