Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

If you were in a consumer products business, I'd suggest using an adjusted shipment trend-line analysis, or purchasing syndicated data to read promotion effectiveness on a market-by-market basis. That is, of course, the ultimate metric for promotion effectiveness and efficiency.

Alas, you are in a B2B world, and that usually doesn't work. In fact, you are probably using the right metrics right now, based on what you've said. Tracking promotion effectiveness is not easy, and you have to use whatever you have to get the job done. There is no magic formula that solves your problem.

I have dealt with B2B clients in a number of different product/service industries, and most of them don't even have the kind of information you do. They use some very crude measurements and make big decisions on what seems to be minimal input -- at least by consumer packaged goods standards.

It's the nature of the beast. Depending on the specific category you're in, there could be some better approaches, but the general answer to the question is that you probably need to stick with what you have ... and be thankful you have that much.

I just wanted to add to my answer with the following.

As with any marketing activity it is important to fully understand what the objective of the campaign are, and then equate these objectives to realistic measurements.

As with any planning, the objectives MUST be realistic. It is possible to increase sales through direct marketing, but more often, an increase is sales is indirect, intangible and difficult to measure. So its important to set ojectives that can be directly related to the campaign.

There are two basic directly related objectives that you can consider:

Retention - it is obviously difficult to suggest that simply communicating with your customers will retain them, they may leave you for a number of reasons (poor customer service, you do not supply the right product for them etc), so you cannot have a retention objective associated with direct marketing. Instead you may want to measure the number of times in a particular period you will mail your customers. Retention mailers may have acquisition requirements too and these can be measured separately.

Sales Leads - where you geneate leads to pass to the sales team for conversion into actual orders. In this situation is it difficult to relate sales leads to orders, the product might not have the right specification, the price might be wrong, or the sales leads might not be followed up effectively, so the conversion to an order may not be appropriate in a large number of cases, but you can measure the actual number of sales leads.

It is important that you measure your direct marketing performance and understand your own businesses performance on conversion to order etc as it is always desirable to try to understand the ultimate Return on Investment (RoI) for your campaigns.

Good Luck again

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Thanks