Measuring tools may have changed, but they’re still of the utmost importance.
As legendary adman David Ogilvy once said, “The general advertisers and their agencies know almost nothing for sure, because they cannot measure the results of their advertising.”
When Mr. Ogilvy uttered these lines, he meant to draw a line between general advertisers and direct response advertisers. Social media didn’t exist. Print still ruled.
Yet, as we were just reminded when our eBAM department revamped our email marketing practices, measuring the effectiveness of our marketing efforts is now easier than ever.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure many in the industry always do their very best to measure the effectiveness of their results.
In the case of email marketing, we know how many people read your email. We know how many of them clicked on a link. We know how many of them completed the goals we set out.
Best of all, we know (at least we can infer) why they did what they did (or why they didn’t), thanks to cool techniques like A/B split testing. This means we know how to do an even better job next time, whether it involves modifying the subject line, tweaking the layout, or modifying the amount of copy.
So great is the importance we see in measurability, we do our best to measure things that are notoriously hard to measure — such as the ROI of social media. And if the results aren’t what we expect them to be, we’ll be the first to let our clients know.
If you’re not measuring, how can you possibly know whether it works or not? How can you possibly define success?
JohnAmardeil.com 