Are You Measuring a Medium or an Offer?

We often hear from marketers who are desperate to improve their metrics. More people to the company website means more actions, means more customers next month. If it’s not working, whip out a quick solus EDM to the database – make it a great offer.

While this approach is perfectly valid, we need to be careful that we are not just measuring the impact of an offer. Regardless of medium, “50% off now” is going to get a better response than “10% off now”. It’s easy to get a chart to prove the “50% off” strategy is working, but is it good marketing?

This phenomenon can lead to simplistic analysis … “We got a spike in traffic doing that so do more.”

But what if your customers start to see you as a sale brand? What if they only want to buy when you’re on sale? What if you are conditioning the market to only buy at certain times of year?

If you are marketing a premium product, this approach can actually devalue what you are selling. What if the customers would come anyway and pay the right price? Then we’re discounting for no reason, or worse, we’re discounting to prove that our marketing efforts work.

This is where simplistic measurability can be discomforting. If the only marketing that you are doing is marketing that can be attached to some kind of traffic report, you may in fact be missing out on an opportunity to target a market that doesn’t respond to click-friendly advertising. You may be missing out on a market that just wants to learn about where to buy the good stuff.

A qualitative approach to measurement takes longer and is worth every minute. The informal chat with someone who has just purchased can tell you a lot. “How did you first hear about us?”, “Where did you learn about us?”, “Do you remember what you were searching for when you found our website?”. The results of those chats plotted in a pipeline tool, over time, say even more.