By Cort Irish, VP, Marketing & Communications at Claritas
In today’s multichannel world, marketing campaigns are more complex than ever before. To ensure their message is being seen by the right audience, marketers have to engage consumers across multiple channels and digital media. And that makes it much harder to measure the return on investment (ROI) on any marketing campaign.
To measure the success of marketing campaigns today, you have to know exactly which messages and channels are working and how much each one contributed to the bottom line. And you need to calculate this as the campaign runs – so you can fix what’s not working and double down on what is.
Fortunately, new measurement tools are emerging that allow marketers to accurately measure and optimize marketing campaigns across channels. These tools can help you maximize ROI by allowing you to answer some critical questions about your campaigns.
Which audiences are buying – and how much did they spend?
First, you have to see which type of customer is buying – so you can reach more of your best prospects. Here’s where segmentation tools provide invaluable insight that allows you to quickly identify who your best customers are – and quickly target new prospects that look like your best buyers. Sophisticated marketing vendors today can even track purchasing behavior using credit/debit card data to determine how much each customer spends.
Which channels do those audiences prefer?
Next, you determine if your current marketing channels are actually reaching your best prospects – and adjust your campaign if they aren’t. To do that, you need data that lets you answer questions like Which social media options do my best buyers prefer? Which TV shows do they watch? What is their preferred email address? In which geographic area do they live? Claritas’ high-definition, privacy-compliant portraits of over 255 million people include key information such as the devices they use, their online behavior and much more.
Why did they buy?
Then it’s all about figuring out why they bought. That means you need to accurately match which campaign exposures led to actual purchases. This requires a tool that lets you tie cross-channel exposures – so you know which online and offline channels are most effective in leading to conversions both in-store and online.
Here at Claritas, we use a unique lift analysis methodology that analyzes the change in consumer behavior directly influenced by ad exposure. This allows you to determine exactly which customers in each channel – both online and off – purchased as a direct result of the campaign. It helps confirm that the purchase wouldn’t have occurred if the ad hadn’t been seen – and thus provides insight into how the various campaign components are actually impacting ROI so you can adjust your marketing plan accordingly. Using this methodology, Claritas clients can even accurately track the effectiveness of previously unmeasurable campaign channels such as podcasts/streaming audio.
What are my final results?
Once your campaign is optimized, it’s time to measure your results… and wow your client or internal executive team with the sales you’ve driven in. Here again, accurately calculating incremental lift is vital to obtaining accurate sales figures across channels.
For example, consider this campaign: 4.4 million households were exposed and 188,000 of those exposed households converted for total sales of $5 million. But the reality is that some of those buyers would have purchased even without being exposed to the campaign. For instance, if a consumer has purchased from the advertiser in the last 24 months, they cannot be considered an incremental buyer because that previous relationship might have triggered the sale instead of the campaign.
So that $5 million revenue number won’t give you an accurate view of how effective that campaign really was.
An incremental lift analysis can help you calculate a more accurate return on your campaign spend. After conducting an incremental lift analysis, you may find that only 40% of those buyers were incremental buyers – or those who purchased as a direct result of the campaign. So, if those incremental buyers generated over $2.5 million in sales, then that number represents the revenue generated directly by the campaign.
Using Claritas’ unique lift analysis methodology, you can easily make this calculation for each channel within your marketing campaign – both digital and non-digital. This allows you to truly understand exactly how much each individual facet of the campaign has contributed to the bottom line – and thus focus your efforts on the portions of your campaign that are producing the most sales.
Consider this: When one large bank worked with Claritas to track which online and offline exposures lead directly to credit-card applications, they were able to optimize their marketing efforts to reduce acquisition costs by 94%.
Is this all really possible?
There’s just one tool that can help you consistently get out-of-the-park payoffs from your marketing campaigns – and actually prove your results.
That tool is the Claritas Identity Graph, which reaches nearly 100% of US consumer households and ties together over 5 billion data points monthly to produce the highest-def portrait of each customer and prospect. It’s the engine that makes our powerful solutions work so effectively.
The Claritas Identity Graph lets you know more about who your customers and best prospects are, what devices they use, and how they use them.
It lets you know more about where each customer and prospect engages, so you can reach them with a consistent message when and where they are most likely to interact with it.
And it lets you attribute exposure to conversions – and consistently measure campaign performance by audience, channel, creative, partner and much more. So you’ll know what’s working and what isn’t – and exactly how to optimize your audience, channels, message and more to improve your ROI.
And best yet, you can track and measure your campaign activity on one dashboard for a complete view of your marketing activities.
To find out more about how you can measure and improve your next marketing campaign, download a copy of the Claritas white paper, The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Optimizing Campaign ROI, or contact us to learn more at findcustomers@claritas.com.