Email Marketing & Publishing News February 2004

Measurement
The essential, online marketing database

Measurement doesn't happen without a robust marketing database that tracks results and makes comparisons. After several years of managing email campaigns for our clients, it struck us that all shared the same three problems:
  1. Marketing contacts in multiple databases that couldn't talk to one another. Typically, these were the corporate CRM, the Web site, the computers of individual reps and various napkins and match covers of senior executives.
  2. IT guarding the customer database, impeding useful and timely queries.
  3. Inadequate tracking of privacy and permission.
To help solve these problems, we began hosting our clients' online marketing databases, linked directly to our email deployment engine and constantly refreshed by click-through activity. We call the result continuous client communications.

Inbox clients create a mailing list based on a number of criteria, send a message to this list and then wait as the returning click-through activity refreshes and updates each individual contact. By drilling down, they can know exactly which customers subscribed to a newsletter, clicked on an offer or responded to a survey.

What this does is automate much of the measurement discussed here and - more importantly - ensure the measurement process. Whether you outsource this activity or create it in-house, it is well worth the effort.