Running the rule over marketing campaigns

The financial director of a company I worked for was fond of quoting at board meetings an unattributed statement that 'half the money spent on advertising is wasted, but didn't know which half." Perhaps his helpful remark was intended to present marketing as unscientific compared with the precise art of accountancy - but lets not go there. The trouble is, although that comment about advertising has variously been used by people such as Henry Ford and Lord Lever and as early as the 19th century, the actual origins are unclear. As to whether it is true - well that's another matter. Another frequently quoted, or actually misquoted statistic is that we are all subjected to 1,518 advertising messages a day - a figure taken from a speech in 1957 by then VP Advertising of General Foods to emphasise and exaggerate a point, based on his own unscientific research and extrapolated to a family of four - not for an individual. A later formal survey put the figure at 76 advertisements a day of which just 12 made any impression and 3 of those negative. Another often quoted statistic is that only 2% respond to direct mail, so 98% is wasted. Others agonise over market share which in some industries is easier to measure than others and of course Google Analytics has shone a new light on web site activity. The reality is that whilst measurement is important, figures need to be viewed with some care. The fact is that marketing has to take account of human factors, preferences and prejudices and that the only real measure is the bottom line of the company. Of course an improvement in profitability can be attributed to other non-marketing factors, such as productivity gains through investment in new plant, or due to savings on waste. So with due caution in mind  the recently published "UK email marketing benchmark report" offered some interesting insight into the measured success of e-mail campaigns. What emerged was different levels of success across different industries. For the industrial/manufacturing sector the bounce rate was 13.28%, opens 20.38% and clicks, 1.86%. Unsubscription rates were 1.35%.  The question is what does this actually mean? Bounces measure e-mails that don't work. Unlike postal delivery where there is a human involvement, any error in an e-mail address will fail, a frequent source of error are the subscribers themselves. Interestingly unsubscription rates are very low suggesting either the list is on target or perhaps a degree of laziness in bothering to unsubscribe.  Although around a fifth actually opened the e-mail,  more will have received and seen the message in the preview pane so would still have an awareness of the campaign. Of those opening the message 9% clicked on the link through to the landing page or whatever the call to action was. At this point of course Google Analytics can track the arrival on the web site. These metrics are  all useful, but just because percentages can be calculated to several decimal places it does not infer there is a high level of accuracy. Marketers need to use numbers but also keep an eye on the bigger picture and develop an understanding of how effective the campaign is.