Improving Budget Efficiency: Always Track It!
Thursday, 11 August 2011 00:00
by Scott Oser
With the recent news of the downgrade of the US credit rating by the S&P it appears that more economic challenges may be coming in the future. Obviously this is not something anyone wants to hear as it could lead to budgets cuts and therefore fewer marketing activities that we are able to undertake to reach our goals and objectives.
If you are asked to reduce your budget you need to know what to cut and how much to cut. The only way to do this is to use the data that you have acquired as you have measured your response rates to your efforts. Any marketing piece should have some sort of tracking/source/effort code attached to it so you know how many people respond. You must also make sure that you are collecting the number of responses by code so this does not simply become wasted information.
Here is an example: An association typically does two direct mail campaigns per year for recruiting new members—one in the Fall and one in the Spring. Both campaigns consist of approximately 10,000 pieces. There are no tracking codes included in the mailing. It is time to budget for 2012 and leadership has said that the cost of the direct mail campaigns need to be cost by 50%. Since no tracking is done on the campaign it is going to be impossible for the marketing person to demonstrate why the campaigns need remain at 10,000 pieces or to determine how much to cut and from which campaign. Measuring the results of the campaign would have allowed the marketer to know how to reduce expense with as little impact on his response rates as possible.
The job of any marketer is to always improve what you are doing and to become more and more effective. This is true in good times and in bad. If you are not measuring response rates and tracking that data by effort as much as possible there is no way for you to do your job well.
Scott Oser is President of Scott Oser Associates. Scott has over 16 years
of experience as a successful marketing, membership, circulation and sales
professional in the non-profit and publishing industries. The company, Scott
Oser Associates, was created to help associations and for profit companies
develop effective marketing programs for sponsorship, exhibit and
advertising sales, membership, products, and services as well as to help
them maximize return on investment from journals and publications. For more
information, visit www.scottoserassociates.com, call 301-279-0468 or email
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