Marketing Advisor Blog

Two UK marketers in five think the best ROI is delivered by CRM, online follows second

According to the Marketing Trends Survey (Autumn 2009), that was released earlier this week by ‘The Chartered Institute of Marketing’ and conducted by Ipsos MORI, 21% of UK marketers think CRM activities deliver the best Return on Investment.

The ROI benefits of Customer Relationship Management activities are particularly noted among those working in financial services/other services firms (27%), the institute says in a press release.

Second highest overall for ROI, is online advertising with 12%, followed by email and public relations (with both 11%).

Kickstart your online marketing testing

Online marketing testing, if done properly, can be a great step towards reducing the guesswork in online marketing. Online marketing testing and tracking can give you accurate and reliable answers to almost any marketing question you can image.

The tracking and testing approach should pave the path towards an online marketing decision making process based on facts, not convictions. 

Though this approach might seem pretty straightforward, online marketeers often ask me the question how to get started with online marketing testing, because this approach can be quite overwhelming.

The following simple guidelines should help you out.

Online marketers miss out on opportunities to increase conversion

We recently completed Omniture’s 2009 Online Conversion Benchmark Survey.

The survey looked at ways online marketers are trying to increase the conversion of their websites and digital marketing using techniques such as testing, personalizing, serving and adapting content in function of performance metrics and visitor behaviour etc.

It also looked at how the content is made properly available and searchable for website visitors.

In the executive summary of the report Omniture says that online marketers are intensely interested in increasing marketing ROI through improved conversion and engagement but that the survey showed that many marketers are missing out on opportunities to increase conversion.

The main stumbling blocks to implement a ROMI program

The Return on Investment (ROI) of marketing is one of the ‘hottest’ topics for many marketers, marketing managers and senior management in general.

The ‘marketing nephew’ of ROI, ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) or Marketing ROI, is becoming increasingly important but make no mistake: it differs a lot from ‘plain old’ ROI and there are many issues to solve before implementing ROMI for marketing reporting and forecasting purposes throughout your company (we hope to discuss them in later posts).

Anyway, today’s marketers are increasingly expected (especially in the actual economic climate) to be accountable for what they do and thus in a way to ‘prove’ the value that they create within the company (no wonder some marketers are a bit reluctant).

ROMI is more than just a way to find out, in actual financial results, the impact of our marketing activities: it is primarily a tool for forecasting and for making decisions in terms of future marketing initiatives, at the level of campaigns, marketing programs or the overall marketing plan (and many other levels that we will not discuss now).

Research reveals a growing need for marketing ROI analysis

In these times of economic downturn, marketers are forced to adapt their decision making processes according to recent research, conducted by British research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of SPSS.

The research shows that marketers are increasingly analyzing the return on investment (ROI) of past campaigns in order to make better decisions for new marketing actions.

A survey that was conducted among 100 marketing professionals shows that more than half of all respondents (53%) adapted their ways of marketing-related decision-making.