If anything, the book presents these ideas in a much more logical, serial format than you’ll be exposed to reading posts on a blog…

The book should provide you with a complete toolkit for measuring and managing the Nurture phase in REAN, as well as insight into how activity in other phases affects what will happen in Nurture.

I bought the book (Drilling Down) by the way and look forward to see how it can add to my current perspectives on things.

http://blog.jimnovo.com/2008/02/08/marketers-both-ways/

This is the paradox that folks who do not use control groups have to answer for. What percentage of the sales would have happened anyway? If that number is zero, then interactivity is *not different*, and there is no point in thinking about customer experience and all the rest of it; customers only buy when you pound them with marketing - just like offline.

But that’s simply not true.  Once they agree to that concept, the idea that sales to current customers might occur without any marketing at all, the next step is control groups, to find out what that percentage is.

I’ve been guilty of being too busy to comment on the “framework for engagement” post that you made recently though I always meant to return to it. Firstly I have to say I agree with the idea entirely. What’s more I have a direct marketing background and completely understand the control group concept. I am one of those technical guys that learned marketing. :) I used to work in a direct mail firm which sent millions of letters daily and would routinely use control groups to determine what the best marketing messages were in mailouts.

I just have never been able to implement and prove that control groups work with the clients I work with in the online space due to too many of the cultural problems which exist (the companies I work with don’t have a CAO or even an analytics and research Hub - though I am working to change that). I got extremely interested with your six weeks analysis above. What mechanisms did you put in place to track the test minus controls in the PPC and email examples?

You’re talking my language. When I was talking about REAN I was talking about visualizing and planning mechanisms for the customer lifecycle. A tactic that helps folks understand what it is that they’re trying to measure both on and offline. Once you have planned you then build KPIs which include the Nurture phase which is primarily the whole thing you’re discussing.

What your work is doing is showing that this can really work. I am now really starting to understand where you’re coming from having browsed through a number of your posts tonight. Lightbulbs coming on over here.

You use customer control groups to measure activity across channel. When you discuss customer you mean someone that is in your database as having bought something (or if you like registered, or downloaded). In many of the recent engagement discussions I think customers have been defined as visits etc.

Does your book go into more depth around this subject? If so I’ll take a copy, this is the best stuff I’ve read in a very long time.

Best regards
Steve

Success on this particular task really depends on how well your measurement infrastructure is put together. I could create a control group and not drop any e-mail to that control. Then I could see what kind of sales activity I get in the control, understanding what I am really measuring is “all other media plus self-service”.

You will get the net contribution of e-mail, and be able to fully claim that share versus whatever all the other sources like PPC are claiming. So you’ve answered the question not by measuring any other media using a control, but by specifically measuring the contribution of e-mail versus all other media as a group.

From there, it gets less “rigorous”, as you pointed out. If I have a customer database that tracks source of all sales, and assuming my source tracking works pretty well, I can begin to understand the components of this “everything else” demand - how much is PPC, how much banners, how much is self-service - by killing off campaigns. This last piece of business is not controlled in a scientific sense but there are some tricks you can play to simulate control - using public service ads in a split test / rotation, for example.

Frankly, I’m kind of surprised with all the “optimization” Google is up to that they don’t provide an easy facility for creating control groups in a PPC campaign. I’m pretty sure we would learn some interesting stuff in the organic versus paid area. Perhaps when they integrate DoubleClick…

What I do wonder about though is how you would apply this in the case of a PPC campaign. You say: “Online, this issue is primarily relevant to e-mail marketers (customer marketing) but comes into play in lots of different ways - especially so if you have PPC or display advertising taking credit for generating sales from existing customers.”

I follow the general concept, but don’t quite understand how you technically would implement it for PPC or banner ads, as you can’t control whom of your existing customers are exposed to the ads, click through, buy etc. in the same way as one can with an e-mail campaign. So the concept of a predetermined control group would be pretty hard to follow up.

Of course this may be addressed by doing a time split test, but then other external factors would play in as well making the results less conclusive. You got a smart (and probably obvious :)) workaround or hack for a newbie?