Slow and steady only wins if you can measure it

Among the most memorable of Aesop’s Fables was the story of the race between a quick-footed hare and his slow, focused counterpart. The lesson? Sometimes slow and steady wins the race. We’ve all seen this anecdotally throughout marketing efforts: the relationship built over time with customers is often stronger and more productive than the flash-in-the-pan sale. The problem is: most modern analytics are better positioned to celebrate the hare than the tortoise.

Kevin Hillstrom recently made this point over on his blog, saying:

“ We’re a short-term society.  We demand sales, NOW, and we reward people for what they’ve done lately. Our businesses, however, thrive when we fertilize the customer file.”

I think of this a bit as the Groupon effect. Over the past year I’ve happily handed over a Groupon print-out at about a dozen different restaurants. The majority of the restaurant trips constituted a first-visit for me, spurred by the Groupon discount. That’s pretty impressive if you’re looking at short-term goals. The Groupon got me and hundreds of others in the door. For the long-term engagement folks though, here’s the rub: Of all the restaurants that Groupon introduced me to, I have returned to only one for a second visit. So is that really a marketing win?

Kevin gave the example of an email campaign which led to an immediate spike in sales by nearly 14,000. However, the vast majority of customers who purchased from the marketing campaign didn’t purchase again from subsequent email campaigns.

Taking the long-view

The question is not whether these types of promotions work, but rather, how we accurately measure their long-term value. It is entirely possible that one of those email-driven customers returned to purchase again after clicking through a banner ad, or by simply visiting the site after an organic search, but if we can’t tie the string of interactions together, we can’t tell how effective that original promotion was in developing a loyal relationship with that customer.

This is why first touch attribution is so important: customers rarely convert on a first visit to a site. Think about how you navigate the web - I currently have 9 tabs open on my browser, a half-read Google Reader account, and a Twitter stream that will be refreshed countless times. I am an internet wanderer. I move around from site to site, email to email, and scavenge for information. At points along the way I’ll take action, but even I can’t always remember every one of the impressions that led to that action. Search engine marketers come up against this a lot. The work they put into SEO or SEM campaigns often goes uncredited simply because the conversion didn’t happen immediately.

Measuring the ROI of slow and steady

So how do you measure the complete path to conversion?

Performable does this automatically as part of its analytics solution. You can also get at it by creating custom reports on some other analytics solutions, although it can be pretty time intensive to get the complete view that way. However you build it, the bottom line is: the customer lifecycle matters. Unless you’re tracking it, you’re making marketing decisions based on a partial view of what really works. What ways have you found to better understand your customers over time?

Original Article