Surveys, the other white meat

Last week I spent three very cold and wet days in Scottsdale AZ at the DMA's Email Evolution Conference. It was a very informative and interesting conference that had numerous sessions on email and digital marketing. Some of the most interesting were presentations by outdoor sporting goods firm REI, Alaska Airlines, Dell Computers and Borders Books.

The one consistent point that was raised by all of these different presenters was the importance of testing and continuing to improve your creative, message, relevance and deliverability.

All of the sessions talked about the need for A/B testing, multi-variant testing, among others, but in all cases the test results were all based on web analytics and perceived behavioral results However in all of these testing methods, not one of the presenters suggested "ask your subscribers".

As a firm that provides on-line surveys and consulting services, I started to feel like the old advertising campaign "Pork - the Other White Meat". It seems that many of these people have become obsessed with web analytics, CTRs, CTORs, etc. that they are missing one of the most useful techniques - Asking and Listening.

Now I do not mean that it can be easy to prepare and analyze these survey results but to rely solely on statistics that can be interpreted in different ways by different people, I suggest that you combine your web analytics with other techniques such as surveys. These can also provide quick and focused results which provide you with an alternative testing method.

We have worked with many major brand management companies to compare creative images that will be used in print advertisements (yes people still do that), to assess the success of various digital campaigns in ways that can measure the conversion of subscriber awareness, favorably, purchase intent and actual purchases and to assess packaging and pricing alternatives.

Last year when we were at the annual DMA conference one of the presenters from a leading web analytics firm even said the same thing. For example when someone leaves a shopping cart to answer the front door, then forgets to complete the sale, that can be considered a problem with the campaign when in fact it is just normal human nature.

So as you are implementing some of these new best practices from the eec conference and a comprehensive testing program, don't forget the other white meat and use surveys to help improve your digital marketing campaigns. Link to this post: http://urlx.ie/eec09