Testing an Integrated Marketing Campaign

How do you test an integrated marketing campaign? How do you measure how well your lead-generation and brand marketing tactics work in tandem with one other? And how do you measure the ROMI that you get from combining several tactics?

The best way to measure the results of an integrated marketing campaign is to add the dimension of time. Use the same testing principles discussed in previous chapters to measure each tactic on its own. For example, if you use e-mail marketing or online lead-generation ads (SEM ads, social media ads, etc.), you should measure your CTR, the cost-per-action, etc.

But now you want to measure what kind of return the integration of these tactics has provided for your marketing campaign. In other words, how did using the tactics together provide a different return from using each tactic individually? In the car insurance example of the previous section, I first received a 2% CTR with the SEM campaign. That’s a pretty good initial result. When I added an e-mail marketing campaign, it increased the CTR for the SEM ads to 3%. That’s better by 50%.

Now how does that affect my ROMI for the SEM tactics? Or for the e-mail marketing tactic? Let’s say that my original target CPA was $50 per action. When I examine the actual CPA for e-mail marketing, I find it was $60, which is above my target CPA. However, the actual CPA for the SEM ads has dropped to $25, which is half my original target CPA.

In this scenario, my e-mail marketing campaign results in a loss, but the benefits of improving my SEM campaign more than make up for it. Thanks to the e-mail push, I saw a 50% lift in the performance of the SEM ads. Even though the secondary tactic may not have hit my target CPA and may not be as profitable, the e-mail marketing campaign was worth it because it created a halo effect that helped to make my SEM campaign more profitable. Thanks to the boost provided by e-mail marketing, the success of the SEM campaign produced a better overall ROI for my marketing efforts.