E-marketing 665
Control
Without control mechanisms, e-marketing
depends on luck. It’s a bit like playing darts in
the dark. How do you know if you are hitting
the target or are just shooting blindly and
wildly? How do you know if you’re targeting
the right customers? Who are they? What do
they like and not like? How many of them
become repeat customers? Which e-marketing
tools work best? How much does each cus-
tomer actually cost you? Control also includes
monitoring your competitors – what they’re
doing, what they’re repeating, what works for
them, what they’re stopping doing.
To answer these questions, an e-marketing
performance measurement system is required.
The requirements for this have been summ-
arized by Chaffey (2001). These are:
1 A performance measurement process. This defines
responsibilities for the different measurement
activities, such as objective setting, metrics
collection and reporting, analysis, diagnosis and
changing e-tactics, or even strategy through
corrective action if necessary.
2 A metrics framework. You need to determine
what data you will look at each day, each
week, each month, each quarter. Time has to
be made for a regular review of what’s
working and what’s not – performance
diagnosis. Performance is measured against
detailed targets, based on the objectives and
strategy. So you need to measure the KPIs,
which were detailed in the section on situation
analysis.
So where do you get this information? Many of
the metrics concerning visitor behaviour are
available from web log file analysers, which
summarize the clickstreams of different site
visitors. Collection by other information sys-
tems or processes is required for key measures
such as sales, subscriptions, conversion and
attrition rates. Standard practice should ensure
data from the different sources is compiled into
a monthly or weekly report and is delivered and
reviewed by the right people. Decide which
metrics need to be reviewed daily, weekly or
monthly, and by whom. The e-marketer must
know which tools are working, that’s why
‘source of’ sales or enquiries is useful – if a
particular banner ad doesn’t pull customers,
drop it and try another until you find one that
does.
Remember all forms of measurement, or
metrics, cost money – you’ll have to factor in
budgets and resources for the following
mechanisms: Monitoring customer awareness.
Monitoring customer satisfaction.
Monitoring customer attitudes.Other forms of control, like sales analysis,
require only that you allocate quality time. So
how do you know if things are going well?
Some objectives are easy to state and easy to
measure: existing recording systems in the
organization will produce the data to answer
the question: so if the objective is to grow sales,
well what was the target for growth and the
timetable for achieving it, and did you make
it?
Chaffey (2001) has suggested that control
should consider the effectiveness of
e-marketing in the five key areas shown in
Figure 25.12. Each e-marketing channel, such as
web or interactive TV, should be considered
separately against traditional channels using
this framework.Resourcing
A further question is what to outsource. For
example, do you design the website or produce
content in-house or contract out to an agency?
And what balance should you strike between
resources allocated to building the site and
those required to maintain it on a regular basis
and leaving a budget for a complete review and
upgrade in three, six or nine months? Other
resources to consider include promotion (see
Figure 25.11) and telesales (are additional staff
required or can the in-house team do it?). Who