Once you have launched your marketing campaigns you will measure your outcome.  To have analytics that are meaningful and useful guess what, you have to plan for them before you launch your campaigns?  As your marketing plan will reflect goal accomplshment through the tactics you choose so the analytics will tell you how successful you were in accomplishing the goals. 

Let’s say you’re about to launch an email campaign to announce a new product feature just added that solves a customer problem.  You’ve identfied the target, you’ve written the benefit messages, you’ve filled in your email template and your’re ready to distribute.  But before you press that send key have you clearly defined what outcome you want and established how you will measure for success?  WIll it be the number of opened emails?  Or the number that click through to the web site? Or the number that request a sales call?  Maybe it’s all of these.  Does the software email service you’re about to use measure for the analytics you want to capture and have you created a special web site landing page to ensure you can isolate this email’s response?  In other words, planning ensures you will be able to get measurement results you can use to improve your program. 

If you didn’t plan for and measure accurately, how would you know what to improve or even if you should repeat the campaign? Without good analytics you can effectively be throwing precisous marketing resources away.  If you’ve ever used or heard the phrase, “oh we tried that but it didn’t work,” without an explanation as to why it didn’t work I’m willing to bet there wasn’t any advanced planning done on what and how to measure results. 

Susan Frederick