In a post at the MineThatData blog, Kevin Hillstrom poses a scenario in which 100 of your online customers abandon their shopping carts on a Monday. The following day, after a targeted email campaign, 30 click through and half make a purchase. "So these are good numbers, right?!" he asks. "I mean, who in their right mind would ever complain about an e-mail campaign that delivers a 15% response rate?"

The problem, he suggests, is that marketers tend not to wonder about the vast majority who didn't make a purchase. "What if we angered 25 of the 85 customers," he asks, "and they don't ever come back and buy from us again, because of our marketing program? Are we measuring this important KPI [key performance indicator]?"

Hillstrom suggests actions like these:

• Follow the holdout group for a year to determine whether they spend any additional money in response to such campaigns. "If so," he notes, "good, it means that as a whole, the campaigns are working."
• Quickly identify those who don't respond to such campaigns, so they can be removed from the list before they become annoyed.

The Po!nt: "One of the challenges of e-mail marketing is that e-mail marketers like you and I are used to measuring 'positives,'" says Hillstrom. "Our metrics are calibrated to highlight anything we do that is good." It's just as important, he argues, to measure the negatives when possible.

Source: MineThatData. Click here for the full post.

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