You might ask: Why is it important for the marketing department to produce a weekly dashboard and share it with other departments within the company? Which direct marketing metrics are critical for company stakeholders to receive weekly in order to react to campaign results? How does a multichannel company combine print and online results? The answer is to the point: It’s critical to have all major departments looking at the same set of numbers when evaluating business performance.

We no longer live in a linear world. Simply going from point A to point B is a much more complicated proposition today.This is truly the case in marketing. Think about the traditional classic marketing funnel, the one with a large opening at one end that funnels down to a small opening or point at the other end. The funnel suggested THAT customers start with awareness, move to research, go to consideration, comparison shop and then buy.

How do you create a response order curve to accurately reflect how close you will be to plan mid-way through a marketing campaign? How can that curve help efficiently manage staffing and/or inventory concerns? How do major holidays affect those forecasted curves?

What are the key profit-and-loss statement (P&L) components of a print marketing campaign? What can you affect in the short-term to turn around a P&L starting to fall short of forecast? The direct marketing printed campaign P&L statement differs from a traditional business P&L in several ways: Its purpose is primarily for direct marketers to measure individual marketing campaigns, as opposed to traditional monthly, quarterly or annual statements.

What are the key profit-and-loss (P&L) statement components of an online direct marketing campaign? The online P&L statement for a direct marketing company differs from a traditional financial business in several ways: Sales are measured through a two-step process for online direct marketing companies—tracking events that drive traffic to a website and then measuring conversion sales to website visitors.

Being proactive is a big buzz phrase in our industry. But many direct marketers continue to engage in practices that seriously undermine the effectiveness of the contact strategies that, in large part, determine their performance and profitability. Once these practices have taken root, they can become so entrenched that marketers no longer even recognize their insidious effects. What can you do?

Do you know what minimum response rate your direct marketing campaign needs to be profitable? What about the required net revenue? How does an email campaign metric differ from a print one?

If I asked you how much you spent on acquiring a new client, and what that client was worth 12 months from now, how would you answer the question? Is your company routinely measuring this critical component? How does the print channel measure up to the 
online channel?

Some direct marketers put the brakes on testing during the past two years, largely due to budget and staffing constraints, as well as poor results. While this is understandable in the short term, it's time to return to testing — in a focused, strategic manner.

The evolution of marketing is well documented. The success of AMC's TV series “Mad Men” highlights and romanticizes the earlier days of mass marketing and advertising. Set in the 1960s, the show depicts a time when a focus group and a martini were all you needed to figure out how best to appeal to customers.

Data are everywhere. Anyone with a smartphone is his or her own (not so private) data point. Technology—and an ever–growing need to track, measure and optimize ROIs—has fostered a corresponding need to analyze and understand data.

Database and direct marketing have always been driven by tracking, measurement, analytics and in some ways, ROI. Historically, the idea of "brand" has been given a relatively free pass when it comes to direct, measurable accountability.

In the multichannel world, we like to measure things. Every marketing dollar spent is, ideally, associated with a return on investment, though it is getting harder to track and measure. There is one metric that does not lie that you don’t have to chase: your average order value. And it’s an important one.

Measuring the impact of marketing campaigns has become both complicated and enhanced in a multichannel world. Traditional methods of looking at cause and effect relationships between a set of activities and a set of behaviors no longer give marketers a complete or accurate picture of events.

It’s become clear that every traditional direct marketing metric has found an online counterpart—its "cousin." The "cousin" analogy is especially appropriate for two reasons. First, cousins are part of the same family. You like them, and to a degree, you understand them. These online metrics are familiar because they are closely related to those we’re accustomed to watching in our offline direct marketing efforts. Second, you may not immediately recognize the cousins you only see once a year, but once you do, you quickly become comfortable with them. In the same way, we must embrace our online "cousin" data.

What do you think of when you hear "square–inch analysis?" You probably know it’s a useful tool for merchandising and pagination; a tool that guides decisions on space allocation, page count and numbers of products in a given category.

Sure, you want to — or need to — do more with less these days. Every marketer does. The challenge is how to significantly cut spending without significantly decreasing sales, or how to maintain revenue without mailing as much.

Any seasoned direct marketer the importance of understanding the numbers side of the business. You have to know both the left-brain (analytic) and right-brain (creative) rules for maximum success. My philosophy is “know the rules before you break them.”

A response curve is the historical calculation of orders — and percentage of orders — received weekly from a direct response campaign. Years ago, when catalogers had to maintain order information by hand, it was difficult to manually reconstruct response curve order information at the end of each campaign.

In June we looked at the profit and loss statement, discussing how a catalog P&L or income statement is different from that of a manufacturer and reviewing what is meant by cancellations, returns, exchanges, cost of goods, and gross margin. Now we'll look at what goes into the fulfillment, advertising, and general and administrative aspects of the profit and loss statement. Let's start by examining the remaining cost centers.

During the past several months we have looked at financial formats for catalogs and the Internet from a global or financial model standpoint. We contrasted the differences between consumer and business financial models, and last month we looked at the financial model and impact of the Internet on direct sellers who have a strong Web component.