Some of my friends in the industry introduced a term to our world that marketers have used for some time – ROMI. Return on Marketing Investment. It’s meant to form a metric that tells you if the investment you are making in marketing activities is actually moving you forward with respect to your corporate revenue goals. One of the challenges of introducing this metric to the conversation is that there are many ways to calculate it. In fact, if you survey half a dozen marketing books, you’ll find general agreement that there is a calculable metric – but you won’t always find the same method to calculate it.

What that means is that one person’s ROMI might not match anyone else’s ROMI. It also means that if you aren’t a financial wizard, or comfortable with the details of metric development and the nuances of interpreting metrics, ROMI might not be the place to start. That doesn’t mean you abandon the value of metrics – it just means you look for the things that help you identify success of campaigns and indicators of growth.

One of my favorite books at the moment is Mark Jeffrey’s Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know. You can find it online at your favorite retail book outlet. What I love about this book is that it walks through metrics that make sense to track, no matter what your business. But, if you happen to be in the printing business and you’re looking for ways to help your customers identify the value of a data-driven marketing campaign, this is the book you want to read.

For each of you, the goals will be different. If you sell printing services, you may want to offer services to your customers that help them identify which campaigns are effective and which are not. This is done by testing response rates against demographic metrics of the recipients of the campaign messages. Or you may want to offer services that help customers re-engage with lapsed customers by mining data and looking at how lapsed customers compare to the best current customers. There are a lot of ways to use data to sell additional services.

Even in-plant print shops can learn to offer services to their internal customers that use the same tools. It doesn’t take a massive IT operation and millions of dollars of software. Jeffrey’s book shows how a simple spreadsheet pointed in the right direction can provide just what you need to give your marketing campaign a tune up that delivers results.

The answer to the question posed in the title is that a metric is any data point that you can return to and track. A metric isn’t the name field in the database; rather, the number of names in the database is a metric that you can track.

While you can buy packages to help track data, mine data, analyze data and even manipulate data, it might be worth considering partnering with any of the many data companies in the marketplace so that you can not only get your arms around your data, but understand how to learn from it.

So come back if this is of interest, and drop me a note if you have questions or ideas at pat.mcgrew@kodak.com – we’d love to share your success story!

Pat McGrew, EDP – Data-Driven Communication Evangelist, Kodak Business to Business Solutions