Whenever new marketing technologies arrive, marketers often seem willing to dispense with the traditional metrics and ROI calculations. As email marketing arrived on the scene, marketers were so enamoured with the speed and low cost (more on that later!) that they forgot to see if it actually had a positive impact on the customer behaviour. Throwing the direct marketing rule book out the window, most proponents seemed happy enough to look at “open rates” and “click throughs” regardless of how this translated into something more tangible like sales, value or even, perish the thought, ROI.

But isn’t that what makes direct marketing so interesting in the first place, the ability to accurately quantify the actual impact on client value? The last few years have seen a move to make email marketing campaigns as measurable and accountable as more traditional direct marketing. However, in my experience, many still forego the basics like “control cells” and assign all purchases to the success of the campaign, as though no one would have bought the latest Britney single without receiving the e-newsletter promoting it.

New and potentially interesting technologies arrive on a daily basis providing an ever increasing set of channels in which to communicate and interact with clients and potential clients. Podcasting, Facebook, Blogging, Neural Implants (oh wait, that one hasn’t happened yet). However, as each one enters the marketers’ toolbox, there seems to be little effort put into how exactly are we going to measure it. Again people fall back on somewhat less interesting metrics such as the number of “members”, “posts” or “tags” something achieves. While those are indeed measurable, without better linkage to behaviour, there is no way to determine whether these investments in time, money and brand are generating a positive return for the company.

Back to the low cost issue. Yes, many of these technologies are relatively inexpensive and the time to delivery can be fast, however, they are definitely not free. There are still some hard costs in terms of dollars. But there are also soft opportunity costs related to the time spent by marketers regularly managing and updating a Facebook page versus working on other marketing opportunities. And perhaps the larger cost is the potential opportunity cost of flooding clients / prospects with a non-stop barrage of contacts from you. This may ultimately translate into decreased receptivity of other marketing messages, which would then have a much higher cost to the company.

I’m no Luddite, but I think that we need to continue to strive to find ways to apply the same rules of measurability that made direct marketing so successful in the first place to these new technologies as they arrive. This will help marketers prioritise their efforts and investments and identify which new tools actually can provide marketing value.