Navigating the ever-evolving marketing realm demands a keen understanding of effectiveness, a metric that often eludes even the most seasoned professionals. According to our latest research, proving the value of customer marketing is the number 1 cause of stress for senior customer marketers. With only 26% of respondents reporting incremental revenue by the campaign, 25% reporting incremental profit, and 23.5% reporting overall incremental revenue driven by a channel or program, this deficiency poses a significant obstacle in showcasing the real impact of marketing efforts.
What is incrementality in marketing?
Incrementality, in simple terms, is the direct impact of a given marketing activity. It measures how much additional value or revenue a particular marketing campaign drives compared to what would have occurred without it. This concept becomes crucial as it aligns marketing efforts with tangible, measurable outcomes.
Why must marketers measure incrementality?
Accurate measurement frameworks are the prerequisite for successful incrementality measurement. For more complex multichannel programs, meticulous audience planning is required to guarantee statistically significant results. It’s not just about measuring campaigns individually; understanding the long-term impact of marketing activities is as important as analysing short-term revenue and engagement.
Without using incrementality measurements as key performance indicators (KPIs), marketers find it challenging to demonstrate their team’s worth to the business. The absence of such metrics makes it harder to advocate for budget allocation and impedes effective decision-making.
How to test and measure incrementality
Marketing teams can use a more comprehensive approach involving advanced tools like Plinc’s self-serve insight and analysis solutions, including Campaign Analyser. These tools enable marketers to automate the creation of control cells, ensuring the ability to report on incremental campaign success across channels accurately. Marketers can report on standard campaign metrics (opens, clicks, etc.) along with incremental spending (based on automated control groups taken from each segment), enabling the marketeer to monitor and optimise their activities to drive incremental revenue. The tool leverages AI to run statistical tests on each campaign’s performance, reporting on incremental revenue and the statistical significance of each result. It reports where revenue was generated (in-store vs various online channels), in which categories and by which customer groups, allowing for a more efficient and in-depth analysis of campaign performance.
How Plinc successfully measured incrementality for a leading retailer
A leading retailer wanted to achieve an unparalleled view of its campaign performance while saving days’ worth of senior analyst resource each month. Through the implementation of a cloud-based reporting solution, the retailer gained access to an interactive dashboard providing real-time insights into incremental value, net profit, email metrics, customer satisfaction scores, and reward redemption. The automated system, updated daily, significantly reduced the workload of senior analysts, enabling prompt decision-making by senior leadership to optimise the campaign program. In a world where marketing success is increasingly scrutinised, embracing incremental measurement becomes the key to unlocking the true potential of your marketing efforts.
Read the full case study on how automated reporting revolutionises campaign analysis.
