Marketing in Motion

Archive for February, 2012

I’m a “glass is half full” guy. And compared to its opposite, I much prefer to be this way. In fact, I can generally prescribe this for everyone.

But I recently learned a lesson that reminds me to not forget that the glass is also half empty.

We’ve been running an effective e-mail campaign across our target market for over three years. The response rates are what I had hoped for, the click through rates are good, and the conversion rates are certainly acceptable; enough so, to keep me moving forward with the campaign as designed and executed.

We recently looked at the annual activity from our target market and shockingly discovered that the results, the kind that show up on our financial statements, were not impressive. We immediately moved resources to support that part of our business.

On further analysis I realize that I had missed early warning signs of the problem. Because the engagement results from our e-mailing campaign were acceptable, I didn’t look much deeper into the results. I was seeing the glass as half full, and ignoring the empty half. As it turned out, I was missing the trees for the forest (another cliché turned on its head). And it happened that the trees I was missing were the trees with the small pots of gold buried beneath (oh, shoot, another cliché). This realization supports our previous reallocation of resources (good), but I should have seen it coming. I missed it (bad).

It’s worthwhile to examine the empty half of the glass from time to time.