In these increasingly uncertain times direct positive contribution to the bottom line from your marketing spend is paramount, here at XYZdirect it didn’t take a global credit crisis for us to establish this as direct contribution or ROI is, and always will be, our focus. Here we offer our top 5 initiatives.

Focus on your core advocates
Now is not the time to be spending valuable dollars on marginal customers, to avoid this segment your customer base on lifetime value, then overlay recency of last purchase. This should be your primary segment for all activity.

Never pay CPM rates for media buys
The prevalence of excess on line ad inventory is destined to increase significantly over the coming months. Exploit this and negotiate hard, refuse all CPM rates and hold out for CPC and CPA deals. Negotiate for their performance buys as most media publishers will be striving to meet pre-crisis targets. Hold off on your schedules and wait for the pressure to be applied, resist the bluff that you will miss bookings as there will be less competition for the spots you wish to buy.

CPC search campaigns
Are your campaigns truly optimised? Are your landing pages performing? Challenge your search agency to propose 5 new tests to validate that your campaigns are fully optimised, and let the conversion funnel be the judge.

Single minded
Avoid the temptation of doubling up messages within your email communications. Focused single minded communications will deliver significantly greater ROI over any multi stranded message.

Recycle
If your on line Christmas campaign worked last year, dust it off and re use it this year. We are using a Christmas campaign developed for a retail client, for the 5th year in 2008, as we’ve seen no decrease in ROI over the last 4 years.