Channel | Data Driven ROI

Local youth baseball teams have a chance to be featured on ESPN, win cool merchandise and a KFC party thanks to a partnership between the restaurant chain, ESPN and ABC Sports.

Sprint Nextel is driving its sponsorship of a NASCAR Nextel Cup Series race in Michigan this month with a sweeps that gives the state's residents a chance to win a trip to the event and receive racing merchandise.

Pitney Bowes Inc. has acquired Advertising Audit Service (AAS) and PMH Caramanning. AAS provides Web-based tools for customizing promotional mail and marketing collateral, and PMH Caramanning offers loyalty, incentive and certification solutions as well as collateral and reward fulfillment.

Pontiac is reprising its role as task sponsor on The Apprentice, this time giving consumers a chance to donate to their favorite cause using the company's money.

GM Goodwrench, the service brand for GM vehicles, has launched a promotion linked to NASCAR designed to build buzz around the 2007 Chevy Avalanche and increase traffic to Chevrolet dealer service departments.

The strategic economic issue for all CRM initiatives must be their cost/benefit relationship. Put simply: How can we determine how much we can afford to spend on CRM activities for a single customer or group of customers to produce what level of loyalty and/or incremental business?

First, the obvious. When marketers were asked which one campaign metric was most valuable in determining ROI for their data-driven campaigns, near-equal numbers cited increasing their total number of customers, a rise in top-line revenue and a jump in bottom-line profits, according to Direct magazine’s most recent survey of database practices.

Marketers will spend an average of nearly a quarter-million dollars to upgrade their databases, according to a survey of Direct magazine’s readers. Will the investment pay for itself?

As Internet business owners, we are bombarded with advice on how to manage, market and grow our businesses. Because of the sheer volume of information, we are forced to weed through the “need to know” versus the “nice to know.”

What’s the biggest hit to your customer service ROI? No surprise: It’s personnel costs, according to a new survey.