I am a firm believer in accountable marketing. But who isn’t? If something does not work for your business, why pour more money into it? DJ Waldow mentioned the several social activities they are involved Bronto is involved in recently. Their effort is pretty impressive. But the first thing that came to my mind is ROI. A lot of activities require a lot of money and time. What is the ROI on these activities? If you cannot measure the results of an activity, how can you decide if it were successful or not?

Okay, social media might be tricky to measure. Let’s talk about more specific examples.

Many companies allocated or are in the process of allocating their budgets for 2009. And the economy expected to continue to get worse, so how do determine which activities you are going to spend money on? Should you continue spending on SEO? How much should you allocate to PPC? How about a PR agency? And of course how about conversion optimization?

One of our regular blog readers, Audio bible, asked a very valid question. He understands the importance of conversion optimization. The problem he has with it is the amount of investment it requires without guaranteeing any results.

Good to see some conversion numbers, in the real world of single digits.

Sure we would all like to have double digit conversation rates, nothing wrong with aiming for the moon.

Throwing down $10,000 on conversation optimization would be worth it IF you can give some kind of guarantee on minimal results.

Audio Bible echoes what we hear from many top executives. They hesitate to invest money in projects without knowing what kind of results they get. If a company has an X dollar amount to invest, they must invest it in the activities that will bring the highest possible return. How can you determine this?

The reality is that the MAJORITY of marketing (especially consulting) companies (online and offline) don’t guarantee results. Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ argues that reputable SEO firms don’t promise guaranteed search engine rankings.

I am sure I can make our sales team job a lot easier if I can tell a client we will guarantee a 20% increase in conversion rates or average order sizes. But the reality is that there are too many unknown elements in the process of conversion that stop us from making such promises. There are elements beyond our control as experts in the field of optimization.

Consider this: How do you think you conversion rate will be impacted during a down-spiraling economy Or when you are side-tracked with a competitor running 40% discounts?

That being said, conversion optimization does not operate in a vacuum. But accounting for such unexpected issues prevents specialists from making promises.

Our structured methodology, the Conversion Framework, is implemented on all of our projects. It guides our optimization process. Futurenow follows the persuasion architecture. Marketing experiments follow the conversion formula. Each of these methods attempt to bring structure to the optimization process. With a methodology, your chances of better results are higher.

Online marketing companies cannot offer real guarantees, but where does that leave the clients?

We’ve left you in the same boat, eh? Any project, with or without guarantees involves risk. It does not matter whether the risk is real or perceived. Your job is to minimize the risk.

As marketers it is time to put your money where our mouth is.

I am not calling for guaranteed results.

I am calling for performance based models. These models will shift the risk from the client to the marketer. Of course with that shift in risk, there should be larger reward. Marketing companies who choose to adopt this model must be compensated at higher level compared to companies who decide to stick with the traditional approach.

As a consulting company, we had gone back a forth about implementing this model. It has many challenges that must be addressed. But since many new clients wanted to the assurances that we stand behind what we offer, our team decided to offer pay per performance for some of our clients who meet specific criteria.

There is a lot more to cover in this topic. But I will leave the rest to future blogs.