Weak math leads to weak marketing plans

I spend a lot of time with iPost clients and prospects, helping them maximize their return on marketing dollars.  So I read (and write) a lot of marketing plans.

Here's an uncharitable view of a typical email marketing plan:

1. Make a wish for stronger response and a bigger list.
   
2. The budget will be the same or smaller than this year's, because we can't reasonably justify a bigger spend.  After all, we're making money now, and spending more is a risk. So let's spend less, and if we fail to improve demand, at least we're lowering costs.
   
3. We'll use the technology that we're already comfortable with, because it's worked all right in the past.  Maybe we can find cheaper outsourcers.
4. We'll try some new "best practices" content techniques, because that doesn't add to our costs and it's pretty easy.

This isn't planning for success, it's making wishes and covering your butt. Businesses that run this way end up being surpassed by competitors who can make calculated risks and generate incremental demand that's many times their incremental spending.

The key to a successful marketing plan, like any business plan, is in making calculated risks.  But to make another uncharitable generalization, marketers are typically not comfortable with, or even aware of, the math required to perform this calculation.

In my next post I'll lay out the bedrock math you need to move beyond making wishes to an email marketing plan based on numbers, including justifiable spending and achievable goals.