How many times have you heard breezy assertions from marketers about how their strategies “drive real ROI,” and then watched them roll out as the “evidence” email open rates, website conversions and reader surveys? Too many? Me too.

Usually marketers report such tactical results because that’s all they’ve got, and their clients settle for them because they need to show something to their CMO! But if those metrics are all marketers have, it’s because they didn’t create a substantive analysis of the net financial gain achieved by the program.