The caller said that since I was such a good customer, they were going to give me two months of free life insurance. Because I had to tell them on my home equity loan application. What the database marketer who directed this program failed to do, was to make sure that the program used the customer information already available to the bank. I ended up angry with a bank that I had previously admired. Ability to do financial analysis.
Database marketing is a very accountable science.
Every activity can and must be measured. If you are putting out a customer newsletter, you must know whether the newsletter is doing any good. Of course, these things are good. You compare the retention rate, referral rate, spending rate of the newsletter recipients and non-newsletter recipients. If the newsletter is a success, the recipients will have higher rates in some or all of these categories.