Setting Your Online Marketing Budget

Undoubtedly, many of you are putting the finishing touches on your online marketing, e-mail marketing, or catalog marketing budget for 2007. Oh, the excitement!

Is there anything more enjoyable than sitting across from your Chief Financial Officer, having to defend why it is important to advertise with a certain affiliate at a time when expenses need to be trimmed by ten percent?

CFO's demand rapid, financially-based answers to questions. The humble Chief Marketing Officer or Online Marketing Executive needs to be able to respond in a credible, but timely manner.

Most of the time, when asked a random question, you don't have the appropriate data with you to answer the question quickly. This is where the "square root" function comes into play.

Frequently, sales generated by advertising follow a "square root" function. In other words, if you had the opportunity to increase your marketing budget by twenty percent, your net sales would increase by the square root of 1.2. This number is (1.2 ^ 0.5) = 1.095. In other words, a twenty percent increase in marketing spend yields a 9.5% increase in net sales.

This becomes important when the CFO makes a random statement like,"Please reduce your marketing budget by ten percent, you have no choice in this, everybody must share in the pain."

Look at this example, where the online marketing budget is reduced by ten percent:

High-Level Online Marketing Scenario
		Reduce Ex-	Incremental
	Base Case	pense by 10%	Sales Lost
Orders	90,909	86,244	4,665
Average Order Size	$110.00	$110.00	$110.00
Cost per Order (CPA)	$22.00	$20.87	$42.87
Net Sales	$10,000,000	$9,486,833	$513,167
Gross Margin @ 40%	$4,000,000	$3,794,733	$205,267
Marketing Cost	$2,000,000	$1,800,000	$200,000
Pick/Pack/Ship Expense @ 13%	$1,300,000	$1,233,288	$66,712
Variable Operating Profit	$700,000	$761,445	($61,445)
Profit as a % of Net Sales	7.0%	8.0%	-12.0%
Ad to Sales Ratio	20.0%	19.0%	39.0%

Notice how the profit and loss statement changes. In this case, the CFO may have a good suggestion, as the incremental advertising dollars are not yielding a sufficient return on investment. Conversely, the numbers might work out in your favor, giving you the ammunition to actually ask the CFO for more money!

Not every business follows the "square root" rule. Your analyst can help you figure out which relationship makes the most sense to build the scenarios around. But in a pinch, go with the square root function. And then ask your CFO to quickly cost-justify some of her investments!!