So what can a marketer do about the problem? Chief Marketer provides a few ideas on how to improve marketing effectiveness and demonstrate its capability to influence business results. After going through a detailed discussion of how to use (and not to use) marketing budgets, corporate profit, etc. to measure marketing efficiency, the writer has three suggestions:

• Focus on groups of low responders and establish more refined selection filters, thereby eliminating the least responsive customers.
  

• Refine customer segmentation in order to improve targeting and raise response rates.

• Test new promotions to boost the accuracy of marketing's perception of the customer.

Finally, the right metrics can also help marketers determine which of their activities are high-return vs low-return. By increasing funding for their high ROI efforts, it may become easier to allocate the existing budget more effectively in order to generate additional marketing dollars.