I am a scientist at heart and am always pressing my people for better ways to understand the effectiveness of program spends. This morning, I found a great series of articles by Heidi Cohen on ClickZ about “Retention Marketing”.

http://www.clickz.com/3626900

She offers some advice on how to track the effectiveness of your customer advocacy programs including:

• Collating feedback from all touchpoints
• Keeping an eye on your message board traffic
• Staying on top of key third party discussion sites – you can buy tools to automate this
• Tallying the number of customer referrals

As she reminds us, your customers can talk about you in many places and it is important to understand the impact of your retention and referral marketing.