In less than two months, we have seen the value of the dollar skyrocket, gas prices and stocks plummet, a worldwide banking meltdown, a spike in unemployment, and the election of a new U.S. president. That's not just change you can believe in, that's change that makes your head spin.

Your customers are reeling from the volatility, and as they change, the way you reach them must change just as fast. Whether you're doing B2B, B2C or both, what worked last month (or even last week) may not work today; in fact, it probably won't work. Maybe last week, customers were looking for reassurance, but this week they might be looking for deals, and next week they'll be thinking of checking out altogether. You need to meet them where they are, and to meet them, you have to know exactly where they are, right now.

In this sea of uncertainty, you might not even know what your budget is for next year or how you'll reach out to new (and increasingly hard-to-close) prospects. For many of you, the budget pie and the customer pie are simply not growing. Just keeping sales and leads flat (let alone increasing them) can be a big win.

Nobody can predict how long or deep the recession will be. But one thing is easy to predict: only marketers who can rapidly adapt to customers' changing demands – and prove their new campaigns are really effective – will have a chance of surviving.

Try everything and test constantly

Don't assume the plan you created in September is still relevant. It isn't. Right now, any survey on future purchasing intentions that's more than a week old is probably obsolete. The good news is, online marketing lets you test, measure and respond to your mercurial customers extremely quickly.

Here are a few examples of what you should constantly be adapting:

• Offers. Value-added incentives that worked in the past may lay an egg now. The "buy our product and get a free T-shirt" offer from last year was a success, but now potential customers may only be motivated by cold, hard cash: a significant discount off your product. Throw out a variety of offers and see which ones make your customers move. Test, test, test.
  
  
• Frequency. For B2C or offer-driven B2B marketing where campaigns drive immediate sales, consider varying the frequency of deals, coupons and special incentives versus frequencies you have used in the past, in order to get more customers buying right now. But you'll also have to test whether an increase or decrease in email blasts actually does bring in more business – without annoying email subscribers and wearing out your list.
  
  
• Creative. Consumer sentiment changes quickly in this environment, so test your messaging often. Perhaps you promote services that will help your customers weather the downturn. But do your customers react negatively to campaigns that remind them of the bad economy? Then you might need to change your messaging to one of comfort and quality – at least this week – and, of course, test that new messaging.
  
  

All of your approaches – even your "champions," the campaigns that proved to be winners in the past – must be tested against each other frequently. Don't be content with A/B testing; make decisions even faster by creating A/B/C/D/E versions of a banner ad, for example, and analyze the responses to see which one works best.

Determine the real payoff with integration

In testing to determine whether a campaign works, don't stop at the click-through. In this environment, you don't merely need traffic, you need quality traffic, the kind that drives leads and sales. The only way to start attracting more of the right kind of traffic is to understand from the get-go which campaigns lead to real-life conversions.

If it takes two weeks to pull these stats from multiple marketing technologies and team members, you're ambling along like an old-economy dinosaur. Are you willing to risk extinction?

In this economy, it's survival of the fastest. The marketers who make it will be the ones who are savvy enough to optimize campaigns all the way to the lead-management system or shopping cart, and quickly apply what they've learned to the next tactic. If you can't measure the results of your campaigns easily and quickly, it's time to seriously consider an integrated toolkit like Lyris HQ™.

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But unless your company is magically immune to global economic conditions, you don't have a choice. In boom times, the entire marketing team can take credit for great numbers without breaking much of a sweat. But when your marketing organization is losing budget, you have to adapt instantly and pull out all the stops merely to stay afloat. And in this environment, that's about the only certain thing.

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About the Author

Blaine Mathieu is chief marketing officer for Lyris, Inc. Blaine is responsible for Lyris' brand and product strategy, including driving marketing initiatives for the company's Lyris HQ™ integrated-marketing suite and its Lyris ListManager™ email-marketing software.

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