Why historical Quality Score matters

by Roland Irwin ON 20 May 2013

When all of the search publisher metrics available are considered, Quality Score always seems to receive the most attention; yet it’s also the metric which search marketers have the least amount of visibility into. It’s difficult to know how to effectively improve it and assess its impact on performance. What we do know, however, is that every time a user conducts a search that triggers ads, a Quality Score is calculated based on a number of factors, including:

• The keyword’s historical click-through rate (CTR)

• The display URL’s historical CTR

• The account history

• The quality of the landing page

• The keyword/ad relevance

• The keyword/search relevance

The first three factors here on Google’s list reference performance history, despite the history of a keyword’s Quality Score being unavailable within the AdWords interface. Rather than showing different Quality Scores across time, Google displays a single Quality Score that provides an estimate of that keyword’s overall quality.

For the most part this is adequate – search marketers analyse Quality Score at specific moments in time to understand keyword relevance and performance issues. However, this one-off-style approach to analysing Quality Score fails to provide insight into how search marketers’ ongoing efforts to optimise campaigns impact upon Quality Score, either positively or negatively.

Whether it’s testing brand new creative or introducing additional negative keywords, improving a keyword’s Quality Score can lead to a lower cost-per-click (CPC) and a higher ad position. Changes in these two metrics can subsequently impact upon CTR, costs and return on investment (ROI), among other things. Unfortunately, the influence each of these best practices has on keyword Quality Score is frequently lost with time, especially within larger accounts. Imagine having to record the daily Quality Score for two million keywords affected by new creative messaging.

To understand the impact of optimisation efforts on Quality Score, search marketers need the ability to trend historical Quality Score, against other performance metrics, over time.

For example, by trending Quality Score and average CPC over a 3-month period, search marketers can understand the exact impact on cost that comes from an increase in Quality Score from 6 to 8. Trends that include other metrics like ROI and conversion rate highlight the indirect impact that Quality Score has on conversion and revenue goals.

Here comes the year of mobile measurement: 5 predictions for 2013

by Brendan O'Kane ON 21 January 2013

Another year pronounced as the ‘year of mobile’. While pundits have been saying this every year for as long as I can remember, it is more true now as mobile device adoption reaches critical mass. Yet in the rush to embrace all things mobile, there’s still something lagging in our industry.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not diminishing mobile’s ascendancy in 2012. It was definitely a banner year for mobile: subscriptions hit a whopping six billion, many new devices hit the market and Apple and Google’s app stores exploded with new apps – a combined total of 1.4 million. With the entire planet going mobile, brands and marketers that aren’t already onboard will be close behind.

What was missing in the last ‘year of mobile’ wasn’t adoption or devices. It was analytics, measurement and the embracing of mobile’s differences. The analytics and measurement I speak of refers to a marketer’s ability to measure the effectiveness of mobile engagement, be it advertising, push notifications, SMS or mobile email – and then act on that data. And embracing mobile’s differences? The understanding that mobile is not email or web banner advertising for a smaller screen. This is increasingly obvious to marketers, many of whom have recognised they can’t apply the same old web metrics to mobile and get the same results. The channels differ, the experience is different and so is the engagement.

So forget about 2013 being the year of mobile. We’re already there. Instead, think of 2013 as the year of mobile measurement. While I don’t have a crystal ball, my money is on mobile analytics and measurement making great strides, establishing themselves as an indispensable component of any mobile engagement campaign. And to that end, here are five of my predictions on what the mobile messaging and measurement landscape will look like in the year ahead:

#1 – SMS will remain highly relevant

Anyone who’s received a text reading 786-454-5736 WE BUY JUNK CARS CASH $300/400 COMPRAMOS CARROS might disagree, but SMS will live on despite newer and arguably more visually-engaging formats precisely because of its simplicity and directness. Read our message. Text 1 to opt-in, text 2 to opt-out. Simple. Look for SMS to remain highly relevant in 2013 in both the developed and developing world – where feature phones outnumber smartphones. With messaging being very limited, marketers will learn to make every character count.

#2 – Marketers will demand the same sophistication form mobile as they do from other marketing channels

Current mobile analytics aren’t meeting the needs or challenges of marketers to engage or retain their mobile audiences and show ROI. But now that the conversation has moved from whether to go mobile to how, marketers will demand the same sophistication that has been applied to print, TV and desktop measurement to gauge campaigns’ effectiveness – and justify their growing mobile budgets.

#3 – Big data will drive engagement, retention and revenue

The focus on ‘big’ data will shift to smart data. Mobile marketers will start paying more attention to metrics that go beyond data gathering to the analysis of deep granular information – eg. location, coupon clicks, organic vs. targeted re-engagement – that provides customer context and makes for successful targeting of individuals. The result makes for smarter, more engaged customers, driving both retention (far less costly than acquiring new customers) and sales.

#4 – Marketers will fine tune their mobile messaging

A/B split testing for mobile campaigns will boom, and become a regular part of app development and management. New startups offering analytics services that go far beyond download counts and open rates to deliver better engagement will come on the scene. Through A/B split testing and more precise targeting, marketers will be more effective, fine tuning their marketing messages to perfection. Bombarding customers and users with poorly timed or irrelevant mobile messages will become so 2012.

#5 – Mobile metrics will reach beyond downloads, swipes and taps

Not only will marketers be doing more A/B testing, they’ll be using gathered data for message retargeting to unresponsive customers and users, leaving no stone unturned in their quest to engage, retain and maximise the value of their audiences. There will be significant investment in metrics such as action analytics – campaigns tied to actions and ROI – that go beyond simply tracking who downloaded what, when, and how many times. And while there might not be an ironclad set of industry-wide measurement standards by the end of 2013, mobile metrics will make huge strides in opening up a world of constant testing, feedback and improvement for marketers and consumers alike.

Looking forward

Sometimes predictions don’t come to pass and other times, like a bad algorithm, they overlook something profound that only seems so in retrospect. So here are a few final words as to what lies ahead in 2013: Apps will advance, the native versus non-native app debate will continue, SMS will resist smartphone domination and yes, SMS spam trying to sell junk cars will continue too. The maturing mobile outlook combined with the advancement of action analytics and metrics necessary to cater to that rising maturity is where the action will be. With heightened focus on engagement, retention and sales, there will be more thoughtful, intelligent and targeted campaigns delivering higher returns and a better overall mobile experience.

So let the Year of Mobile Measurement begin!

Are your measurements meaningful?

by Marketing ON 12 July 2011

In digital, we can measure so much. But so much of what we measure is completely meaningless. What does a click mean, other than that a click has happened? If you have an answer, is it the same answer as the next agency or client would give? Is it even the same for each campaign of yours? As an industry, we’ve tied ourselves to metrics that are very often unrelated to what an advertiser really cares about. And that’s not how the ad “performed,” but how the audience was moved.

The problem is that the ad server that reports our metrics back to us is only good at measuring actions when what we need to measure is attitude.

Some examples of popular but misleading metrics are:

Impressions and eCPM

The ad server tells us that an ad was delivered, but not whether it was seen. Many sites deliver fistfuls of ad impressions on each page. We pay more for the larger ones and those above the scroll because we know that large and prominent has a better chance of being seen. But we don’t know that they are seen. This is further complicated by the ease with which sites can burn impressions no one sees – by placing them on the bottom of the page, by instigating many page refreshes during the content consumption experience, and even by placing ad tags on redirect pages that never render on screens (we’ve really seen that).

Views

The television model of interrupting content with advertising has jumped full force to the web. Ads are being delivered online in pre- and mid-roll formats that can’t be fast-forwarded… but that doesn’t mean people are watching. In a piece of research we did in the US, we found that people take the “your content will start in 30 seconds” countdown as an invitation to do something else for 30 seconds. “I open a new tab and look at something else, then when I hear my clip start I bounce back,” said one of our respondents.

Cost

When low cost is the measure of success you’ve failed before you start. Striving for low cost only means you’ve bought something cheaply. Here’s the news: it’s easy to buy cheap. But it’s hard to buy valuable, and it is in the nature of valuable not to be cheap. Often an agency will buy valuable, pay its cost, and then buy a lot of cheap mass impression inventory to drive down the overall costs. Is it a great use of budget to waste money in order to look thrifty?

What matters is not the delivery of an impression but the making of one. And there are only a few ways to understand whether you’ve captured attention and moved an audience’s perception of a brand. One is to buy on cost-per-click or cost-per-engagement so that the risk of not getting attention rests with the publishers. This way, the only people you pay to reach are the ones who want to be reached.

In a broad study of the effect of engagement, we learned that people who choose to engage with a display ad are four times more likely to recall the ad than people who were delivered a forced view of a pre-roll-like video product. And engagers were two to three times more likely to be able to repeat back brand attributes and significantly more likely to be moved to intention or likelihood to recommend than people who were merely exposed.

Regardless of chosen approach, it is important that the advertiser thinks critically about the metrics that apply to their core goals. In an on-demand world, capturing attention is the single biggest challenge, so we must focus on understanding whether we have successfully done so and what the affect of gaining attention was on the viewer rather than on the ad server.

Do you hear a Who?

by Marketing ON 24 June 2010

The 1954 book ‘Horton Hears a Who’ by Dr. Seuss tells the story of Horton the Elephant who, in the afternoon of May 15 while splashing in a pool, located in the Jungle of Nool, hears a small speck of dust talking to him. It turns out the speck of dust is actually a tiny planet, home to a city called ‘Who-ville’. ‘Who-ville’ is inhabited by microscopic-sized inhabitants, ‘Whos’, and led by a character known as the Mayor. His motto is, ‘a persons a person, no matter how small’ – I think we should take great lead from the Mayor’s motto and apply it to our online marketing.

Marketing is all about the ‘Whos’ – it’s about building and maintaining relationships (and sometimes breaking them) between a business and its customers. The customers are the ‘Whos’ of course, no matter how small they may be.

Many of us treat our ‘Whos’ more like ‘Whats’. We count them, we corral them, we segment them – but we don’t listen to them. They’re just numbers to us – 15,000 names on an email list or 42,000 hits on our web site. For these marketers, success is measured by an increase in activity of the ‘Whats’ – a better response rate to the email campaign, or a percentage increase in time spent on each page on our web site. But that is not effective in building relationships with them – rather it reminds me more of the opinions of ‘Vlad Vladikoff’, the ‘Wickersham Brothers’ and the ‘Sour Kangaroo’ in the book. We don’t believe they exist as people because we can’t see or hear them – so we don’t market to them as people.

But the ‘Whos’ do exist – behind every email address and every click on your web site there is a living, breathing person with their own special needs, likes and dislikes and opportunities for you to reach out and make a new friend for your company.

You need to make an effort to get to know them. Find out who they are. It’s not hard – they are all dying to tell you about themselves – every time they click on something on your site, fill out a form, watch a video, type something on your company’s Facebook page, or fail to respond to an email blast – every time they interact and/or choose not to interact with your company, they are telling you something about themselves. The trick is to listen.

Are you really listening to what your customers are telling you? I mean really listening, as if your relationship with them depends on it (it does you know!)? Are you developing the relationship by tracking and profiling your ‘Whos’ so that you can remember what they have previously told you, and so you can then give them what they want, when they want it? Or are you just counting them – treating them as ‘Whats’ instead of ‘Whos’?

At the end of ‘Horton Hears a Who’, all the ‘Whos’ get together and make a noise so loud that even Vlad, the Wickersham Brothers and the Sour Kangaroo could hear them. Of course, they all lived happily ever after.

Don’t wait until your ‘Whos’ gang up and tell you what they want through leaving your site, never to return again – start listening now. And always remember, ‘a persons a person, no matter how small’.

This is my personal blog. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer, Coremetrics.

Ignorance is not bliss

by Marketing ON 20 May 2010

As a marketing manager (we do most of our stuff online) I have a budget to look after and my main goal is to maximise the return from my marketing investments. I have lots of tactical choices available – banner ads, search, print, emails, newsletter sponsorship, social media and so forth. To decide where to allocate my hard-earned budget, I generally look to the history of my various campaigns and spend more where I know I will get a better return.

The hidden problem for marketers is that many of the measurement tools being used to determine campaign outcomes are totally bogus and so the results being used to determine future marketing investments are false. Truly, you could be operating in a vacuum of blissful ignorance and not even know it!

Most of todays online web analytics tools, including Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends and Yahoo Analytics default to what is known as last click attribution – that is, they count the value of the conversion (sale, booking event etc) towards the last marketing activity that happened. Last Click attribution is good for measuring conversion events but will not tell you which campaign brought the customer to you in the first place – for that you would measure the First Click. And what about the other campaigns along the way that influenced the conversion? How do you measure these and make sure they get some credit as well?

The key takeaway is that depending on the attribution model you are using, your return on investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS) may vary dramatically, and may lead you to make different (and possibly very wrong) decisions about how to best optimise your marketing efforts.

Whilst there are some very advanced attribution techniques being deployed by some companies, the general consensus today is that an approach looking at First, Last and Average Click, side by side, is a sensible and achievable approach – and it can be done with minimal effort (and possibly a spreadsheet, if you must). Such an approach will show you which campaigns are working better for acquisition, influence and conversion – you can then weight the results to drive the campaign mix you are looking for.

A recommended action plan:

Find out which attribution model you are currently using,
Re-assess your current marketing program now that you know what your are really measuring,
Implement a First, Last and Average Click attribution model for your business,
Reconsider your mix strategy for acquisition, influence and conversion,
Make more informed and effective investment decisions,
Bask in the glory of knowing you have improved your marketing effectiveness, and
Spend your ‘Management By Objective’ bonus!

This is my personal blog. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer, Coremetrics.

WOM: demand the evidence

by Marketing ON 23 March 2010

Word of mouth (WOM) marketing is the oldest and some would argue best, form of marketing. And we all know intuitively it works. In fact, a lot of it we probably don’t even consciously notice. The average US consumer has over 100 branded conversations a week. But there is a vast gap between knowing something works, and justifying to your CEO or board why you should spend money on it.

Because there are no standard metrics, in the same way there are for TV and print advertising for example, doesn’t mean that WOM lacks of accountability. But if you’re not measuring it, you shouldn’t be doing word of mouth at all.

Measure conversations

The media metric for word of mouth is conversations. We need to know how many conversations were created as a result of something we did which gives us the reach of the campaign. The simple way to do this is to take a sample of influencers involved in the campaign and ask them to keep a diary of conversations about that product or service for a specified period of time. Ideally you would also include some soft measures around the ‘topics’ of the conversations to understand how the brand is being talked about. An incredible amount of insight can be gained from what people choose to say to others about your product.

Demand evidence

Word of mouth campaigns are designed to be passed on, and for that reason, any measurement must look beyond the first direct impact to the people it impacts at further levels — or ripples if the water analogy works for you.

Soup measures campaigns to two ripples beyond the first direct impact. Admittedly, this isn’t easy to measure, and we have had to develop a sophisticated back-end system to be able to do this; but without factoring in the conversation spread word of mouth won’t pay back. And don’t trust anyone who pulls these numbers out of the air — demand real evidence.

This spread can also be seen online. There are ways to do this through many of the social media monitoring tools but these can be lacking as they don’t include critical conversation channels such as Facebook. We often put elements in campaigns that make them more trackable online, for example adding links for people to pass on. Nevertheless, it still can be difficult to track exact online spread of a word of mouth campaign. We use both the direct ‘asking’ method of influencers and their friends combined with social media monitoring to give us a picture which is perhaps closer to reality.

Measure over time

Unlike most marketing communication, word of mouth is not one single impact. It’s something that continues to grow as the influencer — or the person we involved in the word of mouth marketing campaign — comes in contact with more people they think the information is relevant to. Any measurement must look at a time-based measure to ensure it is capturing the longevity of the campaign. I would recommend the time is dependent upon the objectives of the campaign. But, at a minimum, a dip at one month and then again three months later to track growth is a good start.

Measure the action

Word of mouth has significantly more impact beyond making an initial impression. It is the most likely media to lead to action, change opinions or influence someone to go out and buy the product someone just recommended to them. Measurement must look to include what action people took as a result of the conversation. On average, our research shows that 65% of people who were recommended a product by someone in our word of mouth campaigns will go on to buy the product. This shows the incredible power behind word of mouth as a highly targeted and relevant medium.

Using all this information you can get a robust idea of ROI for your marketing spend. You won’t need to do this all the time, but once you have tracked a couple of campaigns and you can show the evidence, management might be more likely to trust their intuition on word of mouth.

Online marketers still flying blind says report

by Marketing ON 16 February 2010

Despite spending increases in the online space, marketers still lack the technology to support their goals in this space, says a new study.

The study, entitled ‘The Face of the New Marketer’, has found that 75% of the 360 marketers surveyed report that using various online tools for personalisation is a priority and 81% claim that it’s very important for them to increase visitor value through compelling product and content offerings. Yet only half report they currently use online personalisation tools (51%).

Collated by online metrics company Coremetrics, the study also revealed that while spending on online marketing efforts has increased, most marketers lack confidence that they are using the right metrics to gauge marketing success and value.

When asked how they would evaluate marketing success at the end of 2009, nearly half (47%) said ‘meeting our key performance indicators’.

“This global survey shows that many marketers are struggling to derive real value from their online marketing tools. They understand the need to personalise messages for target audiences – they just don’t know how to go about it. This is surprising given just how critical tailored marketing efforts are becoming in competitive markets,” said Kevin Mackin, general manager for Coremetrics Australia and New Zealand.

Other findings include:

The two top challenges facing marketers are:
- Obtaining an integrated view of customers across online marketing touch points (45%)
- Interpreting the resulting data (41%)

The three areas that have seen the biggest spending increase this year are:
- Online marketing (69%)
- Generating online business (56%)
- Web 2.0 (55%)

Two-thirds of marketers (67%) indicated that marketing has always been viewed as critical in their organization – only 19% say that marketing is seen as discretionary.
The three most commonly used forms of online marketing are:
- Email marketing (87%)
- Display advertising (86%)
- Paid search (69%)

The three most commonly used marketing measurement tools are:
- Individual online marketing campaign performance (77%)
- Online customer behaviour – per visit/session (76%)
- Display advertising performance based on impressions (69%)

5 ways to offers your customers cant resist

by Marketing ON 15 December 2009

It takes deep customer insight to provide a truly personalised online experience. And customisation of every touchpoint and throughout every channel is the key to keeping customers engaged – and coming back for more. Your customers need to feel like you know exactly what they want, when they want it.

Of course, that’s not easy. But there’s a wealth of data available to you that customers have been giving you all along. They’ve been showing you which ads enticed them to your site, what’s likely to make them click, how often they need incentives, and which offers are guaranteed to make them convert.

That insight makes it possible to tailor their entire experience and to streamline their journey through the conversion funnel. You can create custom landing pages, deliver hand-picked up sell messages and do everything it takes to make their online experience one that will increase their loyalty and at the same time increasing your profitability.

And that’s important because these days customers are taking a lot longer to buy. You need to anticipate how, when and where customers want to hear from you, and make those communications consistent across your business. Because one-way, push sales messaging doesn’t always work online – customers expect you to engage them in a dialogue.

The longer buying cycle means it’s critical to capture visitor behaviours across multiple website sessions in order to understand their motivation and intent. And it helps to have clear goals while you’re developing every campaign. When you deliver the right offer to them, make sure it’s the best (and most profitable) offer for your business.

Let’s take a look at the many ways you continually keep your customers engaged – getting to know them, talking to them, aligning your goals with their needs, understanding their buying cycle, and communicating with them on their own terms.

Guiding Principle 1: Get to know every visitor.

Gain a clear view of customer behaviour. Tracking every interaction with every visitor helps you formulate the best approach for each unique customer. You can track each customer’s behaviour over multiple visits and sessions, and gain a deep understanding of how their behaviour matches that of other visitors.

Guiding Principle 2: Hear what they’re saying.

Think of your online engagement as an ongoing dialog with customers. Developing a deeper perspective of visitor behaviours based on their actions and content preferences across multiple website sessions means you can listen to their actions and respond appropriately.

Guiding Principle 3: Promote what’s right for them and for you.

Align your business goals with your customers. Incorporating business metrics such as margin, profit and inventory into your metrics ensures that you match each customer to the products you’d like to sell most – the ones that match your broader business goals.

Guiding Principle 4: Understand their behaviour over time.

Match the buying cycle to your marketing approach. Understanding customer behaviour over time, and matching your engagement processes to meet the needs of your customers as well as your business, means that you can deliver the perfect message at the right time in the customer lifecycle.

Guiding Principle 5: See what’s in store.

Anticipate how, when and where customers want to hear from you. Developing ever-increasing layers of personalisation means customising at every stage of your relationship. It means attracting customer to targeted areas of your business, accelerating conversion, increasing average order value, bringing back prospects who failed to convert, turning one-time visitors into loyal customers, and rewarding your most loyal customers of all. Once you understand the objective, you can find a message and approach that will resonate with each individual, demographic, and segment based on their unique relationship with your business.

Learnings from the Online Retailer conference

by Marketing ON 26 August 2009

I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural Online Retailer event
in Sydney recently and I must say, I was impressed. The quality of
exhibitors, attendees and speakers was high and the topics addressed
and discussed very valuable. My congratulations go out to the
organisers – they created a lively and engaging event which captured
the attention of most of the local etail industry.

Over the two-day event I enjoyed talking to many retailers looking
for ways to enhance their online business performance, which lead to
interesting discussions about today’s marketing tactics and whether
they’re generating real results. What was most interesting to me was
that no matter what the focus of the retailer, everyone I spoke to was
looking to shift to a new model of marketing in the immediate future.
Let me elaborate…

From clothing retailers to wine cellars and electrical goods
wholesalers, most attendees were looking for ways to personalise their
marketing tactics to stay ahead in the online retailing game. Everyone
grasped the concept that it’s simply too easy for customers and
prospects to shop with competitors if the online experience is too
boring, complicated or confusing.

So what are they doing at the moment to engage people online? Most
talked about a compelling online presence that was easy to navigate,
looked good, read well and ranked high in search engine results. Many
were also using free web analytics services to monitor traffic to their
site and regularly sent out emails to customers touting sale items and
special offers. All of this adds up to a great start for any online
marketing strategy. However, it quickly became apparent to me the
attendees weren’t that impressed with the results. In fact, most people
I spoke with were looking for ways to personalise their marketing
tactics on a whole new level. They felt that they didn’t really know
who their customers were and how they could enhance communication with
them. And so the shift to contextual marketing begins to take shape.

Retail marketers (out of all the different kinds of marketers out
there) are probably among the first to understand just how important
sophisticated marketing tactics are to a business’ profitability. Many
rely solely on the online store to drive sales. And even those with
traditional stores are quick to understand that they could lose out big
time if they don’t improve their online strategies pronto. Therefore,
the need to hold fast to existing customers and entice new ones is
paramount. But how do they improve on existing tactics? Interestingly,
most thought that by gaining a better understanding of who their
customers are, how they engage with the business, what their
preferences are and entire history with the company, would reveal
important information to answer their marketing questions. And they’re
right.

Knowing exactly who you’re customers and prospects are, what they’re
interests are in your business, how valuable they are to your sales
etc. is the only way to personalise your marketing. There’s no point
trying to send targeted email campaigns to your female customers about
baby wear when only half of them are mothers and have actually sought
information about your baby products online. Just as pointless is the
exercise of highlighting a particular service or product as a ‘special
offer’ on the homepage when none of your customers have ever shown any
interest in it. Just because you want to move that product or try out
that new service, doesn’t mean your customers are interested and it
should take up prime space on the homepage. And what about
re-developing your website to make it more aesthetically pretty when in
fact your customers found your contact page and check-out system
extremely easy to navigate? Why fix what ain’t broke?

I wanted to share my experiences at the Online Retailer event
because it raised marketing issues and a change in thinking relevant to
all businesses. And if you’re not convinced that you need to heighten
your online marketing efforts, think about every time you’ve had great
customer service at your local café where, as soon as you’ve walked in
the perfect brew is already being prepared for you. Now that’s great
customer service and why wouldn’t you want to offer your online
customers the same experience? Lord knows your competitors soon will be.

Tackling your biggest challenge

by Marketing ON 30 July 2009

I couldn’t help but notice that a recent poll on Marketingmag.com.au showed that an overwhelming number of us (almost 50%) felt that our biggest challenges were measuring marketing ROI and securing internal support for budgets.

These have always been among the top issues faced by marketers but I would have thought we’d started to get a handle on showing the value of our day-to-day activity by now. In fact, demonstrating the importance of our strategies and tactics is only going to become more paramount as companies pare back spending and watch budgets like hawks, thanks the recent downturn in the economy.

If justifying our budgets and measuring ROI are two of our most difficult challenges, how are we attempting to overcome this? This is a genuine question I’d like to put the industry and welcome any feedback in response to my blog. If we recognise these issues (among others) that must be dealt with, what tactics are we employing to show just how valuable our services and skills are?

Some might disagree but I actually believe it’s getting easier to justify marketing spend and how we’re contributing to the business bottom line through generating sales leads and much needed communication with customers and prospects. Never before has so much of our marketing been played out in the digital realm and therefore been so very easy to watch, measure and analyse.

Take a look at where you focus most of your marketing efforts. I’d suggest that a significant portion would include tactics such as blogs, emails, online advertising and social media channels. And while I’m certainly not saying that companies can forget offline mediums, I’m confident that most businesses would maximise their limited marketing resources by tapping into digital opportunities. The only problem is (it seems) we’re not tracking our efforts and translating these opportunities into measurable outcomes for the business. I’d suggest that’s where we’re losing executive confidence.

Imagine walking into a meeting with data and analysis that shows exactly how you and your marketing team have converted 35 high-end prospects into customers and generated 50 new leads through a strategic direct mail campaign targeting existing customers, over the last month. That’s the kind of data to back up your smarts with. Because you and I know we provide invaluable skills and knowledge to the business, we just need to know how prove it.

Why you need a strategy this Christmas

by Marketing ON 7 July 2009

The 2009 Christmas holiday season is likely to be one of the most challenging shopping seasons online retailers have ever faced. The economic recession has turned even the most generous spenders into cost-conscious consumers.

So, how are you preparing for this Christmas season? Are you and your website ready to captialise on the shopping rush?

Here are a few questions to think about, as you prepare for the final six months of the year:

1. Do you know your online customers?

By ‘know’ I mean really know them well. Do you know how often they shop with you? What’s their average spend? What are their likes and dislikes? Do you know anything about their family unit? What about their age, sex or other demographic information? Is your knowledge restricted to the last known action on your website?

If you are using a session-based reporting package like Google Analytics or similar, then you probably know what the visitors have done in each session but it is unlikely that you know much about the customer and their activity across their multiple visits to your site. If so, then you don’t really know your online customers, you just know what they are doing in discrete visits… there is a huge difference.

2. Are your special offers personalised, relevant and timely?

How do you decide which products to recommend as up-sell or cross-sell opportunities? When do you make the up-sell or cross-sell recommendation? Who do you recommend the up-sell to? Does someone in the marketing or merchandising team decide that “this goes with that, so here is our cross-sell offer and ship it to everyone on the mailing list”? Or do you dive deeply into what your customers are telling you based on the products they look at together or buy together and then make specific targeted offers to individuals based on what you know about them?

A leading online retailer from Europe recently put it this way:

“By segmenting visitors based on behaviour and tailoring email content accordingly, we are able to deliver highly personalised messages that generate much higher open rates, conversion rates, and revenue per email. We’re also better able to accommodate secondary offers that are available in our boutiques. Instead of trying to second-guess our customers, we can present them with offers that we know will interest them.”

By making personalised, relevant and timely offers in a recent email campaign, this company saw a conversion rate 17 times higher and the revenue per email 25 times higher than their earlier approaches.

3. Do you know which campaigns really work?

How are you measuring your online campaigns? Did you know that it generally takes between four and eight interactions with your site before someone actually converts to becoming a customer? What is the average number of visits on your site for each customer before they convert?

If a customer gets an email from you, then uses your site for a shopping comparison, clicks a banner ad and then comes back a week later through an organic search (couldn’t remember the web address but found you again through Google), where do you attribute the value of the marketing campaign? If you’re in the same boat as many online marketers in Australia, you’ll use a ‘last click’ approach.

The problem with this is you’re not giving due relevance to the email campaign, the comparison and the banner ad – that is, you don’t really have a clue about which marketing campaigns are actually working or not.

If you don’t really know how each of your campaigns are working and how they interact with each other to bring customers to the site and help them convert, how can you replicate those that are working best?

Summary

These are three very simple and easy sets of questions to think about, and they’re going to arm you with knowledge that will make a big difference to your 2009 Christmas.

Know your customers, know the product relationships and know which campaigns work – then replicate what works and dump what’s not working.