E-Mail, Paid Search, Portal Advertising, Channels

How do you evaluate and segment customers who respond to e-mail marketing, paid search, natural search, portal advertising, shopping comparison sites, affiliates, and any other advertising channel?

Are these customers fundamentally "different" than other customers?

Do you treat these customers differently across various marketing strategies?

Most important, how do you evaluate the interactions that occur when customers respond to different advertising channels? For instance, should your e-mail marketing strategy be different for customers who respond to both search and e-mail, vs. customers who only respond to e-mail?

Return On Investment (ROI) In Direct Marketing

Click on the image to enlarge it.

We hear a lot of talk about ROI, or "Return On Investment", when evaluating direct marketing programs.

Catalogers know that paper drives more total sales, and more total profit, than any other form of direct marketing.

E-Mail marketers know that e-mail drives the best "ROI", measured as "total profit divided by total cost". E-Mail marketing has almost no cost associated with it, making it a tool marketers must use, and use properly.

Paid Search marketers know that they reach customers at a "time of need", thereby providing the most "efficient" form of advertising known to-date. No other form of advertising cuts out the waste of uninterested shoppers like paid search ... except I guess for natural search, which has no cost associated with it.

Portal marketers know that they make the brand known to customers who have not purchased previously. They know their investment is best measured on a "lifetime value" basis ... short-term metrics are not appropriate for portal advertising.

In the table attached to the top of this article, each form of advertising has various strengths and weaknesses. Your job is to evaluate your advertising objectives.

Objective: Drive large volume of sales/profit from existing customers.
Solution = Catalogs.

Objective: Precisely target merchandise to existing customers.
Solution = E-Mail, Paid Search.

Objective: Precisely target merchandise to customers in-need.
Solution = Paid Search.

Objective: Make your brand aware to potential customers.
Solution = Portal Advertising.

Objective: Acquire new customers.
Solution = Catalog, Portal Advertising, Paid Search

I didn't even talk about affiliate marketing or shopping comparison marketing, which also fit into this story.

Obviously, there are many different objectives and solutions, my list above is abbreviated and short. Strategically, consider what you want to accomplish, and allocate your advertising mix on the basis of total sales, total profit, and your objectives.

Don't be swayed by folks who tell you that one form of advertising is "better" than another. Each type of advertising has a purpose. Each type of advertising excels within one specific set of metrics.

Multichannel Marketing And Merchants

Our merchandising organizations provide passion and excitement. Heck, if these folks didn't believe in their product, why would the customer believe in the product?

Back in the day (i.e. pre-internet, 1995), catalog marketing was "the store". Say you mailed 1,000,000 catalogs, and put a dress on a quarter page of the catalog. If you didn't feature the dress, you sold $0. If you did feature the dress, maybe you sold $25,000 of merchandise.

Today, the internet is "the store". The catalog, while still very important, "influences" sales.

Today, you will probably sell $33,333 of merchandise instead of $25,000. However, the distribution of sales will be very different, assuming you run the dress in a catalog to a million folks on a quarter page:

• Telephone Demand = $10,000.
• Online Demand Driven By The Catalog = $5,000.
• Online Demand Driven By E-Mail = $3,000.
• Online Demand Driven By Search = $3,000.
• Online Demand Driven By Affiliates = $1,500.
• Online Demand Driven By Portal Advertising = $1,500.
• Online Demand --- Organic = $9,333.

Notice the difference between 1995 and 2007. Back in the day, a merchant got product in the catalog --- where product appeared, how it was presented, and who saw the catalog made a big difference. The merchant fought for her product.

Today, there are at least a half-dozen different avenues for the same item. There are numerous folks that the merchant has to work with, in order to maximize the sales of the dress she is trying to sell.

Most important, the merchant literally has a "portfolio" of investment options. The merchant doesn't have to feel terrified if the dress is not featured in a module in the e-mail campaign, for example. The e-mail campaign only drives a small fraction of total volume of this item.

Now that I'm running my own sole proprietorship, I get to talk to a lot of people across the catalog/online industry. I'm not convinced that we have done an excellent job of teaching our merchandising friends how different the marketing world is in 2007, compared with 1995. Maybe in some ways, we have yet to figure out how different the world is.

CEO Concerns About Reducing Catalog Marketing

Lots of phone calls with business leaders over the past month. All ask me essentially the same question.

Question: "Postage is about to put a squeeze on my expense structure. Should I begin transitioning out of catalog marketing?"

Strategically, there are a lot of things to think about. Listed below are a sampling of the issues CEOs need to consider.

• How old is your average catalog customer? If your catalog customer is 55 or older, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• What percentage of your direct-to-consumer net sales come from the telephone? If this percentage is more than fifty percent, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• What percentage of your direct-to-consumer advertising budget is in search, affiliates, portals and e-mail marketing? If you aren't already spending at least twenty percent of your direct-to-consumer advertising budget online, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts for awhile, until you learn all the ins and outs of online marketing.

• Multichannel Forensics: If prior catalog buyers are in isolation mode (meaning they do not at least try out ordering online), you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• Testing: This is as good a time as any to hold out catalog mailings to a group of loyal catalog customers for a period of at least six months. When you do this, what happens to online spend? Does it increase, decrease, or stay the same? If it decreases or stays the same, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• E-Mail Marketing: A colleague forwarded me an e-mail marketing campaign. The e-mail did not sell merchandise --- rather, it told the customer to look for their catalog in the mail. If your e-mail marketing strategy is to market your catalog, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• Customer Acquisition: What happens to new customers if you stop traditional catalog prospecting activities? The future of your business is new customers --- if you don't acquire new customers via the online channel, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• Paid Search: When you analyze paid search performance, do you find that customers ordering via paid search also received a catalog? If so, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts.

• Online Marketing Budget: What happens if you double your online marketing budget? What is the impact on online sales? If you don't know the answer to this question, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts until you can answer this question.

• Staffing: Do you have a transition plan for all of the folks who have served your catalog efforts for the past two decades? Contact center and distribution center considerations are not trivial.

• Merchandise Strategy: Can you appropriately forecast sku-level sales if you don't have a catalog driving customers to the online channel? Does the mix of merchandise purchased change between online-only customers, verses online customers fueled by catalog marketing?
  

• Customer File Management: Have you run a five-year simulation of the expected change in your customer file? In other words, will you have enough customers, repurchasing at high-enough rates, spending enough money per repurchaser, to fuel the future of your online business? If you don't know the answer to this question, you need to embrace your catalog marketing efforts until you complete your Multichannel Forensics analysis.