eCommerce Marketing: The Art of Customer Acquisition

Pity the session that takes place after lunch on the last day of ad:tech. People are exhausted after a long coupla days of parties, expo booths, buzzwords and PowerPoint. Attendace at these final sessions can be sparse and attention can waver.

Attendance wasn’t too sparse to start at this session, but got more so as the session went along. Maybe people had planes to catch, or maybe it was the fact that a session about customer acquisition had relatively little to say about customer acquisition.

Jeffrey Grau (Senior analyst, eMarketer) opened the hour with a look at where online holiday sales are expected to fall. The estimate from eMarketer: $31.1 billion, up 18.5 percent over last year. That’s a slower rate of growth than previously (last year was 24.8 percent over 2005), but certainly healthy. Forrester and Jupiter both agree, with estimates of $33 billion and $39 billion respectively.

From there, Grau peppered questions to a solid panel that consisted of Steven Feuling (Retail Category Development Officer, Yahoo!), Norrman Miglietta (Director, Advertising and Marketing, Turner Sports New Media), Ellen Duffie-Fritz (Director of Online Marketing, Circuit City Stores, Inc.) and Sean Cheyney (VP, Marketing and Business Development, AccuQuote).

We learned that NASCAR finds the huge amount of content on their site supports organic search, that people are using online retail sites to pre-shop before heading into stores, that retailers are beginning to wake up to the fact that the Web isn’t a channel unto itself and that what Facebook is up to is very intriguing.

But there was far too much time spent discussing issues like loyalty, upselling and retention. Pssssst! This is a session about acquisition! Let’s stop dancing around the topic and talk acquisition!

Bottom line: A good topic and a good panel, but it failed to live up to its promise.