Map the Buy Funnel for Fun and Profit
You’ve spent your budget bringing targeted visitors to your website. But what happens when they arrive? Could you be missing that one key element that would help you double your conversion rate? This afternoon’s session Conversions - Mapping the Buy Funnel served as a brief conversion analytics overview and discussion of site factors influencing visitor conversion.
According to Moderator Guy Creese of Ballardvale Research, help is available. There are over 40 analytics tools on the market, with most of them having reached feature parity in the last year. These solutions have grown from tools focused on the needs of IT decision makers to product suites capable of arming the entire corporation with valuable customer insights.
Douglas van Duyne, Senior Director of Customer Experience Products and Design at Keynote Systems, described some of the methods they use to help Fortune 500 businesses refine their online customer experience. You have to figure anyone with a title like that must know what he is doing. Some of this knowledge was chronicled in his recent book, The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience. Among Van Duyne’s recommendations were:
read more...Technology Marketing Is About The Numbers
Nothing makes a blogger’s job easier than when a presenter summarizes their presentations in a nice, self-contained list. So the “Technology Marketing Ideas You Can Use” panel was a godsend.
Bill Carpenter of Oracle offered his “10 Tips in 10 Minutes”:
- Plan and execute across buying process
- Work with and through sales
- Plan globally, execute locally
- Build and leverage analytics
- Utilize a single data model
- Plan and execute across channels
- Forge alliances with trusted brands
- Define and measure ROI
- Test and learn
- Use agencies as partners
Not to be outdone, Michael Grover of CMP Media offeredd his “3 Laws of Advertising Landing Pages”:
- The landing page is part of the ad.
- Not all clicks are the same. Repeat visitors and first-time visitors should be treated differently and given different offers.
- Be a lead farmer. Nurture leads using media over time, don’t just “hunt” for leads using advertising.
The other guys had some good points as well, but no numbered lists.
read more...
Advertising’s Horizon
Perhaps it’s because it’s the end of a long day and I’m cranky because the Wi-Fi got spotty for me after lunch, but I almost didn’t make it through today’s closing session. Despite John Battelle’s highly intelligent and experienced moderating, I felt that the panel - featuring representatives from Saloman Smith Barney, the New York Times, and Trendscape (full disclosure, Michael Tchong is an online columnist for Fast Company - was relatively rambling and disorganized. I also thought that while some of the disagreements were fun to witness, the group swung between provocation for provocation’s sake and well-reasoned analysis too easily.
Saloman Smith Barney’s Lenny Baker impressed me with his depth of knowledge, and New York Times Digital’s Martin Niesenholtz also lended an air of experience and age to the mix. But for the most part, the group seemed ready to revisit well-trod ground… and not truly consider what the future of advertising could bring.
I don’t know if I expected more futurism or more business pragmatics, but it was a rather down way to end the day. Fingers crossed that tomorrow picks up again.
(A more complete partial transcript of this panel discussion is also available.)
read more...Financial Services Focuses on Customer Experience
The Financial Services Panel featured influential decision makers from VISA, CountryWide Home Loans, Manulife Financial, and Ameritrade. As billed in the AD:TECH program, this industry is one of those most impacted by the advent of the Internet. These organizations manage billions of dollars, and are highly reliant on a trusting relationship with their customers. And, their marketing behavior reflects the importance they place on this relationship.
Manulife is a relatively unknown brand, but since their merger with John Hancock they are a global financial services company operating in 19 countries. For them, growth within their current customer base is a high priority. Ralph Vizi, VP of Strategy and Research at Manulife Financial described how the company recently spent $20 Million on complete revision of the online and offline experience.
One result of this exercise was a new tool to help customers set a financial retirement goal in less than five minutes. They found that customers that participated in the program did see a net increase in assets, and a 20-33% increase in website usage.
The point of all this, is that Manulife is trying to understand their customers existing life goals, and then create solutions to help them accomplish those goals. This was a theme repeated by Kelly Passey, Director of Incentive Marketing at VISA.
According to Passey, VISA, as a B2B provider of card solutions to over 14,000 banking partners, has focused on providing tools to member banks. These tools allow the banks to customize their VISA service offerings to their clients. Passey’s presentation focused on a tool developed with SBI/Razorfish to allow member banks to create custom incentive programs through a web based interface. Banks can pick and choose benefit programs for a number of vendors, all pre-negotiated by VISA.
The second half of the presentation focused on customer acquisition. And here, the institutions were following a well-beaten path. Rich media, has been found to be particularly effective. Rhonda Winchell, Director of Advertising for Ameritrade detailed their use of full page peel-backs on Yahoo Finance as part of a Last Market Hour program. During this promotion they would run media between only 3-4pm for a full week with the tagline “What can you accomplish in an hour?”
Rich Grobel, Vice President of Countrywide Home Loans described his steps towards a fully integrated online and offline marketing program. Their customer model defines “Delegators”, “Validators” and “Self Directed” individuals as moving progressively more towards an online or phone-only loan transaction.
These groups seem to approach online marketing as you might expect them to with so much trust on the line…conservatively. As Kelly Passey said “We’re bankers, we understand risk, and we don’t like it.”
read more...Affiliate Marketing and Shopping Engines: Who’s Really Winning?
The Affiliate Marketing and Shopping Engine session attracted a full house, but despite a clamoring audience, there was little specific hands-on info to be had. The session was moderated by Dan Hess of comScore Networks and included Jeremy Daines of Homeclick, Myles Felsing of Red Envelope, Peter Figuredo of NETexponent and Vaughn Smith, Internet Marketing Director at Ebay. The session proved it’s good to be Ebay. When questioned how they would spend an additional $25K, Vaughn Smith of Ebay responded it would be easier for him to figure out how to spend an additional 25 Million.
Dan Hess provided some stats that showed how stats can be misleading.
The top 5 shopping sites when measured by unique viewers are
1. Shopping.com
2. Yahoo shopping
3. Bizrate.com
but by share of referrals, it’s:
1. MSN shopping
2. Bizrate.com
3. Yahoo shopping
but by dollars spent its
1. Yahoo shopping
2. AOL
3. Nexttag
Go figure.
Some suggestions:
- Treat your affiliates with kid gloves
- Make sure you send your affiliates their checks on time
- You need to police what your affiliates do with your brand and marks
Everyone named 1-800-Flowers as the competitor who gets it right.
Vaughn Smith from Ebay disclosed that Ebay’s top 50 affiliates get yearly checks of more than a million dollars, generating a number of queries as to how one becomes a top Ebay affiliate.
read more...The Big and the Small in B2B
Allen Weiss, MarketingProfs
“I hope you all enjoyed Allison’s extremely entertaining presenation this morning. This panel will be the exact opposite.” Such was the auspicious introduction given by moderator Burce Rogers for Unique Online Ideas for Business Marketing.
Although few unique ideas were revealed, the panel presented a nice contrast between the online marketing challenges faced by small B2B advertisers, as represented by Steve Casey of Expression Analysis, and larger corporate marketing efforts, as represented by Mark Eddings from HP. Allen Weiss from MarketingProfs.com also added the grassroots marketing perspective.
While the marketing approaches and goals of the panelists differed significantly, all agreed that in B2B markeing you have to identify the techniques and strategies your organization can’t do, and then partner with the right people who can do it. For Steve, this meant relying heavily on a full-service outside agency who could target his highly scientific target audience. For Mark, it was about using specialized vendors to fill marketing holes his IT guys didn’t have the resources to tackle.
Some nuggets of information:
- Mark’s group at HP looks for a 4% ratio of online spend to sales. Steve looks for a 20x return on his media spend (or 5% ratio, looked at a different way)
- To track phone sales generated by online HP has the ability to create custom 800 numbers by advertising source.
- Because his target market consists of a specific group of research scientists, Steve orients his online spend around trade shows, with emails, websites, and search focused on driving people to his booth
- Allen won’t spend money unless he first gathers research on whether 1) the product has a direct appeal to the target audience; and 2) the marketing has a well-defined message. Always good advice.
Steve made a statement at the end of the session which seemed particularly interesting for the Ad:Tech audience. To paraphrase:
read more...“It was great hearing Mark talk about the complex metrics and tracking he uses, but for my company it’s all new. There are a lot of guys like me out there who still don’t know what ‘click rates’ mean, and it’s a learning experience.”
