Manhattan Marketing Maven

Recalling William F. Buckley, Jr.

In November 1976 to honor the Bicentennial, William F. Buckley yielded the moderator's chair on "Firing Line" to me for a public debate on the need for democracy. Televised from the rotunda of Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, I was a doctoral student and Coach/Chairman of the Columbia Debating Society.

"Bill" joined the affirmative team along with one of my students. It was a furious yet formal debate held before an audience of 1000 people. Under the domed ceiling and in the formal space, the arguments were presented with well practiced rhetoric and a slight echo. Mr. Buckley displayed his strongly held ideas, quoted the classics, wielded foot long words, flashed his sly smile and used his great sense of humor to devastating effect. It was great fun and a grand night; a memory I've always cherished.

News of his passing reminded me that although I am diametrically opposed to most of his conservative canon, the man taught me, by example,  a great deal about the need for fair, enlightened debate, the careful and strategic use of words, the techniques for marshaling arguments and evidence, the cadence and the tactical impact of a well timed Latin quotation and the necessity to respect one's opponent. Off camera, he was truly curious about people, places and ideas, enjoyed the repartee of an evening with others and was a great story teller. Being in his company felt like having a connection to another era and to the world of ideas and ideologies. 

He made an affirmative contribution to our on-going national debate in terms of content and in terms of the humanity he brought to the arena. He will be missed and remembered. 

What eTailers Learned This Christmas

The Holiday 2007 post-mortems are in. The lessons are being gathered, shared, socialized and baked into 2008 budgets. The bottom line is that we still have far to go to meet customer expectations and to realize the upside of online retailing.

Below is my reading and synthesis of survey work from a bunch of sources including 421 marketing responders to the adtech tactics and budgets survey, 721 consumer responders to Allurent, as reported by MarketingCharts, the 101 insights from MarketingSherpa's "2008 Marketing Wisdom" compilation and 167 merchants responding to Lauren Freedman and the e-tailing group's 6th Annual Merchant Survey.

The results are not new or surprising. Maybe they will help all of us keep our eye on the prize.

Perception is Reality. Everybody knows technology is getting better, cheaper and faster. So why is it still so hard and so frustrating to buy stuff online? Customers don't really have the patience or the interest to understand our systems or our problems. They figure if you are promoting your site, you've got it together. If you don't they leave and hate you.

They want stuff to work easily and simply and fast. They don't want to wait around while a page renders or an photo downloads. They want to intuitively shop and have fun buying cool stuff. And they want to be in control by using persistent carts, order histories and checking out in one page. More than half prefer to download a virtual catalog to their desktop and shop at their convenience. 

Anything that disrupts this retail rapture prompts them to dump their merchandise and split  which also gives them a bad taste for the brand. Merchants have one chance to make a strong impression either way.

Conversion is 3% And Needs Work. Its no surprise that of all those unique visitors making all those page views, just 3% or less actually buy. No wonder CFOs are screaming that its an awful big cost to sell an awfully small number of customers.

There is considerable evidence that internal site search might be a key conversion tool. Almost everyone is conscious of site search. One in three shoppers go right to it when they arrive at a site. Improvements in the underlying logic, definition tables, the ability to punch in either SKU numbers or slang terms relating to products can make a considerable difference in sales and customer satisfaction. There is nothing more frustrating than punching in a search term and not quickly finding your desired object.

What's odd is that so few merchants are using tools to improve conversion. 48 percent spent less than 10 hours a week sifting through the numbers even though 55 percent claim they are going to upgrade their analytics software to integrate online and offline tracking and enable multivariate testing. There's a lot of talk but not much action.I suspect analytical talent is thin in most merchant organizations where 2/3rds of businesses run their multi-channel direct to consumer retail operation with 10 people or less, none of whom are number crunching page trackers.

Equally odd is the lack of attention to shopping cart abandonment. 75 percent of merchants don't interact in any way with folks to put stuff in a cart and then bail out. And 29 percent don't have a way to save carts so they can't use e-mail or pop-ups to lure shoppers back. This seems like an investment no-brainer. If customers are already half-sold it makes emminent sense to install the tools to help customers follow through to complete the transaction.

E-Mail & Search Sell Best. It's the house e-mail list against pay-per-click for fastest best acquisition tool while natural search, now generally considered SEO, claims the ROI prize. As the cost of words and the search for golden phrases intensifies and automates, merchants fall back on the house list which can be counted on for regular ka-chings.

Short, simple offer oriented e-mail with subject lines 36 characters or less work best. Just like DM a second blast against non-responders yields about 50 percent of the first response wave. There is growing evidence that if you concentrate on the responders you can optimize returns even if you end up with a smaller list. Remember its not the size that counts, its what you can do with it. 

There's Lots of Segmentation Talk. Testing and segmentation is everyone's stated intention. 81 percent of merchants say they have some or rudimentary levels of sophistication in customer segmentation. So they know what they should do even if they don't do it.

Nobody knows who is really doing it or which segmentation approaches yield the best results. My hunch is simple segmentation based on product purchases, frequency, gender and dollar value probably trump more sophisticated and costly schemes. Its funny how online marketers are just beginning to embrace 50 year old DM orthodoxy.

Many merchants are challenged by system and organizational silo issues which limit how much anyone can truly do vis-a-vis segmentation. Plus fighting the conventional wisdom is a bitch. Everybody is committed to end e-mail carpet bombing because its inherently bad even if it reliably works week after week.

Bells & Whistles Are Out. Rich media, pop-ups and pop-unders enrich agencies but yield very little in terms of sales or customer satisfactiont. They are being abandoned by merchants and marketers at a strong clip. Mostly they annoy customers who then bail out. There is very little rich media functionality that is persuasive. Just because it can be built doesn't mean its worth building. Equal skepticism is warranted for social networks which are creating a lot of talk but no demonstrable sell-throughs.

The new agency panacea is viral video, games, virtual worlds and mobile media. But the smart money isn't biting especially in a recession when budgets are cut and merchants have to fight the natural inclination to hunker down.          

Natural Born Clickers and Online Brand Building

For years anyone working with ROI-oriented clients avoided banner ads. Now courtesy of Tacoda, Starcom and comScore, we know that "Natural Born Clickers" are aimless losers madly clicking on ads way out of portion to their importance as consumers.

Just 6% of the online population make 50% of all the clicks on display ads. Close to 70 percent of all the people online never click on anything. Banners rather than being eye candy are just a blooming, buzzing eyesore; the digital equivalent of roadside billboards. This is borne out by the absence of a correlation between clicks and attitude toward the brand. The noodniks who click don't care any more about the brands they click on than the average netzien who generally and consistently ignores the brand banners.

Its not surprising that heavy clickers don't look like anyone you want to market to either. They're 25-44 in households earning $40K or less. They spend four times more time lingering and randomly clicking online than normal folks. They haunt auction, gambling and career sites and I'd guess porn sites, too.

Greg Rodgers of Tacoda thinks these guys click more because they are exposed to 5 times more ads. Maybe. I think they click more because they don't have much else to do. It has the same relative impact as click fraud, where clicks are counted but they don't really matter.

Now the point of this study and the involvement of all these heavyweight organizations is that "click performance is the wrong metric for the effectiveness of brand building campaigns." Well ... duh!

The business development objective of the participating firms is to convince gullible advertisers that rather than count clicks they should have faith in banner ads to expose branding messages to the great unwashed online. This protects their franchise and shifts the metrics to avoid embarrassment. In joint press release they argue, "For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what's really important and generating clicks is an ancillary benefit. Ultimately judging a campaign's effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding ...."

Pay no attention to anything like online metrics. Rely on pre-and post awareness measures or standard brand awareness measurements, spend heartily with us and all will be well, they plea.

How about an alternative hypothesis ... brand building using banner ads is a chimera, a joke and a waste of time and money.

Leading Marketing Successfully

Marketers fail because they try to do to too much and lose focus. The raison d'etre for marketing is to grow the business. It is the prime directive. Any CMO who doesn't address this first and foremost deserves to be fired.

Yet setting priorities while running a day-to-day business, managing up and down and putting out fires can be a serious challenge. Consider several approaches for focusing your thinking and allocating your time.

Start with the End. Determine what you want to happen. Visualize the successful outcome. Quantify and qualify the result you want. If you want to double sales, reduce costs by 50%, increase the margin 5 points or add 20,000 new customers you can't figure out how to do it until you know exactly what you want to achieve. Once the endpoint is clear you can construct the tactical plan to get there. Invest time and energy upfront to scope out the goal. 

BTW, if you are aiming to capture the brand's true authenticity, produce the next new genre of TV commercial, revolutionize how media is planned or bought, recapture the glory of "new" advertising or teach the world to sing .. don't bother ... start packing your bags.

Pick Your Shots. You can't do everything. You don't have enough time or people. And nobody has enough budget to fund every good idea. Select the projects that will drive toward the goal fastest. Do them first and best. Pick a couple of slower-moving, infrastructure building things to build your pipeline.  Then merchandise your plan and get everyone to buy in.

Set the Altitude. Business is like 3-dimensional chess. The game is simultaneously played on several levels. Get in touch with your ego and decide how you want to succeed and at what level.Then pick your level and your playing field and master the rules of that particular game. Do you want to be Buffet? Gates? Trump? Welch? Iaccoca? Each requires a different strategy and different game play.

Focus. Marketing is a dynamic game.Every day yields a hundred great ideas. You must be disciplined enough to make a plan and stick to it. There will be plenty of C level distractions to keep you interested. But you can't afford to get off your game or to be distracted by something that doesn't directly contribute to achieving your stated objective. You have to be hard-nosed about this and take your ADD meds frequently.

Marshall Your Resources.  The larger the organization, the more likely the horses pull in diffuse or even opposite directions. You must manage your players and your cash to achieve the objective. There are many synergies and two-fers along the way. Grab them and slough anything that isn't contributing to the direction or the rate of ascent. There are plenty of people within your team willing to go off on tangents, handle pet projects, dote on time-wasters or hide-out by doing "research" and endlessly exploring new options or alternatives. Reign all these guys in. Managers must manage. Here is where you draw the line and surrender your "Mr. Nice Guy" role. That means setting the direction, orienting the team and keeping the horses in-harness side-by-side running in the same direction at a matched pace.

Learn the Plumbing. God is in the details. Much of your success or failure might be as well. Too many marketers don't really understand what their firm makes, sells or distributes or exactly how these things come to be and get into the marketplace. Unless you know the details, you can;t find the inflection points or identify the factors that can be leveraged or the economies of scale that can be found or built. And unless you find and befriend the guys who've been there forever and know where the bodies are buried; the guys who instinctively understand the unstated pathways and things really get done using the informal networks and personal networks of influence, the more you'll risk having a well-placed permanent opposition ready, willing and able to undermine you.

Remember if it was a cake walk any idiot could do it!       

The E-Mail Blizzard Will Continue and Intensify: How Will Your Brand Stand Out?

Everybody loves e-mail because its cheap, its fast and it works. That's the conclusion of a survey done among 2000 online marketers by Datran Media.

More than 80 percent of those surveyed are ratcheting up their e-mail efforts because it works better than other online media and has the best return on investment. 80% send newsletters, 78% use it to drive direct sales and 70% say it enhances customer relationships. The same 80% target e-mail. The targeting criteria are based on demographics or geography, actions, or psychographics and stated interests (in that order). Twenty percent don't target. They carpet bomb using e-mail and this doesn't include the spammers who carpet bomb as well.

Most think that e-mail works best in-tandem with search engine marketing and direct marketing. Half think it complements display ads and very few think it works well with broadcast or cable TV. Almost 25% think e-mail and mobile media might work as a messaging double play. Two-thirds of those surveyed are pretty sure that e-mail also drives sales in other channels and 3/4s plan to do some kind of A/B split or optimization testing.

The survey validates our conventional wisdom. It acknowledges that when something works (think retail circulars) it really works. And for e-mail, like those annoying circulars, consumers are willing to cope with blizzards of them because they serve a useful purpose. and because so many of them end up in harmless junk boxes.

In most cases e-mail serves as a stimulant for customer networks. Rarely does the merchandise in a particular -mail message fly off the shelves. More likely an e-mail prompts or reminds customers to buy the item they've been thinking about or mulling over or cues them to something happening with a brand they relate to or care about.

But if you hope to optimize e-mail for marketing, in this environment, you need to stand out from the crowd and take concerted action to get attention for your brand and your message. Try these tactics:

1. Create a distinctive look or feel. Experiment with subject lines and with Personal URL's in the subject line. Use the same template and be sure it instantly cues brand recognition.

2. Build a Consistent Delivery Schedule. Train your customers to expect certain messages at certain times (Tuesday = Bargain day). Consider a value-oriented TO address to re-inforce the content or the value implicit in a consistent series of offers.

3. Segment and Target Customers. Test the criteria that suit your marketing objective. Communicate the criteria in the subject line. Be sure the value-add is apparent in the subject line.

4. Send Less Better. Rather than do one blast of a million names, do 5 blasts of 200,000 names. Make each segment a different offer or relate the offer to something you know about the behavior of customers in that segment. Focus on behavior its the only reliable predictor of future action. Forget demographics or psychographics, they won't help you target anything other than brand awareness; a task much better suited to other advertising channels.

5. Remember RFM Rules. Peg e-mail basts to frequency of action. People who take a desired action are much more likely to do it again and much sooner than someone who blithely signed up to get on your list.