Exploring Marketing Technology

Opinions are all my own

  • What b-to-b customer retention changes would YOU recommend?

    A friend with a successful b-to-b eCommerce business posed a simple question to me: “If you could only do one or two things for an ecommerce business (that sells actual products rather than a service or software or something) to increase customer retention, what would you recommend?” Here are my recommendations, in priority order. What are yours?

    1. Place your web address, with a compelling call-to-action, directly on the products being shipped. Make this call-to-action as time-sensitive as possible. Don’t be lame and do include a deadline. NO: “Fill out our warranty card online.” YES: “Set up an email reminder on our site so you’ll never forget to replenish. Do it by [date] and we’ll give you an automatic 10% off your next purchase, and free shipping!” Enclose a card reiterating the offer. This may be your last best shot at creating a repeat customer.
    2. Follow up your shipment with a “We’d like to know if your products are fitting your needs” email or letter. Include a customer satisfaction survey that rewards them with something they can use with an immediate order. If you’re using snail mail, naturally you should enclose a printed catalog. Draw their attention to related items that can be found within it (or if it’s an email, found on the eCommerce site). If possible make the effort self-financing by generating an immediate re-purchase. Use the Net Promoter Score (NPS)* methodology in the satisfaction survey, to track current loyalty for this customer and as a way to track overall likelihood to repurchase as a trend over time.

    Those are my recommendations. What are yours? Comments are especially welcome, for me and my friend.

    *I’m including this because, although NPS has fallen out of favor as a predictor of company growth, and in other ways is definitely not perfect, I agree with Dale Wolf in that I like its simplicity. You need to use something as a predictive baseline that can (hopefully) be compared with real loyalty measurements. The NPS methodology, associated with Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld, is good enough to do the job.

  • PPC landing pages start talking at the 200th click

    There’s a trick to conducting pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on a shoestring. Larger campaigns buy popular keyword phrases. They consequently generate a torrent of clicks. Smaller campaigns, on the other hand, must make similar decisions success using a comparative trickle of data. So how do small-time marketers know when they have enough information to make reliable decisions?

    A good rule of thumb is to start trusting the results of a PPC landing page at about 200 clicks. That’s according to Tony Brewin, of SuperEvent in the U.K. His advice was part of a Wordtracker post on optimizing Google Adwords campaigns.

    This is coincidentally similar to the rule of thumb I’ve used in direct mail campaigns. For smaller mailings, direct mail veterans have known that you could start to be confident about results once you’ve received roughly 20 of them.

    A statistician friend once described these critical mass numbers as the thresholds where there is enough information to get simple yes / no answers about whether a campaign is succeeding. He compared them to when you watch a dot of light coming at you from a distance during an evening drive. This threshold is the point where you can first tell whether you’re seeing a single headline, from an approaching motorcycle, or from a car’s pair of headlights.

    It’s still a limited amount of information, but knowing what’s coming at you quickly and definitively can be useful both in driving and in direct response.

  • Take this test to see if you’re a Marketing Tactic Addict

    The world’s recent arms race has lessons to teach about modern marketing. The U.S. and Russia (then the U.S.S.R.) spent a fortune on new weapons during the Cold War, each afraid it would get trumped by the other in battle. Tactics — what weaponry to use — took priority over strategy — when and how to use them. Jonathan Schell’s book of that time chillingly described what was at stake: The Fate of the Earth.

    In spite of lessons from both ancient and recent history, folks who wage wars typically get hung up on gizmos. So do those who “wage commerce.” Are you addicted to tactics over strategy? Take this test:

    1. Can you list three narrowly-focused strategies for doing an end-run around your competitors? Give yourself one point for each, and add a point for each that uses “out-of-vogue” technologies or tactics, such as direct mail or email.
    2. Have you recently watched a competitor use a tactic and asked, “What’s their plan for using that?” Give yourself two points for looking deeply into the tactic. If instead of asking yourself that question, yours was “Cool! How can we get us one of those?,” dock yourself two points.
    3. Was your last strategy something you first imagined being executed using older or lower-tech methods, but they turned out too slow or costly? Give yourself one point.
    4. Do you find yourself, “Spending eight hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy?” (A tip of the hat to Seth Godin’s blog today for this one.) Take away three points.
    5. Finally, have you rejected a proposal lately because the authors didn’t do a clear job of linking their most gee-whiz tactics to the strategy you outlined in your RFP (request for proposal)? Give yourself three points. Conversely, if your RFP did not explicitly describe your strategy, subtract four points.

    Tally things up and pencils down. If your final score is less than three, you may be a Marketing Tactic Addict. If it’s a negative number, seek professional help. Addiction to the latest tactics — whether they’re social media ploys, video podcasts or whatever — are empty calories at best and brand poison at worst.

    Remember that the attack that brought our country temporarily to its knees didn’t come from a thermonuclear strike made by a hostile country. It came from a networked, amorphous group — one that sneaked into our infrastructure and turned it against us with explosive results.

    The enemy used nothing more than box cutters and a willingness to be martyred. It’s a chilling example of simple tactics aligned behind a killer strategy.

  • What the Netflix prize teaches us about digital teamwork

    A few days ago a team crossed the finish line in a race to develop the best algorithm for the Netflix recommendation engine. It wasn’t easy. It turns out that the type of business logic once carried exclusively between the ears of a good video rental clerk is hard  to automate. Netflix decided they needed help. They placed a price on improving suggestion results: One million dollars for a 10% or better improvement.

    Teams around the world got to work. It took them three years to reach the 10% milestone. And 30 days after one team did, the best results over that threshold took the prize. Here’s the leaderboad.

    We can learn from these teams’ struggles. The leaders who were interviewed all agree they couldn’t have done it without an interdisciplinary approach, tight collaboration and a willingness to be wildly creative. According to a piece in the New York Times, “the formula for success was to bring together people with complementary skills and combine different methods of problem-solving.”

    In the physical world, we know that the more hands you have to lift something, the heavier an object you can lift. But most of us in our digital, information age careers, have a difficult time imagining that this synergy is possible when the heavy lifting is computational. We need to think again.

    Quoted in the Times piece, David Weiss, a member of one of the teams competing, said, “The surprise was that the collaborative approach works so well, that trying all the algorithms, coding them up and putting them together far exceeded our expectations.”

    We’ve seen it work with open source software and multi-player online games. Now we have a very public example that in the digital world as well, many hands make light work.

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  • Bokodes talk to you through your smart-phone camera

    According to an estimate on this video, the world is teeming with a billion people who are armed with a “reasonably high quality” digital camera. Most of these cameras are in cell phones. The Camera Culture, of the prestigious MIT Media Lab, wishes to exploit this opportunity with a new type of barcode, called the Bokode. The video below shows the science behind this breathtaking new technology.

    Geek Alert: Unless you’re an optical physicist, you’ll likely start zoning out by the third minute of this five-minute video. Hang in there. The more apparent business applications are discussed starting in the last minute of this thing.

    If you simply cannot endure the details about how this system conveys tons of product information, and senses where your camera is positioned and communicates that position to your camera, here’s a link to a more benefits-oriented video, from BBC’s outstanding technology bureau.

    Assuming you’re like me, a marketing professional who cares about technology, I urge you to educate yourself on this advancement in cell-camera-enabled barcoding. It’s the beginning of a more robust way for us to gather information about the products and businesses we encounter.

    Unless I’m mistaken, that is. I’d love to know what you think.

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