Engage and Convert
Upon acquisition, an individual is not a customer - they remain a prospect until the time they decide to make a purchase. The length of this engagement may vary according to the customer and product: the customer may purchase right away, or they may delay making a purchase for quite a long time. Generally speaking, the higher the cost or personal involvement in a purchase, the more time a prospect will take to convert.
Funnel Reporting
Funnel reports, which measure the "drop off" of prospects on the way to a sale, are an old standby of marketers to assess the effectiveness of their marketing efforts: if an inordinate number of customers drop out at a certain step, this indicates a need to take action to reduce the drop-off at that point in the process.
Funnel reporting has also caught on in the Web world, as it is possible to precisely measure the number of users who continue through each screen of a flow, and drop-off suggests a problem with a given interface.
If can also be applied more broadly on the Web, to indicate certain criteria that are not necessarily part of a linear flow. If you identify that customers who purchase view an average of three pages, regardless of where they are located, you can set up criteria that follow this logical progression: how many visitors leave before viewing the second page, how many leave before viewing the third, how many fail to purchase after viewing three pages?
It may be possible to coordinate across channels to define a funnel effect: you can compare the number of people who received a mailer containing the URL of a promotional site with the number of visitors to that site, versus the number of individuals who entered a promotion code, versus the number who called a number published on the site, etc..
However, you must be aware that corruption will occur, as not all visitors to the site came from the mailer, so the proportions will be skewed by unexpected behaviors. The author shows a stacked bar chart (horizontal orientation) that can indicate where a given step is broken down - the first part of the bar is solid, indicating that there is a known correlation between receiving the mailer and visiting he site, where as the second part is striped, indicating the number of "bonus" visitors who came to the site from search engines or other referring sites rather than the brochure.
Remarketing
Remarketing is the practice of sending follow-up communications to prospects who have not yet acted on a promotional message.
A case study of a bank is presented: their campaign to get account holders who began, but did not complete and online credit card application to complete the process (while they are technically existing customers of the firm, they are prospects for the credit card product), and the following remarketing attempts were made in sequence:
- A credit card promotion was included in their account statement
- Later, an e-mail was sent
- Later, a direct mail piece was sent
- Finally, customers were called
Notice that this plan moved from less expensive to more expensive channels, and became more compelling. Hence, the company spent the least amount of money, and placed the least amount of pressure, on getting customers to complete the purchase.
One caution is given from a hotel marketing campaign, where a promotion was done to all its regular visitors, and those who had already booked reservations simply cancelled them and rebooked at the lower promotional price. This is support for the need to keep a record of customer contacts and consider previous touches before including an individual in a communique.
Some specific opportunities for remarketing are presented:
- Customers who abandon an online process can be contacted through other media, which may or may not reference the abandoned application
- Product returns may indicate a need to remarket to prospects to ensure that they understand the value proposition, in order to set expectations that will decrease the incidence of dissatisfaction
- Customers who failed to act on a limited-time offer (such as a coupon) before it expired may be remarketed to renew the offer
Finally, there's an interesting sidebar about privacy policies, which are common on the Web, and customers are coming to expect a certain degree of privacy even in offline marketing. For example, a customer who provided their contact information for a promotional drawing may be offended when they are contacted with a sales pitch, even though this practice has been in place for year before the Internet. Because any unwelcomed contact is a negative brand experience, marketers should give strong consideration to applying the same opt-in/opt-out tactics for traditional marketing as individuals have come to expect online.
Cross-Sales Offers
Cross-sales offers ("do you want fries with that?") are very commonplace and have been found to be highly effective in increasing revenue per customer. Typically, it is a form of rule-based marketing that a retailer uses to offer a customer an additional product that is complementary to one the customer has purchased.
A division is drawn between one-to-one marketing (which offers products based on a user's profile) and cross-sales (which considers only the last item purchased).
Complementary products can be identified by examining existing customer behavior: reviewing the products a customer buys at the same time, or within a couple of visits, suggests products that are functional complement (such as hot dogs and buns - which are used together) or correlative complements (such as cat food and litter - which are both purchased b y cat owners).
It is common for cross-sales to occur in the same medium (a deck of coupons is placed in proximity to an item, or a web site suggests an item based on the last one added to the cart), but this method can also be used cross-channels, provided that the transaction history from all the various channels is consolidated.
The author also suggests that one should not stop at transactions: if a significant number of people who searched for a term bought a specific product, advertising can be targeted based on the search action (rather than the purchase) to reach a broader array of prospects.
A handful of examples are given of cross-channel cross-sales: online customers who searched for an item receive a promotional mailer, people who made a purchase online for in-store delivery were cross-marketed in person, etc.