Prove It: Multichannel Creative

Review the content offered by bloggers, trade journals or industry experts, and you'll find that creative integration of multichannel marketing is essential. We're told that prices should be the same, and that the merchandise offering should be consistent. E-mail, landing pages, catalog/direct-mail all should have the same theme and fonts and colors.

Has this theory been tested? In other words, is there a library of results somewhere that prove this hypothesis? Or, is this simply VCB (vendor, consultant, blogger) speak.

Your thoughts?

Day Of Week

In recent Multichannel Forensics projects, there has been a increased focus on understanding the days that online buyers purchase merchandise.

Here's what you might want to pay attention to.

1. Customers who order over the telephone in the first two weeks following a catalog in-home date (or first two days following an e-mail in-home date) are dependent upon advertising.
2. Customers who order online, and order in the first two weeks following a catalog in-home date (or first two days following an e-mail in-home date) are probably dependent upon advertising.
3. Customers who order online, and order during "dead periods", when no catalog or e-mail campaign is active, are "organic" customers, customers likely to purchase in the future without the aid of advertising.

Pay really close attention to scenario #3, folks, as you can save a lot of expense here without compromising sales levels.

These days, I code every day of the year, based on whether that day is a "traditional direct marketing day" or whether it is an "organic day". Customers ordering on "organic days" are less likely to need advertising to fuel future purchases than are all other customers.

Demand that your matchback vendor provide you with visibility into this phenomenon.

Five Customer Types: Migration

Obviously, I cannot share actual customer data with you.

But I can give you a few hints about how to look at these relationships.

Organic Customers: One sure way to ruin the organic customer relationship is to run free shipping promotions. The customer was going to buy anyway, and then we willingly throw away gross margin dollars. I'm not saying free shipping is bad --- it is the putting it on / pulling it off deal that is bad. Also, organic customers are willing to use algorithms --- this is why calculation of the Net Google Score is so important.

Algorithm Customers: Pay careful attention to these customers. If the customer does not use a key code on a future order, don't assume that any catalog drove the order. This is one of the places where matchback programs can be wrong, costing you profit.

Social Customers: In the limited amount of data I've been able to play with here, these customers are fundamentally different than all other customers we manage.

Advertising Customers: These customers may not migrate to organic or algorithm status ... and that, my friends, is a bad thing. Catalogers say this all the time --- they say they don't get business if they don't mail catalogs. For these brands, the advertising-based customer won't become an organic or algorithmic customer. Hint --- for these brands, developing algorithmic and organic customers needs to be a top priority in 2009.

Begging Customers: Migration analysis is critical here. Does the incentive/promotion customer respond to advertising, or to incentives/promotions? We make so many mistakes here --- sending expensive advertising to these customers, when the customer doesn't care about the advertising --- the customer cares about the incentive attached to the advertising. Find a way to dramatically reduce advertising expense if these customers will not migrate to advertising response.

Best Buy Voluntary Separation

This is a ten page transcript of the Best Buy investor conference call.

The company announced that it is offering voluntary separation to 4,000 salaried employees, nearly every salaried individual. The company says it may not get enough volunteers, requiring involuntary separation. The company also makes the brazen statement (multiple times) that it is "employee-centric", in the midst of communicating the need to fire employees.

And from page three to page ten, the investment community are given the chance to ask any question they wish.

They ask about capex, about inventory management, about gift cards, Rewards Zone, Geek Squad, vendors, gross margins. They ask multiple questions about Circuit City, for goodness sake.

They do not ask one single question about employees, about voluntary separation, or about involuntary separation. And you'd think they would care about how much money would be saved, wouldn't you?

Our system of business harvests people, uses people, exploits people, manipulates people, over-works people, under-pays people, scams people, and demands revenue from people. The system praises those who shed "headcount", then grumbles when "headcount" has no money to spend to fuel capitalism.

Our system of business does not care about people. If it did, would we be knee-deep in The Great Implosion?

Dell And Twitter Revenue: Keeping Perspective

There's no doubt that Dell's $1,000,000 of Twitter revenue is good ... something that points to Twitter as a possible sales channel (from Venturebeat via SmartBrief).

Now for the bad news. Dell generated $63,000,000,000 last year. This means that Twitter sales represent 0.0016% of annual revenue.

Let's say you are as successful as Dell is, but you manage a $50,000,000 business. 0.0016% of $50,000,000 is $794.

Somebody might blast me for this analysis, suggesting that something like 80% of volume is B2B, therefore excluded from Twitter. Let's go with your assumption. Now the comparison results in $4,000 for your average $50,000,000 business.

I am not criticizing marketing via Twitter, nor am I criticizing Dell, who is clearly innovating. About twenty percent of recent visitors to this blog come from Twitter, so I understand how the micro-channel can be used in a beneficial way.

I am simply asking you to carefully study the magnitude of the numbers the media share with us. Be willing to consider any bias in the information, and how that bias benefits those who write the articles.

At Least 30 Multichannel Questions For 2009

Below I list a series of questions that we might consider answering during 2009. Obviously, these aren't the most important questions, they're just questions I'd like for our industry to answer.


If you couldn't send a catalog to an individual who doesn't have a prior relationship with your brand, how would you acquire new customers?

How do traditional off-line marketing strategies interact with paid search, and do we give enough credit to the off-line strategy that caused paid search to happen?

Do we lose something when we try to merge the skills of retail, online, and catalog inventory managers?

Do we lose innovation and creativity when we centralize functions and eliminate silos?

Is the rest of the company able to perform the "ask and answer" function of business intelligence tools, or is this a skill that should remain with specialized individuals?

If you couldn't mail catalogs anymore, what would happen to the soul of your marketing organization?

Does Twitter matter as a marketing tool if the world-wide audience is only 10,000,000 individuals?

If you had the systems to create any KPI/metric you wanted, would you have the political clout to cause change to happen based on what the KPI's/metrics are telling you?

Does Google steer more sales away from your business than you pay Google to generate for you?

If you are a mobile marketer, what is your mobile marketing solution for the individual living in rural Kansas, a person who does not have access to a 3G network, or may not even have cell phone coverage?

When marketers send unsolicited campaigns to you, do you feel like the marketer is having a conversation with you?

When you send unsolicited marketing campaigns to customers, do you feel like you are having a conversation with the customer?

Have you calculated a profit and loss statement for your relationship with your favorite co-op vendor? In other words, have you compared the profit you generate from your relationship with your co-op with the amount you spend pulling names from the co-op, and if so, is the relationship favorable?

How much, in terms of sales per e-mail, would we have to generate before we felt that e-mail marketing was "effective"?

If we don't believe our own test results when we have just 1,000 customers in a test/holdout group, why do we trust a report from "Neptune Research" about multichannel best practices, based on 1,000 respondents who are generally not our customers?

If we stopped executing traditional marketing campaigns (catalog, direct mail, newspaper, television, radio), and we maximized our paid/natural search capabilities, how would we grow our online business?

Will your boss change her mind when you present facts to her that run contrary to her base of knowledge?

If you are a business intelligence, web analytics, or statistical analyst, do you speak a business language your executive team understands?

If you are an executive, do you give your business intelligence, web analytics, or statistical analyst enough information to answer your questions?

Can you identify one individual who you consider to be a multichannel marketing expert? What does this person know that you don't know?

Should you borrow money to take advantage of marketing programs that produce short-term losses that are more than offset by long-term gains?

If customers only buy from us in Fall 2008 when we discount the living daylights out of our merchandise, why do we believe they will be willing to buy from us at full-price in 2009?

When a vendor writes an article that says "leading brands are reaping financial gains by using 'product x'", should the vendor have to provide evidence to back their claim?

When newspapers die, who will you turn to for credible information?

How do you calculate the profitability of each static/dynamic page on your website?

Do online sales increases matter at a multichannel retailer where customers use the website as an information vehicle for driving retail comp store sales increases?

Have you explored some of the amazing technologies that printers are capable of putting into practice?

Have you put together a task force to predict what catalog marketing looks like in 2015, and if so, what does it look like?

Have you put together a task force to predict what e-commerce looks like in 2015, and if so, what does it look like?

Why are retail customers so unlikely to shop via e-commerce?

Why are e-commerce customers so likely to shop retail stores?

Why doesn't anybody in our industry talk about these very real challenges?

Should retail stores do a better job of promoting the e-commerce and website information channel?

Newspaper Home Delivery

Catalogers ... pay close attention to "breaking news" about Detroit newspapers ceasing delivery of newspapers except for Thursday, Friday, and Sunday.

You keep telling me that you won't have a business if you cannot put catalogs in the mail. Well, we're going to get to observe an actual case study soon. Pick an online analytics service (i.e. Quantcast or your personal favorite) and pay close attention to traffic trends, pre/post delivery decision, comparing these businesses with newspapers that continue home delivery. Does home delivery inspire online readership? We're going to find out.