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Tag Archives: testing

Online sales can reduce your revenue…

22 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by Malcolm Auld in B2B Marketing, Branding, Customer Service, Digital, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Sales, social selling

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

B2B Marketing, catalogue marketing, online selling, social selling, testing

A couple of years ago my agency created catalogues for an office supplies company – different catalogues for different areas of their business and different types of customers.

They had a catalogue for typical office stationery, another for bulk purchases of products delivered on pallets, and other specialty catalogues. They did some sophisticated testing, with the objective of moving clients to order via their website to reduce the dependence upon the call centre, as it took the majority of the orders. They also believed they’d make more money with online ordering.

The test results revealed some interesting insights. When the company migrated customers to online orders, they lost revenue. The average order size via the website was much less than the average order via the call centre. The reason is simple and one which any salesperson can explain.

down-decline-graph

Online sales reduced average sales value and revenue…

Once the customer was on the phone, the customer service person could upsell via questions and sell even more products than the customer might have bought if they simply went to the website. The customers who did use the website for orders, usually only bought a small number of items.

Another insight they discovered was that most customers had the catalogue with them when they called to order by phone. This gives the customer service person another way to engage with the customer, by referring to the catalogue pages and discussing them together.

Woman reading magazine at coffee shop

customers have the catalogue with them when they call…

The grim discovery was that the move to online ordering had the potential to damage the business and reduce sales. While website sales can possibly cost less to process, the average sale value was less than telephone sales.

The company had to work a delicate balance of telephone and website sales and eventually hit on a strategy of telephone follow-up to online sales. As online orders were received, the outbound telemarketers would call the customer and upsell based on the products in the online order.

This became a productive use of the call centre staff, giving them options for inbound and outbound selling. Customers appreciated the ‘service calls’ and nearly always increased their order value.

virtualStaff365_callCentres_img1

let me help you spend more money…

So don’t believe everything you hear about the marvels of digital disruption – it can damage your business rather than improve it.

The old adage continues to apply – just because you can doesn’t mean you should…

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The rise and fall and rise of email marketing…

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Digital, Direct Marketing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

direct mail, direct marketing, email marketing, social media, testing, viral lite, viral marketing

Never in the history of marketing (although telemarketing runs a close second) has a media been so readily accepted by customers, yet so comprehensively abused by marketers, that within a few years of the media being invented, laws were passed to ban its use.

E-mail

And so it is with email.

Thanks to marketers and digi-scam-merchants abusing the privilege they were given to enter people’s in-boxes, spam laws and security systems now exist to protect consumers against marketing via e-mail and to stop messages reaching in-boxes.

The other big mistake made by marketers was to replace direct mail with email, because it was cheaper for the marketer, rather than because it was what the customers wanted.

The impact of these activities has driven down the open-rates of email messages and in some categories has made the media less effective than it used to be. My company owns an email software service, distributing and tracking millions of emails per annum and we know through our monitoring, that average email open-rates have declined. Only those who are smartly segmenting, constantly testing and multi-stage messaging have maintained or increased open-rates.

So if you moved from mail to email to save money, you’re going to have to move back again and contact customers and prospects using both mail and email if you are to succeed. The best results are achieved when email is integrated with direct mail and other personal media.

Interestingly, when I ask for a show of hands of marketers who want more email in their inbox, nobody raises a digit. Yet when I ask who wants to do more or better email marketing, many volunteer their hands.

Email is still the most popular way of communicating and will continue to be for a while yet. Here’s a table from Mark Garner’s research last year about what Australians do first thing each day.

Australians and email

I opened Australia’s first email marketing agency BuzzMail in the 90’s and wrote the world’s first non-American book on the subject; Email Marketing Made Easy. In the early days we sent Flash files as attachments. I remember a driving competition we created to promote Comm Banks car insurance – huge viral effect. Then streaming video emails appeared that started immediately in your inbox when you opened the message. We launched PlayStation’s online gaming this way, getting a massive increase in registered users as a result of the message ‘going viral’ as they say.

Most viral email is in fact viral-lite – see previous post. To see how to really do a viral campaign, view the Obama message that was sent the week before his original election. It was to encourage people to go to the polls and vote. Click here. It’s way more professional than the digital dross dished up by the dullards during this diabolical election.

Eventually the spammers forced legislation to be created and technology started to block streaming content and now even blocks images.

Despite being used for over 15 years, many marketers still don’t understand how to use email to its fullest potential. Email is not a once-only blast. To make email really perform at its best, don’t just send one email message and assume the job is done. The beauty of email is the ability to track who opens messages and who clicks on links. This allows the marketer to send more relevant follow-up messages to recipients based on their behaviour to the first message. You’d be surprised how many marketers don’t use email this way.

Whenever I send a follow-up message to people who have opened and clicked on a link in the initial message, the follow-up message almost always gets twice the open-rate as the initial one. Try it yourself. This simple tactic works. And it’s one of the reasons email open-rates will rise again, as marketers learn how to use email marketing more professionally.

Wine lovers love mail

Curiously, a number of wine clubs that stopped sending statement inserts and replaced them with email, have now moved back to mail. The reason statement inserts work is because they are tactile – people cannot ignore them when they open their financial statement. Consequently when financial statements moved to email distribution, the associated wine clubs lost business. 

wine glass

And the largest wine club in Australia still receives up to 90% of their orders from e-mail offers, via that digital device – voice over data lines – known as the telephone. People don’t trust that their order has been received unless they talk with a human. Though as time goes by, I suspect this attitude will change as trust in online ordering improves.

Email is a lousy acquisition media, but excellent for retaining customers and reducing attrition. The only way email is effective for acquiring new customers is through referral campaigns, known digitally as viral marketing.

Here’s a simple tip: The “From Line” gets an e-mail opened and the “Subject Line” gets it deleted. People only open messages from people or companies they know – and they only open messages they believe are relevant to their relationship with the sender.

They subconsciously ask themselves:

1. Who is sending this to me? Do I know them? (From Line)

2. What is it about? Is it relevant to me? (Subject Line)

If they know who you are, then you have a chance your message will get opened, but only if the subject line is relevant to their relationship with you. The appearance and design of the email content doesn’t matter if the recipient doesn’t open the message.

One of the other impacts of the protectionist technology that blocks e-mail messages, is that formats have regressed and are far more restricted than they used to be. You can no longer stream video into an in-box direct within an email message – you have to link recipients to landing pages, or stream the content from a link within the message. So the new rule is; the simpler your content, the more likely it will be read.

If for example your email message uses an image as the masthead, it may be working against your open-rate, because recipients can only see an instruction to download the image to view it, or a red x in a box. So they don’t bother opening it. Many marketers now use a colour background and a text headline as their masthead and get higher open-rates as a result. This is because recipients can read the masthead in their preview panel and make a decision without having to download images.

If you’re wondering how often to e-mail your customers, ask yourself two questions:

1. “is this relevant to my relationship with this customer or prospect?”

2. “will it enhance the relationship in a positive way?”

If the answer to (1) is “no” then don’t bother with question (2). If the answer to (1) is “yes” but to (2) is “no” – have second thoughts.

Another way to plan your email marketing is to consider what you like and dislike about using email – you’ll probably find it’s much the same as what your customers value. Go figure.

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DM – the art of losing money in very small amounts…

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Direct Marketing

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Tags

digital marketing, direct marketing, social media, testing

Try as I might, despite asking thousands of marketers in my seminars, I cannot find any fortune tellers or forecasters of the future. None are able to tell in advance how their marketing campaigns will perform.

You can predict the future on the interweb

where are all the fortune tellers?

So I ask them, “why risk losing all your money at your first attempt, when you can lose some of it at the first attempt, to ensure you can make lots of it later, when you run your campaign?”

It makes sense and it’s why you should always test your campaigns before rolling out – to invest in a more profitable future. Unfortunately most marketers don’t test – to the detriment of their bottom line and their brand.

Marketers regularly say they can’t afford to test – but I say you can’t afford not to test. And that’s about where it rests most of the time – a bunch of sayings.

On more occasions than I remember, I’ve been asked if I can advise what a response rate will be to a campaign. But here’s a warning; if someone tells you they can forecast a response rate without having run a test, they are either lying or trying to win your business – or both. And we’ve all met those who claim they can predict your marketing fortune in the online world.

The only way to predict the future is to test. And one of the benefits of online media is the ability to track user behaviour in real time. Everything is measurable. Marketers can watch on dashboards as messages and links are opened and clicked on. They know, for example, within 24 hours of an email campaign being sent, what the open and click-through rates will be for the whole campaign.

I’ve seen split-run subject line tests in email, or layout tests in landing pages, generate response rates of over 1,000% difference between the best and worst results. Wouldn’t you like to have that knowledge before rolling out your campaign?

Testing means marketers can predict with confidence how a campaign will perform based on the results. And they can roll-out the campaign immediately the results are known.

Offline tests take longer to assess results, although DRTV generates immediate responses. I once wrote a series of scripts for a 90 second DRTVC for an online bank. We recorded ads and tested the scripts to determine the best performing copy (sorry, content) and then we did a split-run test by gender. That is, the same script was recorded using male talent and female talent. Then both were tested against the daytime TV audience.

Any thoughts on which gender worked best for financial service advice among daytime TV viewers? The male talent dominated the results – and BTW it had nothing to do with my acting ability. It was the copy (sorry, content) that did the work.

If a test can reveal that a particular offer or execution generates a specific result to a sample of the market, then it is reasonable to expect that same offer to the remainder of the audience in the same media, will generate a similar response. 

The incremental cost in a test for additional creative, or another media execution, or a different offer, will nearly always pay off with the knowledge you gain and the improvements in your bottom line. 

After all, why should you guess when you can know?

Test

Then of course when you know what works you can reduce your marketing budget to get the same results as previous, or get better results for the same spend – but that’s another blog:)

And that’s why direct marketing is the art of losing money in very small amounts…so you can make it in large amounts.*

(*Over a long lunch that became dinner, Drayton Bird and I created this alternate definition of direct marketing)

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