Electronic Retailer - June 2012 - 30

DRTV’s New Best Practices

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While the basic elements of a profitable DRTV campaign remain the same, marketers who capitalize on the industry’s new best practices, including online and social media, could reach a new level of success.
million U.S. consumers will make an online purchase in 2012. On average, more than 50 percent of orders on a direct response campaign will come through the web, says Tony Besasie, president of Cannella Response Television, LLC. “TV drives that consumer to buy, so you still need TV to drive the audience and persuade them to take action, but how they’re making the transaction is changing,” he says. “What we’re seeing is marketers who are succeeding are those who are paying attention to the web.” While the web gives DRTV advertisers a new platform on which to engage the consumer, there needs to be a level of continuity between what’s on TV and what’s online. When viewers see an ad on TV, they should be able to go to that website and see the same message points and offer. “Your site doesn’t have to be an exact mirror of your infomercial, but the information there needs to support what the viewer’s just seen on TV,” Besasie adds. “Online can add greater dimension to the user experience, and it’s easy to do. We’ve seen campaigns have great success with customer reviews. These provide a level of authenticity and create a connection between online and television.” Dick Wechsler, president and CEO of Lockard & Wechsler Direct, recommends taking all costs into consideration when trying to understand the return on investment of adding online to any DRTV campaign. Online has become a major source of order generation and fulfillment,” says Wechsler. “In a DRTV campaign, the internet side of it is not necessarily a separate marketing channel – it’s a separate fulfillment channel.” He says order volume is what comes from online, so it’s critical to integrate that into the overall results, as well as the overall cost of the campaign. “There are real costs – paid search and transactions fees, for example,” Wechsler says. “You have to look at it as a whole and ensure the costs of online marketing are added to your traditional costs to understand your real ROI.” However, he says the bottom line is that behavior online is totally different from the way people react to TV and the phone, that’s why consistent monitoring is key to understanding any meaningful movement that you can use to base intelligent decisions about your DRTV campaign. “There’s a predictive curve to how people use the web, and you can lay that over TV usage, but you’ll find no relationship,” he says. “Buying online is a considered action, not an impulse. We’re never going to change that or understand it, but it’s still important to track the impact of TV on online in order to fully appreciate the value.”

BY SARAH SAIN

A successful direct response campaign can sell your product or service, increase customer loyalty, build your subscription base and generate leads. But what does it take to make your campaign a success? Traditionally, a winning DRTV campaign needed to meet all the basic requirements: a unique product, compelling creative and a call-to-action that could not be missed. But in today’s world, tech-savvy, highly educated consumers aren’t always looking to “Order now!” The DRTV world is changing at light speed, says Monica C. Smith, CEO of Marketsmith, Inc. “The rise of glass house transparency has now come to the industry,” she says. “Consumers are more educated and more plugged into better ways to buy. Impulse selling is no longer enough.” Electronic Retailer recently talked with industry experts about the new DRTV best practices that will enable direct response marketers to increase profitability in a modern advertising world.

Engage with Viewers Online
Today’s consumers are going online to research, review and buy products and services more than ever before. More than seven out of 10 internet users are online buyers, according to eMarketer, which estimated that more than 154

electronicRETAILER | June 2012

Electronic Retailer - June 2012

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