Electronic Retailer - June 2011 - 48

MANAGING AN ORDER FROM START TO FINISH

In addition, marketers are seeing a growing need for “touch points” in television and radio advertising. While it used to be that a commercial on television could flash a URL or phone number and get a response, now viewers aren’t even bothering to remember this information and instead are going to a search engine to find the information they need. Therefore, campaigns must be set up to take advantage of television awareness using the two or three bits of information that resonate with the viewer. According to Anthony Medico, president of E+M Interactive, marketing clients need to assess how television is affecting online traffic. Basically, “manage media back down to the spot level,” he says. Today, as many as 40 to 50 percent of E+M’s orders have been placed online. While it may take time and money to change the script for a telemarketer, tweaks to an online campaign can be almost instant and less costly. “We are able to do three or four iterations on the back end, and so we are able to find which offer or version creates the highest revenue per order,” Medico says. Yet another trend is in the way that the media efficiency ratio is being used. According to OrderMotion’s Fahey, the use of MER for direct response has historically been used to gauge the success of a campaign. Most media agencies calculate MER by comparing the cost of the media to the total dollars of orders taken at the call center. But Fahey believes that this approach misses the potentially enormous impact of cancels, payment issues, returns and the success or failure of continuity offers. “With the systems available today, this post-order data can easily be used to extend the preliminary MER to create a ‘total MER’,” he adds. “Total MER is the true indicator of the success of campaigns.” Plus, this analysis can save marketers the disappointment associated with product returns. Simultaneously, it allows marketers to see campaigns that have bad preliminary numbers turn into very profitable programs because of the success of the back-end continuity. 48

Down the Road
Many marketers are predicting the increasing use of “self-service” technology in the near future. Customers want ways to get information immediately through whatever channel they prefer. Plus, if they want to make changes to an order, they want a system in place to make it happen easily. Self-service has benefits for clients as well, including cutting down on costs. Also just emerging is the use of mobile devices to view campaigns and place orders. Marketers need to be ready for this shift. Browsers must be set up to be viewed on smartphones and iPads, and ordering through these devices needs to be streamlined. “If you’re spending millions in television media, you don’t want to overlook the fact that your online presence needs to be set up correctly,” Medico says. He adds that if the landing page is set up correctly, a company should be able to get a 15 percent conversion rate when a person sees the product on a mobile device. Shopatron is feeling the push to mobile. The company has migrated all

of its stores over to mobile-ready web systems. “Our system recognizes that an order is being made on an iPhone and streamlines the mobile interface so Flash or big images are left out and the site works on a small screen,” Grondin said. The future also holds new demands for even more immediacy. Already, customers are having orders shipped within hours. Mobile both adds to and helps with that sense of urgency. But, Grodin says, “It puts a strain on systems. The information has to move quickly and be available anytime and anywhere.” The day is coming when that immediacy will be required for reporting analytics as well. It used to be that once a day or even once an hour was sufficient. Now clients want reports in real time. “Clients want to see how much they are spending, how many orders are coming in and what the ROI is immediately,” LookSmart’s Campbell says. “It’s very helpful for advertisers to know where to move their spends around, and it makes it easier when they go to make changes to their campaigns.”

What’s New, Technologically Speaking
Most fulfillment and online analytics and order-management companies have a core management system that was built specifically for the company and tailored for direct response marketing. While GSI’s technology has existed for many years, Kris Johnson says that today it’s cleaner and easier for clients to manage and read. “Instead of digging through a data pile, we can pinpoint easy-to-use data,” he says. “Plus, since there is always a new way to sell, such as mobile on the horizon, order-management companies will have to keep their technology advanced enough for those new technologies.” Digital Element also has its own system capable of collecting geo-location and IP Intelligence data to manage its online and brick-and-mortar retail customers. The process can range from identifying a site visitor’s location in real time and pre-populating the city/state/ZIP code fields to highlighting nearby brick-andmortar locations, pre-calculating shipping costs for orders based on user location, and serving language and currency-specific content for international site visitors. According to Marty Fahey of OrderMotion, the agency’s technology delivers a solution over the web so that direct response and e-commerce agencies do not have to invest in on-site technology or internal IT staffs. The latest technology is accessible to most clients and has opened the channels for electronic marketers to offer new distribution avenues, such as affiliates and mobile. In response to the trend, OrderMotion created an iPhone application called MobileMotion. “MobileMotion allows customers to quickly access and view real-time order information from their iPhones and respond accordingly,” Fahey says.

electronicRETAILER | June 2011

Electronic Retailer - June 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Electronic Retailer - June 2011