The eCircle conference gave me a chance to talk about recent communications from big brands as I moved into a new house last month. I highlighted some examples of emails from LoveFilm, British Gas and Sky, and followed the customer journey from the email through to the website.

Two things are noticeable – first, with the ever improving email platforms now in use, companies are getting to grips with creating relevant, timely and engaging emails. Second, these emails rarely live up to their promise once you click through.

I showed an Aer Lingus email, nicely put together and full of useful info and links just four or five days before I was due to fly with them. A good example of picking up a relationship with an ongoing dialogue that immediately connects you to a conversation with the brand. My expectations were indeed raised, especially as they used my name, my reference, they seemed to be talking to me.
Sadly, clicking through brought me to a top level generic homepage. Not only did they not remember me, but they even advertised a fare to where I was going at a price lower than I had paid!

The message for brands is, if your departmental structure, systems, etc. don’t really support this sort of personalised interaction, then don’t set the expectation that you can.

Mixed signals this week on whether companies are taking site conversion rates as seriously as they might.

Marketing budgets continue to grow, IT spend on platforms continues to grow and spend on Web Analytics internal staff continues to grow (econsultancy Online Measurement Report, published yesterday).

All good signs.  On the flip side, different messages came through at an event in London yesterday (Figaro Digital Analyse, Optimise, Realise).  Read more »

Digital marketing spend continues apace. Natural search, paid search, display, email, all continue to enjoy big budgets as companies try to drive online business. Alongside this, big projects are run to build websites to handle arrivals and turn them into buyers. 

Yet any web user will tell you that most sites are a poor experience for the prospective customer. Typical moans are difficulty in finding what you want, confusing navigation, and that it is simply not easy. Despite this, paltry sums are spent on making sure that sites are easy to use and deliver completed sales.

How is this so? Read more »

Multivariate testing of websites has come to the fore amongst many companies over the last six months, with many digital teams doing multivariate testing to see which different version of website pages perform best. Powerful stuff and clearly a great way to tease out performance improvements. But where do the different pages emerge from?

There’s a whole process of audience research, persona and scenario creation, customer journey analysis et al before you come up with a site design that is likely to serve your customers well and deliver good conversion rates. And with existing sites, customer experience testing laid over web traffic analytics gives a powerful “why” over the “what” of the analytics.

The danger with multivariate tools is that much of this is forgotten – if it’s easy to create different treatments and see which is best, why not just try all sorts. Play with the copy, change the colours, and see which works best.

This is akin to lining up your cannon, firing out two random shells and then celebrating the news that one was closer to the target than the other. You could do this for years without getting near your target. Better to remember the basic disciplines of website success – understand your target audience, the journeys they take from interest to sale, and how they experience your brand offering online. Get the basic offering right, then use multivariate testing to tweak the offering for continuous improvement.

There is a valuable role for multivariate testing, but uninformed site design is not it.

The AOP conference today had plenty of speakers addressing the likely move from Cost Per Thousand (CPM) models towards more Cost Per Engagement (CPE). On the face of it, this is a welcome shift. It is in line with the increasing demand for media spend to be clearly associated with performance – with achieving the objective of the campaign. P&G is leading the way, with recent briefs offering to pay media owners more for delivering ”engaged users”. (NMA 17 Sept 09)

So far so good.

But when advertisers place media budget with an agency, the agency control is only in delivering the best possible marketing effort, driving volumes of qualified prospects to the website. After that, it is the responsibility of the website to convert the prospect into a sale, be that a purchase, a download or subscribing to a newsletter. And that is in the hands of the website owner, not the marketers.

If the CPE model is to work, advertisers must address the Sale, not just the Marketing. And that means a shift in mindset – when consumers are confident that clicking on an ad will take them to a place that is a good experience, engaging, easy to use, maybe we’ll see clickthrough rates finally start to rise again.

Meanwhile, CPE pits Marketing against Sales and that is not a recipe for driving performance.

Most consumers (and many digital industry workers) are surprisingly unaware of the scale of commercial effort trying to track where they go online. So far the vast amount of news, information and services online has been funded by advertising – to be successful, this relies on a battery of tracking technology logging what you see and where you go.

All this tracking effort has been racked up a notch with the advent of behaviourally targeted online advertising. This week a Federal Judge in Seattle ruled that IP addresses are not personal information based on the premise that the IP address identifies the computer not the person.  Not so the EU Commission, who decreed that an IP address is “personal information” and have instructed search engines to “expunge users IP addresses as soon as possible.”  IP tracking is already used for tracking Internet behaviour by Google as well as AudienceScience (formerly Revenue Science) who provide behavioural targeting for several large UK media publishing groups.

The UK has historically always been more relaxed and passive about privacy matters.  As a result we have surveillance cameras everywhere we go. But in Europe the pressure for action is already greater than in either the UK or the US.  The European Commission is investigating the UK Government’s role in behavioural targeting tests by BT and Phorm in 2006.  In the US, a group of over 5,000 companies that includes Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Disney has just created a report called “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising,” attempting to head off any aggressive Federal regulation there.

There is clearly consumer confusion at the very idea of privacy – millions have Nectar and Tesco Clubcards, but there has been resistance to the National ID scheme. So for behavioural targeting, what do we need to beware of if we are not be spooked by it? Understanding behaviour is part of the story, but when it is used inappropriately or in a way which doesn’t add value to the message, yet exposes the machinery behind the ad, we get the worst of both worlds. If we understand properly both the consumer needs and the context in which the ad is displayed, then we can give consumers real value (or at least a perception of value) without invading their space.

This post is also published as  Guest Comment in this months The Leveller magazine, published by i-level

http://tinyurl.com/theleveller

The Generator Seminar last week was a look at Online Retail and the current trends. As part of the presentation shoppers on Oxford Street were asked, “What is the biggest thing that stops you buying stuff online?”. The biggest issue continues to be Delivery Costs.

At first glance this is a bit depressing – how do you address an issue that isn’t fully under your control..? However, this isn’t the whole story – a proper analysis of the language shoppers use shows a different picture – not so much that Delivery Cost is a barrier, more that it annoys shoppers. There’s plenty we can do about this…

In many sites the delivery costs are hidden until the very last stage of payment. In other cases the default method of delivery is not the cheapest and the shopper has to (a) notice this, and (b) specifically choose a cheaper method if they want the cheapest deal.

One of the other top barriers was that of Trust in a site – not exactly unrelated – if we behave in a trustworthy manner, be upfront with our pricing and the options available, then even the Cost of Delivery can be made less annoying, even if it won’t go away completely….