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Let's take a look at social media in 2010: We continually hear about brands that have a half-million or million Facebook fans. Well, that’s wonderful. That’s validation that social media provides a channel for consumers to interact with a brand. It isn’t, however, validation that social media creates orders.
When you evaluate customer spend on an incremental basis, you quickly find that new channels provide little incremental value in the early stages of development. What happens is that brand loyalty counts for so much more than does the excitement of new channels.
Focus on the data points that directly lead to profit as your top priority. Focus on customer actions as your second priority. Everything after that contributes much less value.
Should my marketing team offer personalized marketing materials to customers, based on how far the customer lives from a store?
My boss thinks that free shipping and 20 percent off promotions are the key to competing with brands online. My team thinks we're giving our business away for free. Who's right?
Dear Dr. pROfIt: My CEO thinks we’re failing with our multichannel initiatives. We recently ran a report that showed that 15 percent of
There are very simple methods for evaluating file strength. Maybe the easiest is to grade your customers.
New purchase channels can achieve success if marketing and merchandising are aligned to the interests of customers.
Loyalty programs are frequently evaluated on the basis of biased metrics, which lead companies to believe that the programs are more effective than they really are.
How do I convince my boss that affiliate marketing is necessary and important, providing a significant return on investment?
The beauty of this process is that you can change new customer assumptions, customer retention assumptions and/or spend per customer assumptions to see what impact the assumptions have on the future of your business. You can identify a path that leads you to the sales figures that management is looking for.
Q: "Are there any best practices for multichannel retailers around how to allocate cross-channel sales and, in conjunction, budget?" — Steve Cates, vice president of multichannel marketing at Carrot-Top Industries
Dear Dr. pROfIt: My CEO recently asked me to run an analysis of our dollars per channel metric, one that measures how much our customer
It turns out that consumers don’t necessarily buy more merchandise just because you offer them more merchandise. Consumers tend to have a “budget,” if you will. In other words, customers are only capable of spending so much on any family of merchandise categories, regardless of how many items or SKUs you choose to offer.
Holidays have a way of chopping off the sales tail. Often, you'll see sales increases early in the week, only to see those sales rapidly decline in the days leading up to the holiday. Sales seldom rebound in the days following a holiday. Try creating a new event to generate interest, as holidays cause customers to shift focus from the old event to the holiday.
