A Winning Combination That Allows Etailer To Optimize Banner Ad and Landing Page Effectiveness.
Recently, a new client approached us to help them optimize their online marketing spend. What they want to know is what banner ads are the most effective at generating profitable leads, what landing pages are best at converting those leads into customers, and what is the best messaging strategy to stimulate repeat purchases. We are talking to a sophisticated etailer who is looking to improve the effectiveness of their marketing effort. To date they have been limited by their ability to track this complex combination of variables: banner ad, landing page, and messaging. This project was amazing because it allowed me to provide the Lead and Sales reporting they are looking for through a simple orchestration of the flow of events and actions between an ecommerce site, Google Analytics and Cakemail. (See Dip into the data pool)
This particular customer
state marketing ecosystem coordinates the sending of 28 different email
communications. There are four customer segments: Prospects; New Customers;
Repeat Customers; VIP Customers. Depending on where the contact is in the marketing process they will receive one of these 28 personalized emails according
to their ongoing behavior (whether they buy or stop buying for a period of time). One interesting feature is that we are using eight versions of the Reminder
email that is sent out when a customer stops buying after a period of time. As
soon as they purchase again a Thank You email is sent and the stops buying
timer is reset. The Reminder emails start up again according to the contact’s
segment and state; however the sequence of emails picks up where it left off,
therefore the contact does not receive the same email twice unless they have
gone through all eight different Reminder emails. The opportunities for testing
are immense!
One of the goals of this ecosystem is to attribute the sale to the last email sent in order to determine the most effective messages for getting contacts to buy. Over time, this information will allow the etailer to improve email content leading to higher sales.
The attribution of the sale to the last email sent is done by the
customer state marketing ecosystem and is reported in near-real time using Google Analytics. The client can view the effectiveness of the marketing
program in terms of the number of sales, total sales and average sales for
specific time periods. This gives them great flexibility to try different email
content strategies without the need to rebuild the ecosystem.
The etailer is also testing out various banner ads and landing pages. They wish to know which combination provides the best results in terms of number of sales, average value of sales, and lifetime customer value. The results are easily reported using a simple Excel Power Pivot table, and the etailer can add new banners and landing pages without having to modify the ecosystem (i.e. Involve IT).
Best of all, the entire ecosystem
took me a total of three days to design, build and test! Once the client had
set up all of their email templates in Cakemail it was a simple process for me
to connect them. Ran one final test and put the ecosystem into production.
The real measure of a marketing automation system to me is how fast the marketer’s solution can be built, how flexible the solution is so that it is easily modifiable, and how agile the solution is in terms of integrated marketing in multi-channel environments.
