Spring Cleaning For Your Online Marketing Campaign

April 2, 2009 | By Marc Porcelli | No Comments »

With warmer weather hitting most parts of the country, I have been spending my time cleaning out the garage and raking away leaves from the fall and winter. I even put out the patio chairs and umbrella on the deck (only to have snow flurries the next day!)  Spring reminds us of renewal and a time to enjoy the outdoors. As a result, I could not help but draw a parallel between spring cleaning and online marketing. Now is a great time to review and renew your campaigns and to improve upon them.

Here are a few considerations:
•    Creative improvement/relevance
•    Metric analysis
•    Landing page optimization (beyond A/B testing)
•    Predictive modeling (taking into account seasonality changes)
•    Distribution
•    Retention

Creative improvement and relevance

Creative can always be improved, which could increase CTR rates. There is always a stronger call to action or a different color or design that will provide lift. Try out different variations of what has worked, the most subtle changes sometime can provide significant difference.  Relevance can also play a key role; perhaps some mention of “spring” in the creative.  Perhaps a Mother’s Day theme, baseball or even football theme (this depends largely on your product).
Beyond the actual creative, you should also focus on frequency capping, targeting and hybrid pricing (some via CPM while some on a CPA). Many sites and networks are also offering hyper-targeting or segments of users based on their habits and preferences.

Metric analysis

How are users coming in through “X” buy comparing to users coming in through “Y” buy? Do the users that come in through “X” have a different LTV versus users coming in through “Y”? For subscription services how can churn rates be reduced? For retail sits, how can shopping cart value be increased? How can users be enticed to come back? These are all questions that often times can be answered through metrics and digging deeper into the numbers.

Landing page optimization

It is one thing to create a landing page, but a whole other to do it right. Simply creating a landing page and making it live does NOT cut it. You need to test the page first with some A/B testing, but you need to go deeper. Multivarient testing is the easiest way to save money, but it is very rarely done. Do yourself a favor and invest in the little bit of time it takes to set this up properly.

Predictive modeling

Most organizations have metrics that they know a user needs to come in around. But how many organizations have predictive models that allow for them to project what a user will be worth? Having some predictive models in place will not only give you a strong indicator of LTV, but it can also give you a significant competitive advantage.

Distribution

An offer or service is nothing if you can not reach consumers. Work with reputable organizations to assist you with your distribution needs. There are a few organizations out there that can really help you with your search, email, web and banner distribution. Walk before you run when working with new partners and it will greatly pay off.

Retention

Now that you have the user through a subscription or sale, how do you retain them? Most organization spend a very small fraction on retention efforts. Users that have already converted are viewed as “on their way out”. Depending on the business model, there are some key ways to retain users. A few examples are offering a discount, free shipping and discount based on (for example) “six months for the price of twelve”.

Each of these topics could be a book! The idea of this posting is to get you to think about what you can do to improve your online business. What better way than to save money during trying times? Through re-examining your current efforts, you will be able to make small changes here and there which will have positive results.

Share
Related Posts:
Tagged: 
Category: Creatives, Marketing Strategy

RSS feed | Trackback URI

Comments »

No comments yet.

Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.