Are online and offline retail typically separate silos? We look at how technology is allowing retailers to create a seamless customer journey and achieve true integration, to drive sales.
The customer journey is a term that is bandied about by marketers continually, and often both the digital and offline function in any retail marketing department will have, at some point in time, conducted a customer journey. Once the customer journey process is completed the conclusions are often not as straightforward or simplistic as one would think. For example - a customer is looking to purchase tights, prompted by a bus ad. She then decides to do some research online, clicks on a few sites during her working hours, but doesn’t actually purchase.
Two days later she remembers seeing a fine collection of tights in an article in Glamour magazine, from www.mytights.com. She googles over lunch again, clicks onto an affiliate link that offers a discount & makes the purchase. What actually was the key driver or touch point that influenced the final decision and consequently where should the retailer’s money be invested? Offline or online,PR or advertising? How seamless is the customer journey and how can she be helped on her way?
What is integrated marketing? Re-known online marketing resource website about.com defines it as ‘a management concept that is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation.’
So if brands really want to deliver truly integrated activity they need to consider how their marketing functions are structured. However, the top five retailers’ marketing teams will be divided by function (brand manager and digital manager) and not by customer segment/usage or even service. The danger with this approach is that offline and online still exist separately, with different objectives, different skill sets and different metrics. But what is the solution? A radical shake-up of departmental structure & mindset? A truly multi-skilled marketer with a ‘customer centric/ ‘data drive’ agenda? Surely that would be some kind of marketing utopia?
In reality, the solution to integration of the offline and online world for retailers is being best enabled by technical developments online. For example at Webgains we have the ‘voucher management tool’. The voucher tool offers the opportunity for offline marketing to be tracked online. Because we don’t need the cookie data for exclusive vouchers, if a customer uses online the code they saw being advertised offline, retail advertisers’ affiliates will earn the commission.
There are also some innovative affiliates who are looking at ways in which online can capitalise on offline opportunities e.g. the print marketing company Hive (see consumer site. http://www.pukkastuff.co.uk/ and http://www.coinks.co.uk/ ) It is a packaging and print co that is developing packaging for big brands offline that drives consumers online with discounts and offers, using affiliate tracking to measure the cost per acquisition. This could be a real online breakthrough for FMCG retailers, who rely heavily on packaging in the marketing mix and will now be able to leverage a call to action online.
In another example, a regional newspaper is offering spare advertising inventory to merchants online with an affiliate programme, using the affiliate model with discount codes etc. The innovative companies are the ones developing these kinds of integration opportunities.
An ongoing area of discussion and curiosity amongst offline and online marketers have been how to integrate and commericialise video online.? Is there an opportunity? Research by US company Dynamic Logic states that, ‘76% of UK internet users have watched video clips online’ and eMarketer goes further to support this by stating that ,‘In May 2008, 3.6 Bn videos watched online’ and, ‘ Online video advertising spend estimated at £700m annually…and growing’. So combine the powerful creative & audio appeal of TV with the interactive and trackability and you have a marketers dream. Brands such as Nike and Littlewoods have already worked with video experts Coull to monetise TV ads for the affiliate marketing channel. These videos were existing ads customised for the web with links to products that online consumers could then buy from their e-commerce websites. In the future if this becomes standard both the offline and online creatives will need to sit down at the early stages of creative briefing so that channel integration is ensured.
We are also seeing more and more retail merchants exploiting pay per call technology. We just have to see some of the ROI figures to see why – click to call services can increase online revenues by as much as 45% and website abandonment can be reduced by 24%. Further, shopping cart abandonment can be reduced by 10% to 45% with click to call services, ( Meta Group). BUPA International is one example of a company that says nearly 40% of "Call Me" customers make a purchase: the highest conversion rate of any form of communication used by it.
For me this works, because what you are doing is giving consumers more choice, not forcing them to take a certain buying route. My husband loves to shop/ research online for holidays but he always calls the phone number on the website to make the purchase. I asked him why, he then told me that if things go wrong he wants to make sure he has someone to shout at! I wonder how even some forms of online chat can be commericialised, such as www.liveperson.com with the objective of personalising the web somewhat and returning to the immediacy of a high-street shopping experience.
In summary, seamless integration for retailers & brands is really about the ability to walk in the customer’s shoes with a common sense approach. There are now obvious routes for the retailer who wants to capitalise on innovations to enable better customer marketing (both online and offline), but I would also suggest that there needs to be some real soul searching as to how far retail marketers are really willing to go to make this happen? Maybe the current economic climate will force their hands…
Author: Sheema Luca, International Marketing Director, Webgains