February 29, 2008

Unique views on the marketing world on leap day.

From E-Tailing's annual mystery shopping study: Very few sites (11%) had all of their 'must have' features. Surprise, the functions are all about the customer experience: Features on the site itself like search; customer service before, during and after the sale; and order fulfillment/tracking. For many improvement can come from building out the shopping experience as opposed to driving more traffic. If your abandonment rate is high then fix the experience rather than find new people to disappoint.
According to a CMO Council survey while total budgets are flat or growing slowly (70% said flat or less than 5%) there are shifts in focus. UP: revenue and demand-based solutions, customer-facing and response generation like trade shows, events and online. DOWN: marketing dashboards, 'advertising and PR'. Agency turnover was highest amount advertising, web-design, and pr firms; it was lowest among special markets, demand generation, hosted services.
Ultimately CPA (cost per action) will become the dominant pricing model. "I'll only pay if people do what I need them to do." Aaron Goldman wrote on SearchInsider the two trends that lead to this conclusion. First, industry consolidation means marketers will have fewer choices and will insist on paying on their objectives. Second, transparency forces everyone to play poker with their cards turned upwards.
From the 'listen then buy' category: CBS is using the recently acquired Last.FM to allow users to listen to streaming songs for up to three times then routes the listener to someplace to buy the song. Next up (if not there already) is a widget that puts a streaming song in my wish list and iTunes with 'one-click'.
From the times, they are a changing: Vertis reports the role of various marketing vehicles on the purchase decision. Advertising Inserts: 27% of adults surveyed rely on inserts for information, up from 19% ten years ago. TV: 8% down from 22% in 1998. And women are heavily involved in technology/consumer electronic purchases.
All leads are not 'sales ready.' In most categories the proportion of people actively in 'buy mode' is probably significantly less than 1 in 10. While those submitting information (leads) are probably more interested in the product or service it is unlikely the odds get any better than 1 in 4 is going to buy today. In between the totally disqualified and the ready to buy are a group of people who need to be nurtured, and that takes time.