Are marketers breaking the sales funnel?

Carolyn Gardner — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:02:56 +0000

For those of you who read DM News, you’ll know they publish a variety of opinion editorial pieces. In this week’s batch, there’s one I wrote and the topic relates to something I want you to weigh in on – it’s called “Keep sales funnel top-of-mind“. And it all ties into the Shop.org’s State of Retailing Online report for 2008 where it reports that online retailers allocate 53% of their marketing dollars to online customer acquisition – driving traffic to a web site or landing page. But when it comes to online customer retention, the marketing spend drops to 21%. This makes one wonder if any effort to engage and convert customers must come out of the remaining 26% of budget??? If that’s the case, we’ve got a big problem in my opinion.

Read the piece and share your comments and thoughts. Is this disproportionate spend and lack of respect for the sales funnel alarmingly short-sighted or is it acceptable?

PS – Speaking of shop.org, Sitebrand will be exhibiting at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas. It’s happening Sept 15-17 and we’ll be at booth 335. If you’re planning to go, let me know as it’s always a pleasure to meet people face-to-face!

Creating an in-store experience — online

Carolyn Gardner — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:27:32 +0000

Sitebrand recently published another customer case study and it’s featuring Wholesale Tool – a multichannel retailer headquartered in Michigan. Like the name implies, Wholesale Tool provides a full supply of name brands and quality import tools for consumers and industry.Before launching their website in 1999, they based their business on 7 retail stores strategically located across the US. As well, they generated sales via an impressive mail catalog with over 50,000 items.

In order to better optimize the web site potential, Wholesale Tool turned to Sitebrand. In addition to the goal of increasing conversion online, Wholesale Tool was also very interested in driving traffic to their seven physical store locations. In addition to finding success using personalization for first time visitor segments, lost shoppers and cart abandonment to name a few, Wholesale Tool takes advantage of geo-segmentation opportunities. Before I get into that, let me show you a screen shot of a Sitebrand powered first time visitor experience. The first time messaging is populating a pre-determined smart content area of the web site – just under the main top banner, under search and in bright yellow…

Wholesale Tool First Time Visitor

By recognizing visitors and meeting expectations that relate to the ones we’ve all come to expect through the classic in-store experience, let’s look at what Wholesale Tool has done with geo-targeting. Using “city as a triggering rule (i.e. the seven cities with brick and mortar stores), Sitebrand is able to populate this smart content space using geo-specific messaging like below:

Charlotte Geo

Prior to serving these campaigns, Wholesale Tool was getting lots of comments (on the website) from people saying they didn’t know there was a store near them. After implementing these geo-campaigns, they immediately saw these types of comments drop…

Being the voice to help and guide the online customer to some level of engagement and conversion…that’s what web personalization is all about.

For all the scoop, read the full Wholesale Tool case study which is part of Sitebrand’s ever-expanding library of case studies. DMNews picked this story up as well = check it out!

Persuasive e-Marketing » DMNews

Are marketers breaking the sales funnel?

Creating an in-store experience — online