30% Growth For Online Retailer By Mapping Customer Decisions

 By Mark A Carbone, Co-Editor, CaseStudiesOnline.com 

 A large online retailer who many of us buy from on a regular basis sells thousands of products online in dozens of categories.  They noticed a big drop in conversion rates and revenue per client and didn’t know why.

They went to McKinsey & Company for help, who did a 20,000 person study on consumer behavior and how selling and marketing to consumers has changed.  They identified where efforts should be directed to yield the highest return on marketing efforts.  Click here to read a great brief about the study – “The Consumer Decision Journey.”

Key Findings

  • They dug deep into existing online analytics to study the correlation between purchases and quantity of product per category
  • They used segmentation to calculate likelihood that customers in each category would “cross the aisle” and buy something in another category
  • After digging into the data, they found the lifetime value of a toy buyer increased greatly when they bought in other categories
  • Conversely, consumers who bought a lot of pet products did not buy frequently in other categories
  • After studying their consumer decision journeys they developed cross-selling and category penetration techniques to grow the lifetime value per customer
  • 6 months into this project yielded a jump of 25% in email conversions, 60% increase in on-site conversions, increase in overall sales of 20% and and overall ROI of 30%.

Click here to read full case study

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Yahoo! Movies Is On A Mission – Monetize 24 Million Users

By Mark A Carbone, Co-Editor, CaseStudiesOnline.com

Yahoo! Movies, a division of Yahoo! wanted to get a bigger piece of the multi-billion dollar movie going pie by the summer of 2012 through their Facebook page.  Their goal is to become the source for movie goers who love to research, be in the “know,” get VIP passes to early showings, and communicate with other movie aficionados.

They get 24 million visitors on their main website but lack that kind of traffic on Facebook where they see untapped potential to grow their brand.

Joint Venture

Their campaign strategy was a joint effort with their offline partner, Regal Cinemas, who put up banners in theaters promoting the Yahoo! brand along with a QR code pointing to an offer most movie goers couldn’t refuse – free popcorn.  People who did a social check-in via their Smart phones and liked the page got the popcorn.  Offer applied online also.  They would just redeem the popcorn when they arrived at the theater.

 The Results From Campaign

  • 1.2 million new Likes on their Facebook page
  • 200,000 Check-ins
  • 1.4 Million minutes spent on Yahoo! Movies Website
  • $1,000,000 of popcorn given away

Let’s Test Their Million Dollar Spend

They say their long-term goal is not about the “liking” it’s about building an audience of repeat visitors who will engage and make Yahoo! Movies their online source.

The great part about case studies like this is that you and I can take a peek behind the curtain and see if this is hype or really working. Below are the objectives/goals they hope to achieve now since the campaign began a few months ago. I encourage you to go to their Facebook page and see if the goals below are being lived out.

How Yahoo! Measured Success

  1. Target a Season – focus on summer movie season
  2. Hit Fans From All Angles – Reach fans online and offline
  3. Relevant – Reward movie goers and capture “Likes” in return for continued activity on their Facebook page
  4. Connect More – Interact with more movie fans via their website and Facebook page
  5. Become The Movie Source – provide great content to keep fans coming back to their page regularly

My Take

I would question their last two goals – connecting and becoming the source. Out of the 2.15 million fans, they are not averaging the comments and interaction I would expect to consider this successful. It’s about amazing content and some of their biggest days of activity are based on movie blockbuster debuts or contests/giveaways they may be doing in a certain month. Their ratio of commenting back to people is very low and not that of a Sage archetype or the “in the know” type of a person I would expect running the page.

To view the full case study on SlideShare - go here.  What do your think?  Was it successful?

 

Social Media Marketing: Trust Your Data, Not Your Gut

The biggest flaw we have in launching our social media campaigns is that we, my friend, are human.

We tend to trust our gut more than we should. We get emotionally attached to advertisements, creative, or even colours, despite the numbers showing you that a particular campaign will underperform.

If we were buying a car, that might be a different thing. Emotions count. But this is social marketing, after all.

Should we not use more non-quantifiable metrics like “it just feels right” in these social spaces?

Not if you take the advice contained in MarketingSherpa’s Marketing Wisdom for 2010 report, just released today. The report contains 70 tips drawn from the research firm’s customers and readers. Inside the report, this tip from Amy Bills of Bulldog Solutions.

“This year, we executed a few message tests in which the results were different than we expected, and had to remind ourselves firmly of what one of our copywriters calls the “essential mindset for testing”: Pour your heart and soul into the planning, then be prepared to let go.

It’s so easy to become wedded to your testing theory, and that can make it difficult to accept results that point in the other direction.

Among the testing surprises this year were a subject line test that showed a higher conversion rate on a less specific subject line (our theory was that the more specific line would convert better) and a test regarding incentive offers that showed “small to all” really is a better play (we’d had an alternate theory) in this particular case.”

The Marketing Wisdom for 2010 report is MarketingSherpa’s eighth annual edition. It’s usually sold for $129, but is available for free download if you’re willing to cough up your email address.

Have you ever made the mistake of trusting your gut in planning a social media marketing campaign? What happened?

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