Guest comment: Maximise digital direct opportunities in the downturn

In the current economic climate marketers are under increasing pressure to tightly manage their budgets, and experience tells us that in a downturn advertising takes a knock with marketers taking shelter in direct marketing to guarantee campaign performance and management. What's different this time around though is that marketers now understand the accountability of online and digital direct marketing should be the lead media they invest in to maximise the return on their investment.

But just putting budget into digital media doesn't guarantee success. Here are ten key ways you can maximise the results from your digital direct marketing campaigns:

1. Site Tracking: If you don't have tracking on your site, make sure you implement it. Google Analytics or Index Tools are good starting tools – and they're free! More, advanced businesses might want to look at more sophisticated tools such as WebTrends, Omniture or Nedstat, which offer greater customisation - at a cost. Then you need to make sure you're tracking goals [e.g. sales] and goal paths to understand drop offs in conversion between arrival and sale. With Google Analytics you also have the option to share [anonymous] data with other parties to help you compare your site performance vs. others in the marketplace.

2. Advertising Tracking: This is slightly different to website tracking. Many of the website tracking companies are trying to get into advertising tracking, but aren't totally geared up to delivering holistic tracking across multiple channels, including display advertising. If you want to run, or are running multi-channel campaigns, you need to ensure that you're working with an adserver. At Cheeze we work with DoubleClick, the world's leading adserver, which allows us to track and achieve the maximum amount of actions and information, including Exposure2conversion, which is the latest insight into the user journey to sale.

If you run both site and advertising tracking, remember to set up your site tracking to correlate the traffic.

3. Plan campaigns realistically: When looking to plot the potential ROI of your campaign, make sure all the factors are covered in the calculation. Ensure that you're plotting all factors including click to arrival rate. Remember, not every click will make an arrival, so a drop of even 5% will have an impact on your projections. Don't forget to add these in. If this is your first paid campaign, check your conversion rates from arrival to sale, and sale value. This will help you understand target cost-per-clicks.

4. Choose your medium carefully: Search is the most obvious route as it delivers almost guaranteed results in the forms of clicks, but remember clicks have never been the only measure of success, so don't forget other channels. Depending on the visibility of your brand, or the complexity of your proposition, paid search may not be the right channel as you end up paying for clicks for people to understand your proposition.

Other channels, like display advertising can offer the opportunity to deliver profitable sales if bought and managed correctly, providing a larger and more interactive area to present your sales message to the customer.

5. Check campaigns daily: The economy and markets are changing daily, so keeping an eye on your campaigns every day will ensure that you're always optimised and positioned to react to news and events, as well as changes on your website.

6. Pay attention, and respond to, current affairs: Worldwide events will have an impact on, or will present an opportunity for, your campaigns. Consumers will react differently to your campaigns when the economy and markets change, creating new opportunities. Recent examples such as the financial industry collapses, the grounding of XL flights and the UK, floods are all opportunities to further manage your campaign or seek out an opportunity. Small changes like this, on a regular basis can have a dramatic impact on your campaign performance.

7. Regularly trial new copy messages: Are consumers looking for deals? Should you be pushing or trialling more sales messages, money-off, discounts etc.? Structured testing and optimisation will ensure the best messages and learnings are rolled out across the campaign. Improved copy on paid search will boost click rate, which ultimately can benefit the quality score and reduce the required CPC to stay in the same position in, or even move up, the sponsored listings.

8. Campaign Landing Pages: There are a number of areas that can improve campaign performance to drive more sales, from the right buying model, to tracking and copy. Landing pages are often overlooked, but provide a great opportunity to continue the crafted message from banner or search click, through arrival to sale. Landing pages can be crafted to test multi-variants such as logos, imagery and call- to-action, which can help improve the conversion ratio and ultimately campaign performance.

9. Invest in SEO: The results achieved from SEO can be very profitable, but take time and a level of investment - there's no such thing as a free lunch. Think about adding content now, or checking your credibility [link status] - what else can be done to improve these? Could you add more content, are there more angles which you can offer today's consumer which aren't currently on the site?

Invest now, or pay later.

10. Re-engage with your customers: When was the last time you connected with your customers? If you're not running your CRM activity, now might be a good time to start. If you are, have you maximised the opportunities? Are you actively listening to them or just sending generic messages? Are you offering an RSS feed which could save you money and them time?

By Jamie Riddell

Director of Innovation

Cheeze

www.cheeze.com