eCommerce – Veronica Stenberg

How to calculate potential ROI for a media investment

Veronica — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 05:00:52 +0000

This is my calculation which I use when I want to see if there is a business case behind a media investment for my clients or my own marketing initiatives.

There are so much information available today, and from that you can manually calculate predictions and potentials before you choose to invest in a specific media, channel or campaign. Armed with the right specific, relevant numbers for your business and some industry averages you can create a hypothesis for the potential for an investment if you are unsure, or just want to make a calculation in terms how you should re-distribute your media budgets and what the potential could be.

Marketing today, merges business savviness and analytical skills. There is just a question of time (I guess there already is someone out there who has turned this into a formula, if not, that someone could make some nice bit of cash on a software for this, collecting data from advertisers, merged with some kind of ad score to calculate predictions based on data available).

You need the following numbers:

Average order value for your website
Average conversion rate for your website
Average CTR of ads for the specific media
CPM or CPC price per media
Budget per media
Calculated impressions per media and budget
Estimated clicks per media
Estimated conversions from each media

= estimated revenue per media

NOTE:

This is just a calculation of potential and you use averages and generic numbers for the CTR for example, it’s just to get a clue about the potential and what specific budget can generate.
Your ads and landing pages, entire website and check-out process has a huge impact on if your campaign and marketing activities that your business do, are successful or not.
If applicable, you may want to deduct the VAT from the final calculation.
If applicable, you may want to do a second calculation on this, deducting a percentage, if you have that number, for any return rate you may have on your goods.
If you are doing a campaign for various geographical locations you need the conversion rate and average order value for each country and website store.
Each media needs to be evaluated and calculated separately. Since CTR and similar may vary from both media and country.

Email marketing strategy

Veronica — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 06:05:39 +0000

Why should you use email marketing and when is it right for you?

If you want to be able to target your customer database with specific messages, or communicate with potential customers, in a cost effective manner – then email marketing is right for you.

The essentials to get you started with email marketing

To get started with your email marketing, there are some fundamental things to learn, but also you need to get an ESP (email service provider) of some sorts and a budget, however small it may be.

There are a couple of big companies that can offer you a service which may fit your budget even as a smaller business or you could opt for doing this by using an online software. Whatever your budget and goal is, it’s always an advantage to learn as much as possible about what you are getting yourself into. So you can arm yourself with the right information for success.

The following article is written as a guide for you, to get up to speed with email marketing and thought as a base for you to start off from. In the coming articles I will share a few hints what to look for, questions to ask and if you should opt for a ESP or try your own hand at free email marketing software such as MailChimp.

Should your budget be made out of shoestrings, then I actually have a few tips and hints for you to get around that as well in future articles.

Most importantly, read, learn and don’t be afraid to test new things.

The swift email marketing strategy

To succeed, you need a goal. First ask yourself, why are you doing this? take a step back and answer the following questions:

Why?

Define your goals, your main objectives with your email marketing, what is it that you want to achieve? some common goals for email marketing can be:

Increase sales
Communicate with your customers and provide them with inspirational material in a relatively cheap and effective way for your company
Capture new leads for your services and business to follow-up on and convert to sales
Learn more about your target audience and customers
Perhaps grow your newsletter subscribers base by 10% during the first 6 months
Increase CTR

The purpose is therefore?

With the goal in mind, define in more detail of how you will achieve this, for example, if you are a online retailer – use email marketing to:

Inform your customers of new products that are relevant and of interest to them, or supply supporting and inspiring content which relates to your products or service

Inform your customers of offers or promotions

How to?

After defining your goals and purpose, make a quick plan of how you will achieve this. This is where you define how much money, time and resources you have. It’s also time to dig out any old dusty marketing plan and content schedules to make sure they will be on par with each other.

Who?

Who are your readers? Define your audience so you can easily create relevant content and messages for them for each customer segment.

Segmentation?

Divide your database – how small it may be in segments either based on purchase history or any other information you have so you can ensure you target them with relevant content

When?

The frequency of your emails, once a month or once a week? The purpose and audience should give you an indication. If you are unsure, why not opt for a safe card – once a month. Until you have a large and segmented database, to send targeted messages to.

Add this to any content schedule – so you have content in time for any newsletter deadline.

Try a few different times and dates during the week, to see if you can get better results during one specific day in the week.

Measure?

How do you measure success? By increased open rates, forwards and sales? Below are some indicators you can use to establish success or find areas for improvement by monitoring:

Open rate, click through rate, unsubscribe-rate (a KPI for your content – relevance and quality – how well does the content resonate with your customers)
Size of subscribers base (is it growing or declining?)
Forward to a friend (is your content good enough to be seen as valuable for someone else?)
ROI/Sales generated

Actions to get started:

So to get started with email marketing – this is what you need to do:

1. Set your strategy and goals
2. Choose a solution which is right for you, in terms of software supplier – a full service company or an online software such as MailChimp
3. Either hire a designer and a developer to create your email marketing template. Alternatively customise or use existing ones that may be available from your ESP
4. Identify collecting points, make sure to adda sign-up form or in any other way collect – name, email and permission – to start building your database
5. Create a content schedule for your newsletters and align with marketing activities and plans
6. Start gathering content – copy and images for each segment in your database
7. Start sending out newsletters

Actions for when you have your foundation in place

So to get started with email marketing – this is what you need to do:

1. Perzonalize with name, dynamic content etc

2. Continue segmenting your database

3. Social integration

4. Start A/B testing

5. Automize tedious tasks

Defining the Customer Journey to Online Purchase (Path to Purchase)

Veronica — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 06:33:10 +0000

A user journey/path to purchase is useful to help you develop communication, content and marketing strategies that are from your customers or potential customers point of view (i.e need based).

I like to simplify, so I have abandoned the classic AIDA model (attention, intention, desire and action) which was used in school way, way back then for: See, think, do and care – which from my perspective is more straightforward and easy to use in the work I do with my clients and more applicable in our current context (remember the AIDA model originated around 1898).

To further illustraste the model, let’s use a online sports store as an example:

See – this is where your company are noticed, so perhaps it’s through ads, on and offline. Perhaps with articles relating to running in this case.

Think – is where a person is thinking about a solution, let’s say that we focus on a person looking for a pair of new running shoes. However, they are open to any brand and model but found this particular online store and are now browsing the selection available. They are starting to consider some options.

Do – this is where the person has decided that they want to buy a pair of new running shoes, from a particular brand, to colour and model and is ready to make the purchase.

Care/loyalty – is after a person has bought the running shoes, how can you care for them in a way so that next time they need a pair of new running shoes they come back to the same online store. Perhaps with advice on how to best wash and care for the shoes for better durability? perhaps the person signed up for a newsletter, where you based on the purchase target this person with other items and inspiration related to running? Or another possibility is that the sports store in question attracts someone else customer into this type of content and therefore may attract additional customers from this in the future.

You want to move your customers through each phase of this model. And of course it’s not always as straightforward for a customer to buy from you online. The main point of this is to have a more customer centric approach for content, marketing and activities.

What is relevant in each phase is specific for your customer, service and company. However using the picture above to illustrate this model I’ve added a few items in each which you can consider from the customer and offering perspective from your company:

Touchpoints
Marketing channels
Content
Customer needs/pain points
Customer intent in each phase
How can you reach customers in each phase (i.e marketing)
Content to answer their questions and move them to the next phase
Contact information and departments
What obstacles do we have to move the customer into the next phase?
What questions do they have?
How can we make our products relevant?
How do we prove our credibility and earn their trust?
The customers experience

Useful for:

Creating supporting and customer centric content for your website
Evaluating your website content and improving your current website and content
SEO
Marketing investments, activities and strategies – and when to focus on what
Internal dialoges that need to be reminded of the external focus
Find obstacles and bottlenecks
Re-targeting strategies and messages
Paid search campaigns

Want to use the simple sketch I have made above? feel free. Download the ppt file right here.

Of course – you want to be able to evaluate, optimize and measure success – so define the KPI’s – use this article and template to follow and evaluate your performance.

For more information:
The customer journey – explore data for verticals in larger markets

The key to data driven decisions

Veronica — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 06:13:36 +0000

In today’s data driven world there is new data to gather insights from every minute of the day every day, from multiple locations, from multiple devices in various contexts about your customer, campaign performance and sales.

A monthly or weekly report for data is now obsolete, since the information you are viewing is not necessary relevant anymore and the information is already outdated when the PDF-reports start to hit your inbox.

And by the time you had the opportunity to get a gather all the relevant reports from all your relevant sources, the information is probably not relevant and in most cases only targeted to your marketing department within your organization.

To solve this challenge there are a plethora of new tools available to build a dashboard to vizualise the data in real time. Som simple apps you can download to your iPhone other more complex where you can add TV spot info and view in relation to visitor flow on your website.

The benefits of building a dashboard are many and here are a few:

Gather data from all relevant sources and access real time data for real time data driven insights and decisions.
Remove the noise and clutter of irrelevant information and streamline and visualise the data only containing the relevant information
Put the information in a relevant context for IT, Sales, marketing etc by creating custom dashboards only containing the information necessary and relevant for them
Add business KPI’s to the visualisation of the data and evaluate performance
Add indicators for actions when a metric drops below a certain threshold to take actions immediately
See the complete picture, not having to piece together information yourself from different reports. Get the holistic view of your business performance.
Design relevant dashboards for each department of your organisation.

Tools:

https://www.datapine.com

http://global.qlik.com/

Build your own dashboard in Google Analytics:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1068216?hl=en

Image source and copyright: slidemodel.com

How to create a results driven media plan

Veronica — Mon, 25 May 2015 05:00:01 +0000

Media plans are not just a planning tool for big media agencies outlining marketing investment and activities. They are useful for anyone managing marketing activities to keep track of investments. Usually a media plan reflects the investments necessary in each type of media in relation to your communication and marketing plan for the year.

This article focuses solely on digital media and I want to add another layer to the media plan which is return of investment (ROI) and helps you set-up your own media plan by yourself.

The benefits of my media plan are:

This media plan helps you keep track of each penny invested and each penny earned from each campaign.
You will know which campaign that performed the best or worst in terms of ROI or any other goal you add for your campaigns (CPL, CPO etc)
You will know which network or platform performs the best or worst in terms of ROI.
You will have all the information you need at your fingertips when you need to evaluate performance and compare platforms or campaigns to each other.
You can add other KPIs as well, such as traffic, shares etc, if relevant.
I’ve used ROI since its easy to measure

My media plan template explained:

I’ve built my media plan in one excel document, which start with the overview on the year with my chosen channels to the left and the months continuing to the right.

This is the overview of the total investment in each channel, each month and the total investment for the year.

This is where I insert the specifics for each campaign. You can extend this further with more details if you need, such as adding all banner types used, links to the banners or call to actions used.

My advice for using the template

This is what I used before there where tools such as DoubleClick or you could build attribution models. However, to get the complete view from a ROI or CPO perspective, this is still relevant.
Make formulas in excel which counts automatically upon entering numbers. Don’t know how. Here are tutorials for how to create formulas in excel for basic counting: add, subtract, divide, percentage of.
Assess this at the end of each week/month/campaign/quarter and/or year to keep track of the performance of your campaigns and stop running campaigns that generate non or low returns.
Assess at the end of the year or marketing period and plan the following year or period to ensure better use of your marketing budgets and platforms.
If you need help to calculate the ROI you can use this ROI calculator

Template download

Of course you can download my template and modify with details that are relevant to you. If you get any new nifty ideas or use for this template, please add them in the comments below.

Photo credit: death to the stock photo

What is attribution modeling?

Veronica — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:38:33 +0000

The word attribution modeling have been bouncing around in the digital marketing world for some time now. It may sound like this is something very complicated that only the analytical-uber-menschen-geeks can grapple and handle. But alas, its i not. In this article I will help you understand what attribution modeling is and how this can help you measure the effect of your marketing campaigns in a better way.

Also called: marketing attribution, attribution marketing

Attribution modeling is a method which helps you understand which digital marketing channels (your digital touchpoints) that have been involved in the process of a customer purchase, lead or sign-up. (Whatever you define and track as a conversion).

Today a visitor can find their way to your website via an banner ad, return to your website via a recommendation for the product from someone on Facebook, return via your AdWords campaigns and lastly use a search engine to find their way back – and finally buy that product they have been researching all this time.

This journey may not necessary be this linear, the same customers are more likely to bounce around your various digital “touch-points” aka digital marketing campaigns, your social media pages or website – before they make that final purchase.

This is where attribution modeling comes in handy – because by using this method you can:

Gain insight to distribute your marketing budgets accordingly for better ROI
Improve your campaigns or remove completely from your marketing mix – where you discover poor interaction, influence and results
Compare your digital marketing channels results against each other
Revise your CPA (cost per acquisition – e.g the cost in marketing per order generated from it)
Reduce time to conversion
Understand your customers journey better
Re-schedule your campaigns
If you run AdWords campaigns, compare keywords against each other – to see which generates more sales, thus allocate the budget accordingly

To use attribution modeling you set up rules which assigns different levels credit (or points) to a particular channel depending on the interaction and thus get the credit for the conversion (sale, lead) in the end. Then the rules you apply calculates the credits (points) and then visualizes this information for you.

For example – you can build rules/models that assigns credit/points to the last channel the customer when through before a sale. To re-use the example above;

A visitor can find their way to your website via an banner ad, return to your website via a recommendation for the product from someone on Facebook, return via your AdWords campaigns and lastly use a search engine to find their way back to the product page – and finally buy that product they have been researching all this time.

Then search would get 100% of the credit/points.
Or you can build models/rules that assigns credit to the first interaction, or all interactions, time, positions etc.

You can utilize this functionality in Google Analytics Premium.

To find out more about attribution modeling:

Learn more about the different types of models and why they are useful.

How to use attribution modeling in Google Analytics (free account) – with the help of Excel