In our fast-forward age, where a sense of personal superiority often rests on having a quicker modem speed than one’s neighbor, it is hard to remember that the computer power to analyze and measure promotions didn’t exist 20 years ago.
Not that the time pressures for speedy promotional evaluation weren’t there – they were. If the promo consisted of a weekend store sale, then daily measurements were required. If the program was a long-running one, then data had to be collected at the individual store level on a weekly basis if it was to have any meaning.
But to get to that summary took weeks, sometimes months.
Why? Because the tools and techniques are required for quick evaluation were totally lacking. The process of assessing a promo resembled disinterment of a body: The data was buried, hard to get to, and just lay there. Promoters relied mainly on research organizations like AC Nielsen to do cumbersome “shelf store audits,” while other groups like Selling Areas Marketing Inc. (SAMI) performed computerized “warehouse withdrawal surveys” – all designed to determine if sales had jumped as a result of a campaign.
Following the early use of scan data, several other research groups like National Family Opinion (NFO) and Market Facts Inc. or Marketing and Research Counselors, Inc., even had pre-recruited “mail consumer panels,” where participants filled out purchasing diaries or questionnaires which took weeks and weeks to summarize.
With the early 1980s, shelf store audits were gradually phased out by the arrival of scanner data, but promo measurement itself remained primitive, and results took much too long to obtain to be of much use.
Check this out The advent of the automatic checkout lane was the technological breakthrough of first importance for the promotion industry. For the first time retailers and manufacturers had a core tracking tool that could help them watch a promotion in actual operation. The checkout process revealed little about the customer, but package and brand characteristics, the exact price paid, the purchase quantity, timing – all were there in-store, thanks to the bar code and the computer reading machine.
It is one of the fascinating ironies that manufacturers and retailers of the day didn’t perceive the potential of the tool they had in their hands. They embraced computer checkout in order to reduce clerk error and speed up checkout times. They saw no farther than that. But the point is that the tool that would transform the promo-tracking field was out loose in the world at last.
By the ’90’s it was belatedly recognized that without speed there was no effective evaluation of promos. The sense of breathless haste that had enveloped modern life had descended on promotion measurement as well. McDonald’s executive R.J. Milano recently spoke of the “compression of the promo cycle”; and added that McDonald’s gauges the success of a four- to six-week promotion by the reaction in the first five days.
But what powered speed, everyone discovered, was information: the database, the specific customer information that allowed a promotion to focus on a particular group of prospects in order to discover “what they’re buying, how they’re buying and where,” in the words of Peter Robson, vp of data-based marketing services for Harte-Hanks Direct Marketing Technologies, Bellerica, MA.
Efficient market services, a Deerfield, IL, company that tracks real-time retail data for packaged goods brands, says that quick collection of store scanner data is critical to accurate tracking. According to Paris Gogos, vp of business development for ems, his group “pulls back on a daily basis” scanning data from the individual stores, coupled with an audit of the display presence in each and every store. “We basically record all of the segments that make up a promotion,” says Gogos. This entails recording the selling price to consumers both in terms of traditional scan price as well as the net sales price generated through the use of frequent shopper cards.
The collection and analysis is made on a “quick-return basis,” so that ems can track daily whether the promotion has been fully executed and what type of results the promo is generating on a store-specific basis.
Gogos says that the “1/2ner level of detail analysis” allows manufacturers to react to short-term opportunities during the run of the promo and make modifications.
“Data has changed from being a research tool to being an operational tool,” Gogos says. “Yesterday’s methods allowed you to do a post-mortem on the promotion. Today’s methods allow you to treat the illness while the patient is still alive.”
He complains that the majority of manufacturers still see data primarily as a research tool.
Cyber-options Coupled with the advent and growth of the Internet, the use of database technology has enabled manufacturers to not only measure promotional campaigns more accurately, but to use the data to target their best prospects, reducing the information going to the wrong people and increasing the return on investment.
Rudy Nadilo, president and ceo of Greenfield Online, Westport, CT, says his company has a proprietary Internet database of some 500,000 households with more than 70 fields of information per person. For those participating in his database building there are plenty of prizes, says Nadilo, gifts ranging from $2 to $100 for help in providing data. Green1/2eld also stages prize drawings like Win a Caribbean Vacation. “For that one we signed up 1,500 respondents in 24 hours,” Nadilo says. His data has done wonders for clients like Xerox Corp.
Daily promo-tracking is also a specialty of RealTime Media. The Haverford, PA company, whose ceo Chuck Seidman claims he invented the Internet’s “scratch and win” technology, recently completed the biggest instant-win promotion ever held on the Web, for CDNow, the leading Internet music store.
The “CDNow Million Dollar Music Mania!” instant win game and sweepstakes involved over 60,000 prizes as well as a chance for CDNow customers to win a $1 million grand prize. The contest was offered to hundreds of thousands of participants in 26 countries.
The program used RealTime’s patent pending Internet scratch-off technology. With each online purchase, the CDNow customer received an electronic “Scratch & Win” game card which showed instantly if the participant had won anything. Since chances were one-in-five, there were many repeat players. Each time a customer made a purchase, he was automatically entered in a weekly vacation sweepstakes for eight world-class destinations.
Using e-mails, RealTime was able to track the course of the promo day by day. Using electronic summaries, execs could make decisions quickly. “If we want ed sales to be kicked up, we’d send out e-mails and modify the offers,” says Seidman. If the e-mails sent in didn’t increase in number, RealTime responded instantly by seeding more offers into the promo.
Thanks to its technology, RealTime was able to send its client, CDNow, a daily report of the number of game plays which were matched against the number of purchases and players.
The daily e-mail traffic summaries also enabled RealTime to make modifications to the campaign. “If you want more traffic at your site, if you’re not hitting your numbers, you can take out additional banner ads and buy more media support,” Seidman says. When the CDNow numbers began to sag at the end of the promo, that’s what they did, buying a banner ad that “doubled the number of game players,” Seidman says.
No spamming the globes Another marketer that has taken traditional methods and adapted them to the Internet is Acxiom Direct Media, a Greenwich, CT-based interactive company. Working a promo for Eddie Bauer, Acxiom made sure that the offer was personalized and diverse. “We suggest marketing include more than one call to action,” says Regina Brady, the leader of Acxiom/Direct Media’s Interactive Group.
The more personalized the offer, “the less it will feel like spam,” she says.
When Bauer was marketing a discounted line of khaki pants, Acxion did a direct e-mail campaign and made sure there would be a key code – a specific marking meant to evaluate the effectiveness of the list of prospects -embedded in every piece. Each message targeted a specific individual. For example, last Christmas, when Eddie Bauer was promoting Snow Globes, the e-mail provided a link to the Bauer Web site where the Snow Globe was being featured. In fact, there were three different product links within the message including a link to the overall Bauer shopping area. In the case of the khaki slacks, those recipients who went to the Web site then saw not only the khaki pants deal, but an offer of 50 percent off a line of sweaters as well. “That’s the additional call to action,” Brady says.
Instead of traditional direct marketing, by offering two product links to a mailing of 10,000, Acxiom would have “20,000 specific customer links in place,” enabling the company to see by the customers’ responses “which parts of the message were most exciting as well as what is driving the traffic of the Bauer site,” says Brady. “We give back to Bauer everyone that was on the site – all the e-mail addresses” to continue building the database.
But since the customer interactions and responses were immediately processed, Bauer was able to track real-time results from the first. “Instead of the usual three weeks, we gave Bauer the first results of the campaign within 36 hours,” Brady says. “That’s exciting.”
She says that 20 percent of the recipients will act on one of the links within a message which is “like opening a catalog.”
Preparing the proper direct e-mail is key to this whole process. Today’s high click-through marketers can test-price offers and offer copy on Friday, send out the completed direct e-mail copy for response on a Monday and by Wednesday “feel comfortable in selecting certain offers, premiums rebates” that will appear in the actual promotion, Brady says.
The advantages over traditional marketing, she says, are tremendous: “If I’m going to do traditional direct marketing, I’m going to do a test and the cost for short-run printing is a penalty. Plus I’m losing on (sorting costs). Plus I need a discrete group. I don’t have any of that with e-mail.”
She acknowledges that the letter that they sent as part of the Bauer campaign “doesn’t have great creative. Its function is to drive you to the Web site.” It’s at the Bauer site that the promo takes concentrated aim at the targets – the fabled 20 percent who do 80 percent of the buying. Since a Web site is public and anyone can view it, it’s difficult to make tailored offers. But the e-mails gave customers access “to private parts of the site with offers that no one else has access to,” she says. The private offers are a way to customize the company’s relationship with the consumer and do it most efficiently with tracking and follow-through.
“It’s a real-time environment,” Brady says.
Network
