Multivariate Testing of webpage

Today I grasped the concept of MVT - multi-variate testing. It can even test specific elements on a webpage - down to a title or a masthead image. By creating a control group, and a test version, and with the right tool, one can deliver these 2 version to a 50-50 split of web audience who request for the page. And tracking can be done to look at the metrics gathered on the page - page visit, abandonment rate/exit rate, time spent, journey, etc.

Designing the test is an art/ skill in itself I feel. And there are expert who can do that to help optimize the website. however I think the gap of MVT skill set and the profound understanding of the site objective/design is still quite large, hence the progress of MVT in this area may not go far.

And MVT is considered very surgical in execute which is quite expensive to do and at the same time, the results are often not revenue-related. So I believe MVT will not go far in this industry.

Disrupt Your Marketing Mix

At one of the more interesting panel discussions was entitled, “Disrupt Your Marketing Mix.” which has the following panelists:

· Jeff Berman, president, Sales and Marketing, MySpace

· Chip Hall, senior vice president, Sales and Marketing, Teracent Corporation

· Mitch Joel, president, Twist Image

Here are some of the learning:

1. Start small and take baby steps to understand new media:

• Look up the top 15 videos every week
• Pick 10 people and follow them on twitter
• Look up top 5 musicians on MySpace
• Look up top blog sites on blogger.com

2. Online advertisement

• Display ad with no data/insights are better off not doing them in the first place
• The future of display ad is where its given by data insights from website / crm/ customer review on other sites.
• Locally marketing your products in a digital way - Robin Baskin has an interesting targeted selling based on temperature weather. When weather is between certain degrees, sell certain products, and so on... a bit too radical I think...
• Branding of online ad - impression also serves the purpose of branding if the marketing objective is awareness creation.

Quotes:

• Content is king and Context is queen.

Social Media Frameworks Overlay

So far there are various types of models and framework created in an attempt to frame up how marketers look at social media. I attempted to overlay a few models to create another dimension to look at social media.

Before I share the new model, here are some of the existing framework/model created by various company/individuals.

Social Technographics: Types of Social Media Users

(Source: Social Technographics from Forrester)

Social Technographics classifies people according to how they use social technologies

• Creators make social content. They write blogs or upload video, music, photos or text.
• Critics respond to content from others.They post reviews, comments on blogs, participate in forums and edit wiki articles.
• Collectors organize content for themselves or others using RSS feeds, tags, and voting sites like Digg.com
• Joiners connect in social networks like MySpace and Facebook.
• Spectators consumer social content including blogs, user-generated video, podcasts, forums, or reviews.
• Inactives neither create nor consumer social content of any kind.

Types of Social Media Platform/Sites

(Source: iCrossing – What is Social Media Nov 2007 & Wikipedia – Social Media)

• Social Networks : these sites allow people to build personal web pages and then connect with friends to share content and communication. (e.g. Naver (KR), MySpace(AU), Facebook(SG), LinkedIn(professionals))
• Podcasts: audio and video files that are available by subscription, through services like Apple iTunes. They are portable files that can be downloaded to a device and played anytime.
• Wikis: these websites allow people to add content to or edit the information on them, acting as a communal document or database. Creating a collaborative site or document is the key here.
• (e.g. Wikipedia).
• Blogs: perhaps the best known form of social media, blogs are online journals, with entries appearing with the most recent first. (e.g. blogger, wordpress, vlogs – video blogs)
• Customer Review/ Shopping Sites: communities or sites which allows customer to rate products and services or provide comments.
• Forums: areas for online discussion, often around specific topics and interests. Forums came about before the term “social media” and are a powerful and popular element of online communities.
• Content sharing communities: communities which organise and share particular kinds of content. The most popular content communities tend to form around photos (Flickr), bookmarked links (del.icio.us) and videos (YouTube, Todou(CN)).
• Microblogging: social networking combined with bite-sized blogging, where small amounts of content ('updates') are distributed online and through the mobile phone network. (e.g. Twitter)
• Q&A: Quick question and answer where user can rate best answer (e.g. Yahoo! Answers, Naver Knowledge Inn)

Types of Social Media Marketing Tactics

• Topic/ Forum Management - Engage in forums and discussion board to drive a message across or address support issues. It can be doned by agencies or even company's employees or even friends and family of company's employee (unbadged)
• Key Influencer - Engage key bloggers or power bloggers (> 1000uv per day) who will then write about your products/ services, etc
• Content Distribution - Create company managed blogs, group pages (e.g. in facebook, etc). Also include disseminating content into product review sites / comparison sites.

By combining these frameworks together, one can decide based on the % of users in the social technographics in different country (check with Forrester.. they have the latest statistic by country) and then decide which social media tactics to use in different types of social media sites. For example, China has lots of "creators", hence competitions like photo upload/ writing stories may work in China.

Any thoughts on this framework?

Brand Equity Pyramid

I came across this concept today. I think its not a new concept but I am quite fascinated by the framework. Its is similar to marketing funnel but this is in the context of loyalty.

Level 1: Bonding - Nothing else beats it

- Unique & Superior combination of benefits (Meets needs and advantage statements):

The relative importance of the advantages

The share of endorsement for the brand

The number of brands considered

Level 2: Advantage - Offers something better

- Endorse any of:

More acceptable price Appeals more

Works better Offers something different

Higher opinion Growing more popular

Most popular Unaided first mention

Level 3: Performance - Delivers

- Do not endorse:

Doesn't perform well enough

Level 4: Relevance - Brand that might be considered

-Meets needs or do not endorse:

Costs more than you are prepared to pay

Too cheap to be acceptable quality

Doesn't meet your needs

Doesn't appeal to you

Level 5: Presence - Know something about the brand

-Endorse:

Unaided brand awareness

Bought or used

Have an opinion about a pyramid attribute

10 things I learned from ad:tech Singapore 2009

10 things I learned at ad:tech Singapore 2009

1. Social Media Engagement Tactics based on Social Technographics

• Social Technographics (Ladder) mentioned in Forrester report should be one of the frameworks to form the social media engagement tactics. It will help to determine which market should use key blogger tactics (where there are more "Creators") vs Topic engagement tactics (where there more "Critics")
• Emerging Markets like China has lots of Creators 40% and Critics 44% compared to Aus Creators 26%, Critics 35%. And this could be because China economy is only opened up in last 10 years and this creates an outflow of expression/ opinions that may been subpressed over the years. UGC contest like upload photo/ write essays, etc will work in countries with a lots of "Creators" - in this case China.

2. Monetise Social Media / Tactics

• Social Media can be monetised when the right social media tactics is used (e.g. team buying - Dell Swarm) In the Obama campaign case study, I am encouraged to see social media helped in fund raising, however the speaker didn't share in depth the tactics to drive conversion using social media. On the other hand, I think content/ topic of Presidential Election is key and social media is just a communication vechicle.
• Different stage of the product lifecycle requires different social media tactics - from new product introduction / crossing the chasm / tornado / mainstream, etc. E.g. Key bloggers tactics will work for NPI (new product intro) more.

3. Yahoo vs Google - Competitor Keyword Bidding

• Google has changed their SEM policy to allow keyword bidding using competitor keyword which means... the next time you search for "Sheraton hotel", you'll get "Hilton Hotel" as Paid search results. Interesting to see the exchange of comments between Yahoo Search and Google on the panel.
• Google uses the analogy of a supermarket where brands has to put their products on shelves and they have to manage get the best spot on the shelves. I think this analogy doesn't work. By changing their policy, it seems like Google is allow brands to cover up the competitor's brand products with a stick over. A customer wanted to buy a Dove product may end up taking a Pantene product - where is the customer experience then? This is not giving choices to consumers but confusing them further.
• By allowing competitor keyword bidding, CPC will go up - brands pay more, customer will suffer poor experience and the only winner seems to be Google.

4. Mobile/Social Media in Japan

• Although Japan has 55% accessing internet via mobile and 51% access social media (ie high usage) BUT most marketing agencies are still NOT using social marketing pervasively as a platform for marketing. A lot are still on experimential stage.
• Mobile URL - there is actually a short URL generator for mobile market so that URL can be passed around in microblogging which has 160 char limitations for some. And Japan has high penetration of QR codes and mobile email (and SMS is not popular in JP)

5. Mobile Updates

• Like Social Technographics, Mobile has its set of framework:

1. Inactive
2. Talkers
3. Communicators - uses SMS/ MMS a lot
4. Connectors - uses on needs basis - check map / flight details/ movie
5. Entertainer - download wall paper/ iavatars/ ringtone
6. Heavy Connectors - heavy on status update / microblogging

6. Youth Panel insights

• News will reach me (youth) if its important enough - hence youths don't read as much from newspaper.
• Prefer Opt in rather than Opt out - don't auto-sign up me for twitter. If I think you are interesting, I will sign up to your subscriptions / tweeter.
• Look for bad reviews more than good reviews to decide if they can put up with the bad experience before buying.
• Prefer peer recommendations than from advertiser
• Need to be unique - Shop clothes online because they want to be unique - so that no one else on the street has it.

7. Email Best Practises

• "No, not now" choice for customer - apart from getting to click now and buy, have a separate flow for "No, not now" that gets channeled into a survey asking them about purchase cycle 30 days / 60 days, etc and work that into a trigger to send reminder based on prefered purchase period.
• Sequential email trigger - for every trigger, look at response type and create subsequent trigger rules for various response - no open, no click, click on review, click on buy, click on tell-a-friend, etc
• Abandoned shopping cart program - create a flow to trigger an addition discount/ free gift X days after for the specific product that he left in the shopping cart without check out and throw in a bunch of other products (under cross sell/ upsell program) so that he can have more choices. This can be executed in controlled session - send reminder 1 /3 /7 days later - 50% with incentives, 50% without incentives
• UGC enhances email relevancy (a case study shows 42% increase in revenue per email)

8. Older Marketers vs New Marketers

• Older Marketers - excel in Brand, Marketing experience and consumer knowledge
• Newer Marketers - excel in Digital Marketing, Experimential Marketing
• both has to work together and be open to listending to each other - partnership

9. Social Media - Obama case study (scott@revolutionmessaging.com)

• Social Media used as 3rd party validation.
• Ease of adding video to pages - this sounds tactical but it a strategic move to create video viral.
• With the right convincing content / key message, delivered by right media (e.g. video), customer will move their mouse from $10 donation to $20 donation. This is the needle we want to move.
• In US, mobile subscribers have to pay for incoming and outgoing SMS/MMS.. hence mobile is still not big in US.
• Key influencers can even be your barber because they talk all the time. In Singapore, it could be taxi drivers.

10. Publisher vs Content Creators

• Its interesting to put FT and BBC next to Google and Yahoo. It seems the tranditional content creator has not reinvent to catch up with the new model of content distribution. When Google and Yahoo provides all the tools to aggregate content from various sources to meet customers needs of new form of content consumption, content creators grapple with copy rights issues, new business model that works with new way of content consumption.

Download presentations

• Forrester's report - Digital Consumers & Interactive Marketing in APAC - The State Of Play by Steven Noble, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research (Note: I got a call from Forrestor 2 hours later after I downloaded their presentation ... amazing!)
• Advertising Networks & Exchanges From Chris Schaumann, Microsoft.

URLS mentioned

• www.mob.com - social networking site
• www.iab.sg - Singapore first Interactive Advertising Bureau. WWW version is at www.iab.net
• www.paywhatyouwant.com.sg - Iibs hotel campaign site
• http://www.eventful.com/ -social network of consumer events
• http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ - uses Microsoft Silverlight technologies

Acronymns / terms mentioned

• CPM - Cost per impression
• CPC - Cost per click (not cost per conversion - conversion - refer to CPA)
• CPA - Cost per Acquisition
• CPI - Cost per Interaction
• CPE - Cost per Engagement
• CPP - Cost per Period (time)
• CP#@$! - Cited by one of panelists who "likes to swear"
• Prospect Acquisition Cost
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Prospect Asset Value
• CSR - Corporate social responsibility

Quotes

• "Brands have to be prepared to give control to customers"
• "Content proliferation (distribution & aggregation) is a thread to content production"
• "We lost Encarta to Wikipedia"
• "The web flattens the marketing funnel"
• "All impresssions are not created equal"
• "Social Stream of consciousness" -- ???

Statistics Mentioned

• Straits times full page color ad - S$28K (from SPH Raymond Teoh)
• 56% of mobile users in AP are happy to receive advertising if its relevant
• 15% uplift in results if 360 marketing is used (instead of marketing in silo media)
• $60 for a Obama poster on online store
• Consumer visits 85 online sites a month.
• Hotel Intercon analytics team grew from 4 to 40 in 3 years.

Complicated Trigger Rules

As I moved on to defined more complete trigger rules for my trigger email marketing program. I didn't expect it would be so complicated.

Initially I like to keep it simple, like..

>> Thank you email - immediate after product registration

>> Getting Started

>> 1 week cross sell

>> 120 days supplies sell

>> 240 days supplies sell

>> 360 days supplies sell

>> 1 year cross sell

>> 2 year cross sell

>> 3 year product replacement

When my agency start asking about scenarios I have not thought through.. things got complicated.

- what if customer buys and registers 2 printers 1 week apart, 1 year apart

- what if customer registers a PC and then a printer 1 week later

- what if customer buys 1 PC and 1 Notebook and 2 printers at the same time

Is the customer going to get spammed like crazy by the email engine?

There are rules that enables the system NOT to send out email if there has been email sent out within last week/ last month. However does that creates some misopportunity or less-than-ideal scenarios?

The concept of trigger is still hard to grasp. Trigger basically puts customers into queue and depending on the rules, it will start sending emails out to customers based on rules and conditions. Making changes to rules have to be particularly careful since it is tricky to stop the engine and imagine the consequences of it.

Nonetheless its still fun to pilot this out.

Social Media - Topic Management

In social media, there are various ways where advertiser or manufactures try to harness this media to drive conversation, influence perceptions, drive purchase intent, etc.

In the area of topic management (ie getting into forums, discussion groups to drive conversation), there are various approaches:

Tone Approach

a) Guerilla tactic

Engage social media agencies to get their team to go into forums to start topic/ reply existing discussion. This approach usually uses fake identity or the team pretends to be part of the community to influence certain conversations.

b) Corporate talk

Company can go in as company PR lead to reply to messages, etc. Very often the tone of language can be corporate sounding which may not go down well with the community.

c) Common Langugage talk

Company can engage agencies to go in on behalf of the company's PR lead and response with the same tone / language as the community

Engagement approach

a) indepth 2-way discussion

This approach requires the agency/user to be equipped with good knowledge of the product/services to be able to reply and engage in a 2 ways communication to deliver the message across to the receiver.

b) short reply with links to more information

This approach is safer and less effort intensive as this requires the agency to just 'touch the surface' and lead the reader to other sites with more information/tools/message to do the convincing.

c) standard response library

The client has to create a response library to address the common questions asked in the forum. However depending on how strict the agency should follow the library, the conversation may not flow nicely or it mean appear too corporate-like answers which may back fire (community may deem this as advertiser trying to drive their agenda in the community)

Response Framework

Client has to established some rules surrounding responses and bullet points of various possible reasons for agencies to use. The response rules are necessary to help agencies operate within a boundary that is aligned back the client's objective and intent.

Here are some rule of thumb approach to decide if a response is needed.

a) no reply needed if user is emotionally charged (when they use words like "hate, never buy again, etc.."

b) multiple competitor brands are being mentioned (again depending on the extend of conversation and the depth to carry through, some feel this is a terriotory that typical conversative company will avoid.

c) user's positive response (that is already in aligned with company's direction)

d) user sitting on the fence or already sold in one of the options - if the user is sitting on the fence, it is much easier to drive a conversation to swing his opinion.

Different responses should also be prepared for

a) installed base user - already owned a product

b) prospect - user seeking advice to buy

c) researcher - user doing a product review and comparison

Advice or responses should also be specially tailored to conversation about alternatives / counterfeit products.

Any thoughts to frame this more comprehensively?

Trigger Email Marketing

Today I am struggling to put together messages for my company trigger email marketing. The framework is set, high level approach determined.

Next is to create the trigger emails. And this is not as straight forward as I thought. With every trigger, its an opportunity to talk to the customer. And each different trigger email is inter-related. So the messaging within each trigger have to be well thought through.

Thank you email

- this is a critical touch point to foster some level of relationship with the customer. And its critical to provide post sales information. Information that helps the customer, rather than trying to sell them more things.

Getting Started

- Getting started trigger emails can be positioned as helping the customer to get started OR even positioned to help the company to educate the customers with certain key messages that will protect the future business. For example, educating how to differentiate counterfeit products in future purpose or the disadvantages to buy counterfeit or alternatives to original.

Supplies connect emails / Accessories connect emails

- although these messages are position as selling more to the customers, but if it is worded in a manner that benefits the customers, addressing the customer's need, the sale message can be viewed as helping the customers.

Upsell messages

- Different messages can be presented in this email. First off, the can be positioned as selling the next product. Secondly if the customer is not ready to buy, they can buy warranty extension. If they are not buying either of them, a small survey link can be also included to ask them why they are not keen to buy now or are they buying competitor products.

If you have any other types of trigger messages to share, do email me.

Possible reasons for high exit rate

Today we have a campaign results review and one of the key highlights is the microsite has high exit rate of 85%. The other 2 country campaigns has about 30% to 35% abandonment rate.

So the inevitable question comes along - why?

Here is a list of possible reasons - may not be exhaustive but its a good start.

1) wrong target audience

It may be that the target audience is wrong and we could be buying the wrong media. So even though there are click through from media to the microsite, but if the message is not what the audience expect, they will just close the browser or exit elsewhere.

2) Poor site loading time

If the site is heavy (e.g. flash), then the visitors may exit or close the browser. Different countries may have different patient level to wait for the site to load.

3) Poor internet connection speed / interruption

Some countries could be running on a lower bandwidth / lower internet speed, so it affects the loading speed of the site. Or even there could be a instance of connection drop (e.g. earthquake under the sea bed affected internet cables) - however such incidents typically will not last a few days.

4) Disconnect between media and microsite

Sometimes the message /look and feel on the media differ from the landing site, then the visitor may be confuse and leave the site.

If the media message is promotion but when visit comes to the landing site, the message is value proposition, then that will be a total disconnect.

5) Fake visitors

In certain countries, there are paid underground syndicates that just click on media to boost the cost per click, hence driving up the exit rate when it comes to the microsite.

If you have any other reasons, please share with me.