“You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don’t make the same mistake twice.” – Former Proctor & Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley

We love this philosophy because it has so many important lessons – “always try new ideas,” “make sure you have data to learn from,” “be smart about how you allocate budget” and on and on. And while this philosophy helped Proctor and Gamble go from a 15-20% success rate with new products in the 1990’s to a 50% success rate more recently, it is not an approach that only the biggest companies can afford.

So, what does this have to do with Food, Beverages, Email and Social Media? Cost-effectively using online marketing to build a successful food and beverage brand, of course!

As discussed in our previous post, the key to efficiently spending your marketing budget is to engage and activate your customers, and communicate with them directly through cost-effective means, while avoiding an over-reliance on advertising (at least the paid kind).

The strategy you can employ to do this is through collecting data from your customers online, and communicating with them through email and social marketing. When you have a dedicated base of customers, you can communicate with them at will. This provides you a critical, and cost-effective, opportunity to test, learn and understand how your products can be successful, how you can drive more sales, and how you can increase your distribution.

Implementing such an approach ties directly into the core activities needed to build awareness, sales and distribution of a food and beverage product. A recent study published from Emarketer sheds light on the testing strategies that you can employ to test marketing concepts via email and social, by outlining the top activities people are likely to do after receiving marketing messages directly from consumer package good (CPG) companies:

• Download and print coupons (offers, upsells)
• Purchase products online and offline (sales, distribution)
• Try a new product for the first time (awareness, cross-sells)
• Order a product sample (trial)
• Research more about the product and company (awareness)

According to the same study, 74% of people who receive opt-in messages from CPG companies, “have a more positive impression of the company,” and 70% are “more willing to engage with [the] company.” Best of all, collecting customer data on your website and building email and social marketing programs is cost-effective, turn-key and provides a plethora of data that you can use to analyze and plan your next move.

Learn more about our email and social marketing solutions, Thrivepoint Engage™ and Thrivepoint Remarketing™, or contact us to discuss how we can help you build your brand, sales and distribution.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

In 2004, wine connoisseur, Neil Monnens, noticed a funny thing about wine – there was no consistency in price across wines with the same ratings. In late 2004, he started publishing WineBlueBook each month to provide a simple wine buying guide that offers an at-a-glance breakdown of how one wine compares to another in terms of quality and price.  WineBlueBook’s goal is to make wine drinking and wine buying more accessible to everyone by helping consumers find quality wines at every price point.

Client Challenge

WineBlueBook’s goal is to signup website visitors to a free trial of its monthly publication. The goal is to show visitors the value of the product and then subsequently sign them up to a paid subscription.

WineBlueBook’s site had undergone extensive search engine optimization (SEO) efforts which were yielding significant levels of highly targeted organic search traffic each month. However, while the organic traffic levels continued to grow, the program was generating very few trials.

In addition to SEO, WineBlueBook launched a paid search campaign on Google to drive traffic but the campaign also yielded very few trials.

Thrivepoint Solution

Thrivepoint conducted an extensive analysis of WineBlueBook’s website usability, organic traffic and keywords to determine where the conversion funnel was breaking. Thrivepoint quickly discovered that the primary cause of poor performance was rooted in the fact that 9 out of 10 visitors were leaving the site less than 30 seconds after arriving.

To engage consumers with WineBlueBook, Thrivepoint implemented Thrivepoint Engage™ – a solution to improve the messaging and layout of the web pages in order to capture more trial signups. Optimization was focused on three pages as a proof of concept.

The focus of optimization was on message, layout and offer testing to determine if consumers viewed WineBlueBook as a way to save money on wine or as a way to discover new wines to try. The testing of messages and layouts were implemented to determine which core theme was going to drive the highest trial rate.

Through the course of the program, Thrivepoint implemented and tested three web page layouts, two core messages and three offer treatments. Test messaging was deployed as eight executions rolled out into matched pairs to determine if “Savings” or “Discovery” messages were the primary motivators for trials. After the test yielded that consumers were more motivated by the “Savings” messages, the test was further focused on drilling down into which specific “Savings” message maximized trial rate.

Campaign Results

The program yielded an overall increase in site wide trials of 192% in two months driven by an increase in signup rate by 103% and increasing organic traffic.

For the three pages targeted specifically for optimization, the results were even better. A key finding in the initial analysis was that visitors were not engaged. Decreasing bounce rate by 6 percentage points increased conversion rate and enabled home page optimization which yielded 776% more trials than months prior to the program. The other pages targeted for optimization yielded a 950% increase in trials.

In addition, all optimizations were handled with care to ensure that no flow of organic traffic was interrupted and pages were further optimized for organic search in cases where it was warranted. The net result was a 22% increase in traffic for the targeted pages.

Read more Case Studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Halé Bob, a Los Angeles-based clothing company globally known for its unique style and celebrity clientele, employs its website as a key strategy in servicing its global client base, but the website itself was not producing the desired customer relationships or revenue impact. Some factors included: declining revenue during 2008-09 recession; most people leave the site without engaging; Poor performance from online marketing.

Thrivepoint Solution

Thrivepoint implemented Thrivepoint Engage™ – its proven marketing optimization solution – to:

• Completely map the conversion funnel and identify new engagement opportunities;
• Engineer design and message test to increase sales and signups while decreasing abandonment;
• Align online media, paid search and social media with the new strategy;
• Implement SEO on each page to increase organic traffic.

Implementation

Through the conversion funnel analysis, Thrivepoint established that repeat visitors were exponentially more likely to purchase and first-time purchases required a high frequency approach. Halé Bob’s current approach emphasized high reach and low frequency. Thrivepoint recommended implementing a conversion funnel that emphasized first time visitors signing up for remarketing programs that would provide them fashion exclusives and discounts on merchandise. Remarketing was defined as signing up for email, following Halé Bob’s Twitter profile or becoming a fan of Halé Bob on Facebook and the goal was to use these cost effective remarketing programs as the primary channel to introduce the higher frequency needed to turn one time visitors into repeat visitors and then customers.

With this strategy in place, Thrivepoint implemented website optimization consisting of offer, design, message and content testing on key website entry points — i.e., high traffic web pages — to maximize sales and signups to the remarketing programs. Through the course of website optimization, Thrivepoint also implemented search engine optimization by using proven messaging and content from the testing programs. Finally, the improved conversion flow and messaging were integrated with the paid advertising campaigns to ensure that ROI from paid media was maximized.

Campaign Results

The campaign has been a big success!  Declining revenue trends have been reversed and the channel is growing again.

Due to conversion optimization focused on the engagement model and conversion funnel, engagement rate from advertising increased 15x and overall site-wide engagement rate increased 851%.

Due to the improved conversion funnel and website usability, online advertising effectiveness increased allowing spend to grow by 3x which delivered an absolute increase in the size of the remarketing prospect database of 60% in just four months. Revved up remarketing efforts increased the quality and frequency of visitors to the site which contributed to higher visit to sales conversion rates and revenue. As a result, visit to sale conversion rate increased by 124% because visitors were introduced to remarketing programs and encouraged to come back to the site, which ensured that the quality of traffic to the site was continually increasing.

Thrivepoint continues to work with Halé Bob to optimize its marketing programs, website and search engine optimization.

Read more Case Studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

One of the key tools in an advertiser’s toolbox is the “cookie.” Cookies are a common component of most website tracking and online advertising targeting systems and are defined as: “A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.”

The primary use of Cookies in marketing has been to determine the value of a particular advertising buy using a methodology called, “closed loop marketing.” Closed loop marketing assigns a cookie to each user who sees or clicks an ad; the cookie is then used to determine if that user later purchases at the website. Closed loop marketing math works like this:

Ad Spend / Purchases (or leads) = Cost per Order

With a cost per order (or other ‘cost per’ metric), the marketer can rank their different buys and make decisions about how to improve their program.

So how does this all matter to Line of Sight Marketing? Because there is a debate about how long a cookie should be active. The reason is that many marketers know there is a limited time that one person remembers an advertisement and they want to limit the amount of credit that ad receives by using an expiration date. For example, if a person sees an ad 95 days ago, a 30-day cookie would not give credit to that advertisement if the user later visits the site and makes a purchase.

The problem arises that by expiring the cookie, the marketer has lost sight of someone whom they have already started a relationship with. There is no question that there is an expiring value associated with a particular media placement and advertisement’s results. However, when the cookie expires, it also expires the intelligence that you have about that person’s preferences and response to a particular message. Because most systems assign only one cookie for media tracking and creative intelligence, when the cookie expires, so does the intelligence.

To maximize your line of sight, cookies for creative intelligence should be separate from media and never expire so that the marketer will gather an ever-growing set of intelligence to inform and improve results with.

Evergreen Creative Cookies Use Case: Bob is browsing the web in July and notices an offer for a new Widget A from Company X. He looks at the ad with interest but does not actually click or visit the website. He later forgets about the ad. The tracking system sets a cookie on Bob’s computer to indicate he saw an ad for the widget. In December, Bob is browsing the web and again notices an ad from Company X. What ad should Company X show Bob now? The potential scenarios are:

• Scenario A: With an expiring cookie, Company X does not know that Bob already saw an ad for Widget A in July. The system shows the same ad Bob saw in July and the result is the same — no click, no visit.
• Scenario B: With an evergreen (non-expiring) cookie, Company X knows that Bob saw an ad in July and did not click. The system instead shows Bob an ad with Widget A offering a 10% discount or a different ad with Widget B featured. With the evergreen cookie, the marketer employs a more intelligent creative program that allows them to better maximize their advertising budget.

There is a nascent set of solutions out there that are starting to separate the media and creative cookies so that marketers can maximize their line of sight. Two to keep an eye on are ChoiceStream RealRelevance® Advertising and Atlas Engagement Mapping.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free needs assessment, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Line of sight marketing implies that the conversation with the customer is continuous and uninterrupted. When the line of sight is broken, the connection with the customer is over and the customer must be ‘found’ again or replcaed before restarting the conversation.

Because it is difficult to restart the conversation without a significant investment to locate that customer or to find a replacement customer, line of sight marketing should be a critical objective of any marketing organization. Line of sight marketing is especially important online because most initial website visitors are not yet ready to become customers.

One of the easiest ways to start the conversation with website visitors is to employ a value-added email marketing program. To launch an email marketing program only requires a smart strategy and simple-to-use off the shelf technology like icontact or Constant Contact. When starting an email marketing program, keep in mind the following considerations:

• Gathering email names is not the objective; continuing the conversation is;
• The email program must offer ongoing value to each customer otherwise customers will unsubscribe;
• The initial offer used to generate the email address should not be the only offer; each email sent must provide value to the customer;
• Email marketing will require email management software, design, copy writing and an overarching strategy;
• The cost to send email to your customer list can be as low as $10 per month or $0.01 per email sent;
• Email marketing software will include design template, tracking software, reporting and SPAM compliance tools;

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free needs assessment, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The news is filled with dire headlines and seemingly worse news everyday. The market appears to be moving to a more conservative state. Through all this, you still have a business to run and grow. Here are five best practices for your marketing to help you come out ahead during an uncertain economy.

Establish Metrics: Before you invest any money in marketing, write down what you expect to get in return. A metric helps you establish benchmarks and milestones for measuring spend. Most importantly, it helps you establish an eject button to stop spending if it is not working.

For example, If you spend $1,000 on advertising, how many customers do you expect to gain in return? Or how much revenue do you expect to earn? If you spend $1,000 and expect to have 100 new customers as a result, your metric would be to spend $10 per new customer. If after spending the first $200, you have only gained 5 new customers, you can project that after spending $1,000 you would only gain 25 customers or 1/4 your target. At that point, you can make the determination about whether to continue spending the full $1,000 or to cut bait and save the remaining $800.

Track Performance: We have all heard the adage that, “I know that half of my advertising doesn’t work. The problem is, I don’t know which half.” In a tough economy, having 50% of your advertising not work will quickly put you at a severe disadvantage. The way to improve is to employ reliable tracking to analyze the performance of your marketing and determine which ‘half’ is working. By using data to quantifiably determine what parts of your marketing and advertising are working, you will be able to increase your return on investment and your competitive advantage.

For example, if you run ads three days in a row, the tracking would help you determine which day or which message drove the most customers to your business. More importantly, if you are evaluating a marketing opportunity and do not see a way to definitively track results at a detailed level, then it might be worth putting that idea on hold.

Ensure Line of Sight: Line of sight refers to the complete relationship of your customer with your business from awareness to sale to repeat sale. If at any point in the process, line of sight is broken, it is likely that you will lose the customer and may not be able to find that person again.

Your goal right from the first advertising impression is to not let that conversation end and to keep the prospect engaged until you have had sufficient time to propose your products and services for their consideration. Whether you are a retail store offering sales or a web-based business registering users for a newsletter, not losing sight of each of your potential customers once you engage them is critical to marking the most of your marketing spend.

Implement a Testing Regimen: Testing is the foundation of smart marketing. By segmenting a small portion of your budget to test new ideas and messages, you will create a center of excellence within your marketing to continue to evolve and improve. Testing allows you to try new ideas without risking the overall performance of a campaign and when you identify ‘winning results’ to easily implement on a broader scale. Most importantly, as the market dynamics change, your marketing program will be designed to always be evaluating, improving and evolving itself to meet new market conditions.

Confirm Out Clauses: Before signing a contract with any provider, evaluate the payment terms and out clause to ensure that you can cancel should you not be happy with the results. Most marketing partners will offer an option where you can cancel for any reason with advance written notice. You will still be responsible for payment of all services prior to the end date, but you can put a stop to your spending should the results not be what you expected. Most importantly, be wary of any marketing partner who does not offer an out clause.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free consultation on your marketing efforts, please contact a Thrivepoint advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Unlike a cocktail party where conversations are face to face, the web is anonymous which creates a seeming disadvantage to effectively communicating and carrying a conversation. However, the anonymity of a web audience, in particular when you analyze your own target web audience, can provide subtle clues as to the needs and intentions of the website visitor.

No one visits a website without a specific need – be it information, research, contacts, etc.. The thought you give to why your audience would anonymously visit your site can be used to your advantage to develop content and hooks that create more value for the website visitor and ultimately engages them in the long-term conversation. That visitor may not contact you right away, but by engaging the audience on their terms, you are building trust, credibility and value in their mind which may ultimately lead to them clicking that ‘contact us’ link.

This is where the content becomes critical – the longer you can keep the visitor engaged, the more likely they are to ‘speak up’. Content that delivers value to the visitor will create a memorable experience and increase the likelihood of that visitor to be engaged long enough to become a customer or visit the website again.

The best part is that improving your website likely only requires a minor shift in your schedule – carve out some time each month to think about your customers and about what value your website can provide to them. If you provide ongoing value to your anonymous website visitors, you will likely see dramatic improvements in your website’s overall contributions to your business.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free needs assessment, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.