Email and search marketers might feel as if they have an uphill climb to influence new customers and secure old, but a recent study suggests the two online media have become the most effective online tools to drive sales. The Forrester Research report -- The Purchase Path of Online Buying in 2012 -- in collaboration with GSI Commerce Spring Attribution Research, identifies the Web as a powerful tool for consumers looking for brands, products and services by typing words into a search box or speaking them aloud. The report suggests that new buyers are "heavily influenced by paid search," more so than repeat customers. In fact, Forrester cites search as the single most important tactic for finding new customers. While 7% of new consumers typically type in a URL to find a site, 6% use a search engine followed by one other tactic or paid-search ad followed by one other tactic. Overall, 39% of transactions by new customers begin with clicks from paid or organic search results. Search attracts new customers, but email works best for repeat customers, according to the report. About 4% of new consumers are influenced by an email and use one other tactic to find the product, compared with 17% of repeat customers using email and one other tactic. Some 30% of transactions by repeat shoppers start with a click on an email from retailers. Direct traffic remains critical to sales. So, while search and email drive conversions, social media works best to bring awareness to brands, products, and services. The Forrester report identifies a disconnect between the conversion and the influence from highly top-of-the-funnel tactics that require more time. Some social sites work better than others to move consumers through the purchase path. Pinterest users spend fewer dollars on travel than the average Internet user, but for apparel and home categories they spend more, according to the comScore State of the Internet in the U.S. 2012 report released Wednesday. Images on Pinterest related to the Home and Living category influence consumers most, 25%, compared with other social sites at 24%. Apparel and Accessories follow with 17%, companies with other social sites across the Internet.
An email sender reputation is like a credit score - having no history is treated the same as having an unsavory history. Because sender reputation is built through frequency and tenure, email marketers who do not mail frequently may benefit from a shared IP, where their sender reputation can piggy-back on the volume and history of other senders using the same IP. The caveat, of course, is that if the other senders compromise the IP's reputation, every sender using it can suffer.
I recently read a statistic in the Harvard Business Review that researchers who invested in brands based on online reviews did 7.9% better than the S&P 500 index. After studying four years’ worth of product reviews of 15 brands -- almost 350,000 reviews -- they found there were two major predictors of performance: one was the sheer volume of reviews and the other was negative chatter. This got me wondering: Do marketers see email performance spikes or dives based on reviews and chatter over time? The hypothesis here is that in some trailing period of time following negative reviews, email engagement will slump -- and then recover. Proving or disproving this statement could affect when you send your campaigns, the content you deliver and how you position it. The great thing is that reviews and comments live on online, so tomorrow, you can go back and take a historic look to leverage as a future predictor. If you want to answer this question for yourself, there are two different kinds of data you need to get your hands on: Reviews and commentsStart with the preceding quarter and gather all comments posted on your site via ratings and reviews, on your Facebook page or in your Twitter feed -- including the dates. You will clearly need more detail to develop a definitive pattern, but it is better to start small and increase the investment in the effort based on what you are seeing. Email metricsGet your hands on the engagement metrics for all of the email sent during the same period of time, including opens, clicks and conversions, to see if the comments affect different engagement elements differently. Once you have the data, sort the feedback by day and attribute a count of comments per day as well as the dominating sentiment (positive or negative) and plot it against your email engagement metrics. Do you see a correlation? If you do see a marked drop in engagement following negative reviews, how might you address it with your program?