Wake up and smell the data

Does your organisation value data?

Does it know how much value there is in each customer account & interaction it records?

Does it really appreciate that the timeliness, accuracy and depth / richness of the data captured stored or created has competitive advantage?

No... I didn't think so, and I'm pretty sure most other organisations don't either.

That's a shame. 

Online success - 8 soundbites for digital improvement

I'm typically not in favour of using soundbites, without backing them up with facts or information. However I find myself using the following more and more... so thought I'd note them down for future reference.

Find and identify your audience
Turn monologues into dialogues via web and social networks
Match the style of message with the style of audience
Create, implement and analyse ideas which deliver results
Measure value and worth properly
Build engagement, loop it and exploit it
Developing a programme for continuous improvement
Evaluate, set-up, use and  tools that use the data you already own

Hopefully in another post or two I'll go into these in far more detail.

True content marketing is calculating page value

I see so many articles on the subject of content marketing it makes my head hurt. They nearly all just witter on about blogs, infographics and social media, but hardly any even mention one key thing... return on investment.

Its like we've stepped back once more to either around 2008 (when social media gained a lot of attention) or the early days of the dot com bubble in the 1990's. Both were a time when a lot of people lost a lot of money, by not focusing on value.  The value of what you're doing compared to what you get out and the value you're adding.

So before rushing into loads of content marketing efforts and wasting everyone's time and money. .. ask yourself "do I know the value of this page I'm either creating or maintaining?".

If you don't, might I suggest you stop right there and work that out first?

eCommerce Programme or Project Manager? Part 2

This is the second of 2 postings on the difference between an eCommerce Progamme or Project Manager. The earlier part can be found here.

Responsibility
It’s a natural effect that the bigger the amount of work to be done, the more there is at stake throughout a business. Although this risk is typically financial, it could also have other important effects on your existing business. With this risk comes the responsibility of reporting it to senior people (with the aim that they can mitigate it as much as possible)… who in-turn may have directors, owners or shareholders to keep happy.
Keeping the senior stakeholders informed on a large online project can often be a role in itself and I would always recommend that the Programme Manager contributes or even runs the regular senior meeting attended by all relevant parties. The ability to participate in or even chair these sorts of meetings typically requires additional communication, influencing, or other skills that are usually beyond those needed of a Project Manager.

Coherence of Effort
When your ecommerce requirements need a programme of work, then it is essential to have a coherent overview of all effort. This is to ensure that there is no unnecessary overlap or conflict in tasks & deliverables. Although a Project Manager will be responsible for the effort within one project, the eCommerce Programme Manager must understand all possible touch points across all pieces of work for all projects. If there are any interdependencies, the programme manager must be responsible for ensuring that each Project Manager is aware of them and takes on the responsibility to their project.

Ultimate Value to the Business
A project manager has key performance indicators to report on, mainly that of the project running on time, ins cope and to budget. These are the main factors for a project to align to its business case and if it will be ‘judged’ as a pass or fail.
The ecommerce programme manager however must look at the overall value to the business for each component of the programme of work. They must be able to justify why each piece of work is important to the long term return on investment of ecommerce to the organisation.

Prioritisation
All of the above lead into prioritisation of effort and resource allocation – which is fundamentally different between a project manager and a programme manager. The programme manager must have the ability to override a project manager’s plan for the ‘greater good’ of the ecommerce programme of work and delivering the maximum value to the business.

In summary, there are significant differences in both roles and as the key stakeholder of the you need to decide which one(s) you really need to ensure all your initiatives are a success in the long term.

Increasing customer value on travel websites

Having worked on a number of travel sites in my career, it is surprising to see that some travel companies still aren’t looking to maximise online customer value at every opportunity.

However, there are different ways of doing this online, each with their own merits, approaches and supporting technologies:

1. Increasing customer revenue per transaction

This is the strategy of trying to get as much out of each online customer order as possible. In ecommerce terms this is known as AOV (Average Order Value) and is a key metric that most travel websites live & breath.

The enabler of this maximisation is a decent user experience within the booking process that should give the visitor enough information to make all the booking decisions they need and presenting the relevant opportunities for:

• up-selling: trying to get the customer to order the better option of what they have selected (e.g. room upgrade)
• cross-selling: trying to get the customer to buy additional items that enhance their stay (e.g. car hire, excursions, etc.)

2. Increasing customer revenue per complete booking cycle

Once the customer has done their booking and left the site, that’s not the end of the sales relationship with them… that’s the beginning. The opportunities to increase the value from each customer will depend upon their budget, circumstances and how they want to spend their holiday (relaxing, touring, playing badminton, etc.). But failing to recognise these opportunities is potential lost revenue and may actually mean the customer misses out on something they didn’t know about.

The two enablers of this activity are:

1. Marketing to the customer and informing them of the relevant opportunities you offer (e.g. via email, telephone, etc,)
2. Allowing the customer to return to the site to easily upgrade and to incrementally buy items they want by themselves.

Care should obviously be taken not to bombard your customers with too much or unnecessary messaging and don’t forget that each different type of person will be have their own decision cycle/timings.

Hint: The idea is to understand these different customer types and be able to market to them in a better & better revenue-generating way as they lead up to their eventual stay.

Also, you have to make the self-service functionality of you website easy enough to be used by anyone… if it becomes a complex application that only a travel agent with a PHD* could understand, then you will unsurprisingly find that this service isn’t used very often. (* and there aren’t too many of them around)

3. Increasing lifetime customer value

A person booking with your site once is a sale, a person booking twice is a retained online customer. In my experience, marketing to the retained travel customers is usually easier than marketing to a new customer…. They have previously used your services and you know information about them that will help you speak to them in more relevant and effective way (assuming they didn’t get a completely negative experience previously).

Therefore it should be in very travel website’s interest to encourage existing customers to book more often that they currently do and to try to increase their order value each time. Eventually you should get to calculate / measure the value of a customer over the entire time they want to do business with you (their CLV or customer lifetime value )

For this you need to consider using CRM systems and processes which pull together customer information such as purchase history, AOV, etc. and then need integration into online systems for personal emails, etc.

The value of an email address

"What's each customer email address worth to you?" I asked a client a year or so ago, when we were discussing their future email marketing plans. We then set-about finding out the Lifetime Customer Value of the company's email database (and further important calculations). In other words, we tried to model the revenue per email address over time, with some interesting learnings along the way.

These days its not effective enough to measure just the cost of each campaign and work out the average revenue per email... You have to have a good idea of the total worth of these accounts and try to understand the customer buying profile(s).

To take the stress out of calculating this yourself, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have done this work for you . They found on average that an email address is valued at £9.11

However, its should be remembered that:

1. This research was done in late 2006 / early 2007, so you need to amend this according the the rate of inflation over time
2. This is only an approximate average from a number of companies in different sectors, therefore it is probably a good thing to do your own modelling and mathematics

Wake up and smell the coffee journalists

Michael Skoler from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard (who collectively know a thing or two about this subject) has recently written a very interesting article on "Why the News Media Became Irrelevant and How Social Media Can Help"

I'll not go into too much detail, but this paper starts in a tone that many old hacks will be concerned about:

Journalists are truth-tellers. But I think most of us have been lying to ourselves.

He covers the inconvenient fact that journalism has no business model if it cannot provide something that people value or enriched their lives.. and perhaps the discussion should stop there?

Link value

Following on from my post last week about hyperlinks being the new currency, I read with part-amusement and part-interest this article from Mike Masnick on TechDirt about calculating the value of a hyperlink.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090418/1715314550.shtml

Mike explains how some links are more valuable than others (agreed) but then references Fred Wilson's article that personally passed links are more valuable than others.

Whilst I've no arguement that we need to look at the whole value of a hyperlink, I'm not convinced that the only difference is if ahyperlink has been referred between two people. What about: authority, SEO, immediate value, lifetime value, etc?

However, the link source (where people obtain their links from) could be an additonal parameter to measure, if that information is available.... food for thought thought?