Retailers wanting to improve ROI on their marketing spend need to ensure their offline advertising is measurable, accountable AND incorporates a way for the consumer to instantly respond anytime, anywhere. In this article, Gordon Ellis-Brown, Marketing and Brand Director at new payment channel txt2buy, explores the ways that marketing is becoming easier to measure.
Measuring the effectiveness of adverts with promotional codes and suchlike has been fairly standard in the world of direct response advertising for many years, but has been challenging to implement and under-utilised in offline advertising campaigns. I regularly come across retailers that are not effectively tracking their customers’ buying behaviour – they do not know how their advertising and marketing has influenced what they have bought.
The reality is that in order to really know your customer and understand your market, it is absolutely essential that retailers are fully aware of why their customers enter their store and why they are driven to purchase. Ultimately, a failure to incorporate tracking methods will contribute to lost sales.
I am a firm believer that through understanding the buying behaviour and measuring response to different media and campaign messages, particularly in the current climate where every piece of marketing has to be optimised to ensure survival, companies can maximise their existing spend and ROI.
Consumers are exposed to marketing messages and routes to market in more ways than ever before, from adverts on tubes and buses through to promotions embedded in computer games and iPhone Apps. Any savvy retailer mindful of budget and ROI needs to know which strategies will work for them and which won’t. If there is a way of better understanding which messages drive consumers to purchase with you, surely it is better to know than to remain in the dark?
The Mobile Revolution
For years, direct marketing through leaflet distribution and vouchers have been great ways to collect data. Customers would simply enter their details onto the back of the coupon to hand it over at the counter, after which the retailer will know where the customer lives and what they bought. As technology has evolved, the use of the internet has taken over and we see data capture every day in the form of newsletters, promotional codes, loyalty cards, user accounts and so on.
The next phase in the technology revolution is the utilisation of mobile for commerce. We are already seeing a surge in the number of retail related mobile Apps and technologies such as QI codes, scanning product bar codes via mobile entering the scene, but I believe the real innovation is about to come.
One of the drawbacks of smart phones, tablets and other modern devices is that you can only ever target that section of the market that has adopted that particular technology and in retail, your customer base may well be far wider than that. An ideal solution is one which didn’t rely on super-fast internet access or the latest mobile device, but could be used by anyone who had a basic mobile phone – which is actually 50 million customers across the UK.
A new solution that is now available to retailers is the ability to target any customer who possesses even the most basic of mobile phone and gives them the ability to instantly respond to an advert or marketing message and purchase the item then and there. Using existing technology already in consumers’ pockets, there is no upfront investment required and all retailers need to do is add a simple text code call to action to their existing advertisement or marketing campaign. Customers can respond via text message and after a basic registration, will be able to order their product in just a minute or two and it will be delivered direct to their home.
I believe that text campaigns are a much needed addition to any retail communications strategy and will help retailers to gain immediate traction from their advertising with a bigger audience then ever before, wherever and whenever they interact with their audience.
By Gordon Ellis-Brown
Marketing and Brand Director
txt2buy
www.txt2buy.com
