CJU Course: Consumer Shopping Trends: What makes them tick? What makes them click?
The Internet has become the main purchase path for many consumers so let’s uncover the latest trends and developments in online shopping and learn about what is making consumers click “Buy Now.” How are innovations in mobile, local, and social changing the shopping experience? What is the real impact of coupon and deal sites? Join us to discuss what is driving changes in shopping behavior, who is buying and why, and most importantly, how affiliates can continue to be at the center of these trends. The speaker was:
- Ronan Vance, Director, Business Development
This was a great last session to end on. It was chock full of information – if you were an attendee of CJU and didn’t get a chance to check out Ronan’s presentation, I highly recommend you access the CJUniverse for his presentation PDF. There’s so much more information in the form of great charts that I can’t really include here. I love it when presentations have lots of interesting stats, and Ronan sure didn’t disappoint!
Bullet Point Review!
- Where to buy? Lots of different ways to buy.
- The times they are a-changin.
- Early 20th century: personal, social, immediate, informative.
- Late 20th century: variety, experiential, social, immediate.
- Early 21st century: variety, convenience, transactional, informative.
- Understanding the online shopper.
- Buying more online, 30mil new shoppers online. 5.8% of total retail sales in 2010 (eMarketer). Forrester says if you take groceries out of the equation it’s more like 12%.
- Top reasons us shoppers will shop online: 24 hr shopping, easier to compare prices, free shipping offers, I don’t want to fight the crowds, more convenient to shop online, easier to find iems online, better variety online, I often don’t have to pay tax.
- Three hot trends that continue in 2011.
- Coupons
- Despite challenging economic conditions, people are still shopping online to get the best deal.
- More people are price comparison shopping and printing coupons online than looking for jobs.
- Couponing has become part of our culture.
- Maximize coupon usage: give choices, diversify placement, remove obstacles, promote sharing, go mobile.
- Adult mobile coupon users. About 19.8 mil today, est 35.6 mil by 2013.
- Daily Deals/Deals of the Day
- Fleeting, play into your emotion because people feel they need to take advantage of the opportunity that they’ll never see again.
- Groupon and LivingSocial have ~40% of the group/ daily deal market.
- Very social aspect. Over 80% of Groupon subscribers will share a deal in some way, shape, or form.
- 77% of deal buyers for Groupon, LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, Travel Zoo are new customers, 36% spent beyond the deal value, 68% returned to the establishment and bought again without a coupon, 20% became return customers, 22% were unredeemed (Source: Rice University Survey)
- Social local mobile (SoLoMo)
- F-Commerce? Commerce on Facebook.
- Discovery + eCommerce + community = future of F-commerce.
- Local apps (Foursquare, Gowalla): check-in, find deals, build loyalty, earn rewards, get instant gratification.
- Mobile: check stock, compare prices, find coupons, learn more, read reviews, shop online, phone in order.
- What’s next?: Informative, Experiential, personalized, social, immediate.
ad:tech San Francisco: Performance Marketing – Getting the Most from Your Marketing Dollar in a Tough Economy
Session Description: How can marketers get the most from their budgets in a difficult economic climate? We’ll explore how to attain more from a smaller budget via performance marketing with practical, tactical solutions. We’ll look at the pros and cons of allocating dollars to performance marketing and we’ll discuss what technological innovations are coming to the performance marketing space that will maximize budgets and minimize challenges.
This session took place Wednesday, April 22, 2009. The speakers:
- Neil Strother, Analyst, Forrester Research (Moderator)
- Peter Bordes, CEO, MediaTrust
- Steve Schaffer, Founder and CEO, Vertive
- Jarvis Mak, Senior VP, Global Research and Insights Director, Havas Digital
- Kelly Powers, Senior Manager, Customer Acquisition, Zazzle
This session was definitely geared towards those marketing and advertising professionals that are not already in the performance marketing game. It was very insightful to watch from that point of view in mind.
Bullet Point Review!
- Neil asks “What is performance marketing?”
- Paying only for results, whether those results are leads, referrals, a percentage of the sale. Advertisers get to determine how much they pay.
- You can leverage your affiliates to assist with your paid search efforts.
- You need to have good landing pages.
- What’s the real value of the actions being driven?
- What you’re paying for is marketing.
- Affiliates have more incentive to drive more qualified traffic and customers.
- Affiliates drive higher conversions, average orders.
- There’s three types of advertising, CPM, CPC, and CPA.
- Merchants only want to pay one touch point for the sale.
- There’s a mentality that affiliates are frowned upon; CEOs will be wary of the methods but CFOs will be excited about the value and efficiency of the channel.
- AM is very data driven – more money is shifted towards traceable marketing.
- Executives need to understand affiliate marketing; the whole industry is misunderstood.
- Industry is starting to get the data out and break through the black box and lack of transparency.
- Peter briefly explained what’s going on with the #advertisingtax to the crowd.
- A couple of states have been able to stop the #advertisingtax but it’s moving fast.
- Fraud has grown exponentially, especially in lead gen.
- Paying for leads welcomes fraud in som,e industries, ask yourself if you can pay for a different action.
- A major player will soon announce a ranking system (Peter couldn’t divulge who).
Points brought up during the Q&A
Is there a metric to show brand safety? No. It’d be nice to take the focus off the brand.- Yes you need brand awareness, but that’s not going to drive a sale. The best offer is.
- It’s not infinitely scalable; you can always throw more money at search, etc. but throwing more money at affiliate marketing doesn’t work because the core is the relationships.
- Amazing how much more some merchants pay on other marketing methods and channels over affiliate marketing.
- Advertisers need to do a better job at attribution to track the sales to the correct channels.
- Feel free to launch new products with affiliate marketing; it has worked in the past when done right.
- What are some practical takeaways?
- Continue to optimized
- Work on attribution
- Look at marketing channels as a holistic portfolio.
- Focus on better, fewer networks and don’t spread your program too think.
The Q&A portion wasn’t so much a traditional Q&A as it was a case study like discussion. The panel really wanted to help with real examples, and only one gentleman in consumer finance was willing to ask for assistance.
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