From the Source

Thanks to the numerous ways marketers are contacting customers — and the many different ways customers are responding — it's sometimes harder than ever to figure out what's prompting buyers' behavior.

“The irony is that this is happening in an age where tracking can be done so precisely,” says Alan Rimm-Kaufman, president and CTO of The Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online retail consultancy.

In any given 12-month period, customers are mailed more frequently, and they might also receive an e-mail several times a month. Plus, they may search out a brand themselves on an engine like Google. “Technology gives more tracking options, but there's more marketing. So it's harder to track what actually drove a particular order,” Kaufman says.

“It's a challenge to know what came from what source,” agrees John Seebeck, DM business director at Crate & Barrel.

Of course, all channels work together in a promotional sense. Nancy Fischman, L.L. Bean's director of customer planning and acquisition, notes that the retailer has few Web-only products. “They don't do well,” she says. “They need the promotion of the catalog.”

L.L. Bean has a high capture rate of ZIP codes in retail stores and is testing new concepts, including opening several stores that are much smaller than the Freeport, ME flagship. The company does seasonal match-backs but when the catalog is mailing heavily, sometimes it's tough to pinpoint the last point of contact, Fischman says. “If the last catalog mailed was a fly fishing book and the customer bought a woman's shirt, we don't match that sale back to the fishing book.”

Nordstrom did a hold-back campaign on catalogs and e-mails in an attempt to track those results, which enabled it to see the incremental value of each marketing vehicle, says Kevin Hillstrom, president of multichannel retailing consultancy MineThatData and former vice president of database marketing at Nordstrom.

Rimm-Kaufman says Wine Enthusiast put tracking codes at the bottom of its Web pages so telephone reps could ask customers for the code if they called in. Wine Enthusiast thought high-ticket items like wine cellars weren't doing well online. Actually, people were using the site as a research tool and then placing orders by phone.

Of course, tracking the genesis of online orders extends into the search arena. The value of branded vs. non-branded search should definitely be considered, says Coy Clement, president of ClementDirect, who — along with Fischman, Seebeck, Rimm-Kaufman and Hillstrom — spoke at the New England Mail Order Association's spring conference.

Indeed, says Rimm-Kaufmann, a search for an ‘L.L. Bean shirt’ is much different from a search for a ‘men's hunting shirt.’

“It's important to break out those results,” he adds.

But if you follow a particular customer's clickstream all the way back to the beginning, it often doesn't start with the brand, according to Seebeck. “I can almost guarantee that everyone who searches for ‘Bean’ got a catalog at some point, even if it wasn't recently,” Fischman adds.

A recent gift-card promotion — for every $50 spent shoppers received a $10 gift card — increased Bean's phone, Web site and search traffic.

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