February 2008

Reroute consumers to your online destination
Online marketing can be a conduit directly to the point of sale. Here’s how to convert browsers to buyers. By Owen Sagness

There is no question that there are tough times ahead for retailers. Shoppers are facing budgetary challenges that will ultimately lead to changes in their behaviour. Navigating through this economic cycle and coming out stronger will require a deeper understanding of customers and their shopping habits. Marketers need to engage and remain relevant to their customer base who may otherwise switch brands, reduce their purchase freqhe Internet provides consumers with roads leading to products and services. Unlike out of home (OOH) and television advertising, online marketing is a conduit directly to the point of sale. The catch is that consumers tend to take the scenic route and make multiple stops along the way before visiting the online cashier.

Behavioural and demographic targeting drive consumers to your Web site and increase brand awareness and sales, however, in most cases nine out of ten people don’t get past the online check out line. This continual “tug of war” leaves marketers with a dilemma: How do you successfully redirect engaged consumers that have exited your site, back to the brand and point of sale? The answer: convert browsers to buyers with remessaging.

Reassess what they want to hear
Brands spend millions of dollars driving consumers to their online properties. However, what should marketers do about users who visited and left their Web sites without spending a dime? The bottom line: don’t give your competitors the chance to invade the conversation with your audience. Tell your customers what they want to hear - the second time around.

Remessaging acts as a multiplier and leverages all traffic – from display, search, and organic traffic sources - to continue a dialogue between the brand and consumers after they exit the site. Specifically, it allows advertisers to reacquire users by tracking actions and visited pages on their Web site via embedded code and cookies. The advertiser can then identify if elements such as price, delivery time and stock availability affected the consumer’s decision not to make the purchase.
Based on rich user data, remessaging ads target consumers and their needs by promoting offerings such as price, new products and bundles. This can be as simple as “target users who have visited my site” or as complex as “target users who have performed a pricing query”. The goal is to entice the consumer to revisit your site and complete the original transaction.

For example, consider a user who clicks on an airline’s display ad found at www.sympatico.msn.ca , visits the brand’s Web site and searches for a round trip to Ottawa. After rummaging through various seat sale options, assessing dates and even selecting the economy flight, the user arrives at the point-of-sale page but fails to purchase the ticket. How do you motivate the user to come back to the site and make the purchase?

By tracking the user’s visited pages and actions on the airline’s site, the advertiser determines that price played a pivotal role in the prospect’s decision not to complete the transaction. As a result, the advertiser then launches another display advertisement on the sympatico.msn.ca travel channel promoting the airline’s latest seat sale offerings on Canadian flights. The new advertisement, containing information that the consumer wants to hear, will redirect the user back to the original point-of-sale.

Reconsider your building blocks
While rich customer data is as valuable as navigating with a GPS, there are important factors marketers need to consider to ensure the remessaging campaign is a success.
Remessaging is not for everyone, but it works particularly well for advertisers with solid brand awareness, and robust Web sites that run multiple e-commerce pages. As well, it’s essential that marketers advertise on portals and networks visited by a majority of the online audience. This guarantees a high overlap between users on the brand’s Web site, and users on the network engaged with the advertisement and remessaging service. While ad generated traffic is essential to remessaging, it’s vital that the Web site support a high volume of users to generate robust data on the target audience. Additionally, throughout the sales funnel, the site needs cookies and tags that track behaviours and determine why the user failed to make the purchase.

Brands that use display advertisements with behavioural and demographic targeting create a solid framework for successful remessaging campaigns. Behavioural targeting hunts for qualified users to send to an advertiser’s Web site. These users are ideal remessaging candidates since they are interested in the brand and have even come close to making a purchase –they just require more specific information and messaging before signing on the dotted line.

Re-evaluating online conversations
Take a leading US telecommunications provider, for example. The company was looking for a way to increase online sales and continue a conversation with its target audience. Garnering over ten million unique visitors per month to its Web site, the Telco launched a beta remessaging campaign across the Microsoft network to reacquire departing consumers. The program targeted five per cent of the Web site’s audience and categorized the users into six segments based on behaviours and actions. The results were phenomenal. The Telco successfully achieved an average conversion rate of 2.4 per cent, with some rates reaching as high as 6.2 per cent, as a result of remessaging.

Seal the deal
The key to the Telco’s success was not turning back to mainstream traffic to acquire new users, it was re-evaluating the messages and targeting interested consumers.

Not everyone takes the express lane directly to your brand. However, it’s important that the dialogue continues with your most valuable consumers – beyond the initial introductions. Don’t let the competition invade your follow up conversations. Take an alternative route and give users the messages and directions they need to arrive at your final destination.

As general manager of Consumer and Online International for Microsoft Canada, Owen Sagness is responsible for driving the business strategy behind some of the country’s leading Web-based services under the MSN and Windows Live brands. These top ranked services in their respective categories include the Sympatico.MSN.ca portal, MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces. He is also responsible for continuing to build on the success of the Live Search service and for introducing the Microsoft AdCenter advertising platform in Canada.