Two-way communication: The key to making online marketing work

The old notion that marketing initiatives run themselves has no place in web-based marketing and retailing, Michael Crotty, vice president of marketing for NeimanMarcus.com, told attendees at the Annual Catalog Conference Tuesday. “People consider online advertising like print; you get it ready, send it out, then wait for results,” Crotty told attendees at the “40 Best Practices for Digital Marketing in 40 Minutes” session Tuesday morning. “But this is different. You have to manage it on a daily basis. It’s a change and it takes time for people to get used to it.”

One of the key ingredients of a successful online marketing campaign is constant communication, he said. The retailer should lay out expectations, then constantly monitor results and let the marketing partners, such as a portal or search engine, know whether it’s meeting those results. If not, online marketing is such that the parties can make immediate changes to the campaign to create the results they want.

Such constant monitoring is the reason that Bluefly Inc. has re-aligned its marketing department, Ken Seiff, CEO, told the same session. Bluefly has increased its marketing staff from three to seven, Seiff said. The growth was the result of a desire to assign specific marketing duties to each staffer, Seiff said. So now there’s one marketer whose job is to manage affiliate relationships, another who manages only search engine marketing, two who manage the e-mail marketing function.

The ability of a marketer to focus on a particular technique has resulted in immediate benefits, Seiff said. “We saw a 200% to 300% lift within weeks of putting people on it,” he said. “It’s not that we are doing anything so much better, it’s just that when you put a smart person—even an entry level person—in a room with your marketing partner, things are going to happen.”

He added: “It kills me that we didn’t do it sooner because it makes such a good ROI.”

Deborah Levinger, director of MSN Shopping, who moderated the panel, underscored the importance of dedicated staff to monitor the campaigns and communicate with partners. She recounted the story of a retailer customer who was spending $1 million with MSN but was not getting the results it expected. When she asked executives who was the liaison with MSN, they replied that there wasn’t one. She reported that she went back to the salesperson and suggested that Microsoft reduce its pricing by $50,000 so the customer could hire someone to manage the campaign at the retailer side.