6 Tips for Marketing to Millennials

via Practical Ecommerce http://ift.tt/18VGVXd

DECEMBER 31, 2013 • MARCIA KAPLAN

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Millennials are the roughly 65 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 34, a coveted demographic for brands and merchants. They spend a lot of money, even if they have little discretionary income. See“Ecommerce Merchants Should Not Ignore Older Shoppers,” my recent article, for additional information on the relationship between baby boomers and Millennials.

Characteristics of Millennials

Most Millennials are college-educated. They have an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent — counting those who have dropped out of the labor force and are no longer looking for work. A substantial number are underemployed, working only part-time. Yet their spending habits do not reflect their financial reality. Most are not interested in saving.

While Millennials spend heavily on clothing, food, electronics, and entertainment, they often have little interest in owning houses or automobiles. Online shopping is certainly more convenient than purchasing at brick and mortar stores if one does not own a vehicle and Millennials are very comfortable doing a substantial amount of purchasing online.

Fifty two percent of them are more likely to make an impulse purchase than older shoppers, according to Hanover Research. Seventy eight percent of Millennials are more likely to select a merchant with a loyalty program than one without such a perk. Though many brand manufacturers and retailers fret that Millennials exhibit no brand loyalty, these shoppers will continue to show interest in a brand that continually rewards them. It also helps if their friends and influencers provide buzz on social media sites about a particular brand.

Millennials are typically voracious users of coupons and always look for deals before purchasing. “Millennial shoppers have the lowest shopping conversion rate because they are the most selective as well as the most economically challenged,” according to Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of The NPD Group, which published a study on millennial shopping this summer.

Mobile devices and social media are an integral part of their lives and they rely heavily on both for product and price information. According to a survey conducted by Research Now, 58 percent of millennial respondents acknowledged engaging in showrooming, nearly 10 percent more than older shoppers. And over 19 percent of millennial shoppers have been in a store and purchased an item via their mobile phone from a different retailer while still in the store, twice the rate of all other respondents.

According to the Google 2013 Holiday Shopping Intentions Study conducted in September 2013, 95 percent of Millennials planned to use the Internet as a holiday shopping resource and 88 percent of all Millennial smartphone owners planned to use their devices for holiday shopping this year (versus 67 percent of smartphone owners over age 35). Millennials both research and purchase via mobile devices at a higher rate than older shoppers.

6 Tips for Merchants

• Millennials desire a seamless shopping experience so make sure your site design accommodates the same screen on all devices.

• Don’t spend money on television or print advertising. These media are mostly ignored by Millennials.

• As for social media, don’t rely solely on Facebook. Have a presence on all social media platforms. According to a study of female millennial shoppers, performed by Edison Research in November for social media solution provider NetBase, while Facebook is the most consulted social platform, it does not have the most influence over buying decisions. Blogs and message boards are most influential, followed by Pinterest and then Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Eighty three percent of 18 to 24 year olds say they consult at least one social media platform before purchasing a fashion item according to the Edison study.

• Provide plentiful information. Millennials don’t purchase without doing substantial research and, because they are underemployed, they have the time to browse.

• Make your marketing efforts visual. Millennials prefer visuals, especially in the accessory and clothing categories.

• Millennials want to feel special. They want brand manufacturers and retailers to court them. You can do that with promotions that show you are aware of their product interests. Personalized coupons and emails can make Millennials feel connected to a retail brand.

Does Social Media Impact Ecommerce Sales?

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61594-Does-Social-Media-Impact-Ecommerce-Sales

Black Friday online sales hit a record of $1.2 billion, according to published reports. But only a very small percentage of those sales could be attributed to social media, says an IBM report.

In analyzing traffic and sales from nearly 800 retailers, IBM found that only 1 percent of visits to ecommerce sites came from social networks. (To be clear, IBM’s measurements consisted of sales that could be directly attributed to traffic from social media — a “last click” from the social site to an ecommerce site.)

These findings are commensurate with a 2011 survey conducted by Practical Ecommerce, which revealed that 77 percent of responding merchants saw less than 5 percent of sales coming from social media.

Social Media’s Role in Customer Purchase Journey

If social media has little bearing on direct sales, then what purpose does it serve in the overall ecommerce sales continuum?

An article from Google Think Insights points out that social media does, indeed, play a role, albeit a supplementary one.

The article outlines four different segments where marketing channels fit along the customer path to purchase: Awareness, Consideration, Intent, and Decision.

Google divides the customer purchase path into four segments.

It refers to the first three as “Assisting” channels, which “build awareness, consideration, and intent earlier in the customer journey.” In each of the industries considered, including retail, social media functioned as a means to influence purchases rather than be directly responsible for them.

Social media assists in the purchase process.

5 Benefits Gleaned From Social Media

Despite not being a direct sales channel, social media can support ecommerce in the following ways.

• Promote brand awareness. One of the chief benefits social media provides is its ability to help retailers build brand awareness. A survey conducted by online marketing tools vendor Wishpond found that 89 percent of respondents said social media marketing generated more business exposure.

Due to its viral nature and ability to quickly and easily spread a message, brands that commit to regular posting of relevant content on social sites grow their base of fans and followers, and have ongoing interaction with them should, over time, expect to see an uptick in awareness.

• Help overcome customer reluctance to purchase. While customers still express some degree of confidence in advertising messages, that pales in comparison to their reliance on word of mouth, especially when it comes from trusted sources such as family and friends.

According the most recent Nielsen Trust in Advertising report, 84 percent of those surveyed said word of mouth was the most influential factor when deciding on a purchase. Consumer opinions posted online ranked third at 68 percent.

If “trust” is a potent factor in convincing consumers to purchase a product, through its focus on building relationships and fostering interaction, social media can serve as a channel to help consumers overcome their reluctance.

• Improve customer loyalty. In a day when customers are one click away from doing business elsewhere, the importance of increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value cannot be overstated.

By building relationships with new customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones via social networks, it stands to reason both will increase.

• Provide marketing insights. Even retailers who choose not to pro-actively participate in social media can benefit by listening to the groundswell of opinion expressed by consumers on such sites.

If it’s true that people trust recommendations and advice from other people online, then it behooves merchants to make a practice of hearing what these folks have to say about their brand, products and services.

• Support search engine optimization. In her Practical Ecommerce article, “SEO: 5 Reasons Not to Ignore Google+,” search marketing expert Jill Kocher cited a report from search marketing tools vendor Moz, which stated there is a correlation between higher search rankings and Google +1s.

“Though Google denies that +1s are an algorithmic factor in search rankings, some speculate that sharing content on Google+ has a causal relationship with higher Google rankings. As Google’s social network becomes more mainstream, we can expect its social signals to be incorporated into Google’s search algorithms,” said Kocher.

If that is the case, or soon will be, then social media participation merits consideration for SEO purposes alone.

Recommendations for Merchants

• Think Social, Not Shopping. Facebook and other social networks are “social” environments where people gather to share updates about their lives and interact with friends, not as a place to shop.

Merchants can still utilize the channel, but have to think differently about their approach. The experience needs to remain social, interactive and contextual. They should balance promotional posts with those that educate, inform and entertain, and put the needs and interests of customers above their own.

• Start with a Strategy. Merchants need to first determine the reason they want to participate in social media and what they expect the outcomes to be. Unfortunately, strategy is often usurped by tactics, leaving such outcomes uncertain.
• Establish Measurable Objectives. Even with a strategy in place, unless there are hard numbers associated with it in the form of measurable objectives, merchants may not be aware of social media’s impact on their business.

Objectives can fall under several categories including:

• Traffic from social media to their ecommerce site;
• Ratio of traffic from social networks to conversions;
• Number of fans and followers that represent their target market;
• Ratio of social media audience growth to overall sales;
• Ratio of social network engagement (comments, likes, shares) to sales;
• Number of repeat sales from customers connected to their brand via social media;
• Percentage of customer service inquires handled through social media as opposed to a traditional channels.

These represent but a few of the ways to tie social media to sales. For more insight, read the Practical Ecommerce article, “How to Measure Social Media Marketing; 3 Steps.”

Conclusion

Even though social media has not proven to be an direct sales panacea, the ability to build brand awareness, overcome reluctance, increase customer loyalty, provide marketing insights, and improve SEO makes it a worthwhile channel that merchants can use to influence purchase behavior over the long term.

Ecommerce Profitability: The Critical Second Sale

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61531-Ecommerce-Profitability-The-Critical-Second-Sale

Acquiring new customers is so expensive for retailers that it wipes out any profits from a first time sale. New analysis from my firm, SeeWhy, of data from Forrester and U.S. Census Bureau shows that on average 73 percent of online conversions come from first-time customers, but that these first-time conversions are not profitable due to the acquisition costs.

In contrast, the 27 percent of conversions that come from returning customers generate 41 percent of the revenues, and 100 percent of the profits. This mirrors work done years ago by Bain and Company and made famous by Fred Reichheld’s book, The Loyalty Effect.

There are several factors at play here.

• Returning customers spend more than first time customers.
• The cost of acquisition is born solely by the first purchase.
• Factoring in customer service, fulfillment, and returns eats into margins.

New shoppers generate an average 9 percent loss, due to the acquisition costs, compared with repeat shoppers who spend more and generate a 14 percent gross margin, on average.

However, it’s worth noting that even though new customer conversions are not profitable, they still make a contribution to overhead. A proportion of new customers will go on to become profitable returning customers.

Your own data will likely show some variation from industry averages. I’ve assumed a gross margin of 40 percent — some retail sectors are significantly more profitable than this, and others less — and I’ve also not amortized the customer acquisition cost across the expected lifetime purchases of a new customer. However, if this prompts you to do your own analysis, and consider tactics for securing the second sale, then it will have been a fruitful exercise.

So what tactics are important when it comes to getting the first and subsequent second sales?

Getting the First Sale

Getting ecommerce prospects to purchase for the first time is a topic that warrants a novel, but here are three essential tactics to focus on.

• Nurture new prospects: Remarketing, brand messaging, promise of service. Only 0.25 percent of new visitors buy — but if you can get them back to the site, your chances of securing a conversion go up 9 times. The reality of the conversion process is that each visitor is on a journey toward a potential purchase, spanning a sequence of visits to your site and others.

There is a huge temptation to view all visitors on a particular page as equal and to focus solely on conversion optimization of the page. Prospects behave differently from customers and have different needs. It’s also tempting to chase the holy grail of securing a conversion from the first time visitor. But it’s probably going to take a sequence of visits before your prospect is ready to purchase.

Nudging nervous prospects with reassuring brand messages via email helps drive new customers back to your site. This is best done using retargeted advertising and email remarketing, and the key to success here is to be 100 percent consistent with your brand and to promise great service.

• Build trust: Content, authority, social proof. You can build trust in your brand and purchasing experience with great site content. When writing content, step out of your shoes and into those of your prospect by giving objective advice about which products to buy so that you earn a trusted adviser status. Remember that new customers aren’t looking to be sold, they are looking for confirmation that your proposition is a good fit.

Social proof in the form of reviews, testimonials, number of products sold, and authoritative reviews by independent third parties, are all critical for building trust in both your products and the brand and service that go along with it. Don’t forget to feature reviews and testimonials about your service — they may have decided to buy the product, but not yet decided whether to buy it from you.

• Make it easy: Phone numbers, free shipping and returns, payment methods. Studies consistently show that consumers seek free shipping and free returns above all other promotions. Easy returns are of particular concern to first time customers who have no experience with your brand or customer service. If you can’t offer free returns then make the process transparent and as easy as possible. Don’t bury this information on your site or hide your phone number, which only deters nervous prospects from purchasing from you. A prominent phone number goes a long way in reassuring a prospective customer that you will be easy to contact when something goes wrong. Ensure you have thought through your payment strategyas it has a big impact on mobile conversions, in particular.

The purchase process should be easy and intuitive. Read Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think and consider your own site experience while wearing the shoes of a prospective customer.

Getting the Second Sale

Again, I’ve picked three tactics, out of many, to focus on in securing the second sale.

• Deliver exceptional service. We know that customers choose to spend with you again based on both price and previous experience. So it’s critical that first time purchases go off smoothly, and you should use any hiccups as opportunities to deliver exceptional and memorable service. These are the “moments of truth” that cement a relationship with your brand and lead to brand advocacy and future purchases.

Since the first purchase is unlikely to be profitable, you may encounter resistance internally to spending money on outstanding service. This is why understanding where the profit comes from is important. Leading ecommerce companies know this. It’s not a coincidence that Amazon is the largest ecommerce retailer and also has the highest customer satisfaction score.

• Get customers browsing your products on their tablets. Tablets are increasingly being used for recreational shopping, so take a page from the catalog companies’ playbooks and link the pleasure of browsing catalogs with easy online purchases. There are massive online conversion benefits from having customers research your product catalog at leisure on their tablets. If you were planning on building a tablet app soon, you might want to reconsider and look at digital catalogs instead as they are more in line with what customers want when shopping recreationally. Or, focus your efforts in having a stunning tablet shopping experience that recognizes the recreational nature of how many consumers are starting to shop — in the evenings from the couch.

If you’ve not yet investigated digital catalogs, they can be produced cheaply and will drive high-quality traffic to your site that spends more. Put this on your to do list, or read my previous article, “Do Digital Catalogs Drive Conversions?” to learn more.

• Keep email communications relevant. Simply adding new customers into your email program will keep your brand message in front of them but does little to build a relationship. Instead, think about triggered email programs that are more relevant, including leveraging recommendations on the purchase confirmation, soliciting for post-purchase reviews, and real-time triggered emails based on products and categories browsed. All of these techniques increase the probability of securing future purchases.

Conclusion

Examine your own numbers so that you have a clear picture of profitability for new and returning customers. The tactics above offer some opportunities to improve first and second time conversions. Actually making changes that improve the new customer conversion experience can be challenging. But hard data tends to win the day and offer objectivity that allows you to make much better informed decisions.

Digital Marketing And Analytics: Two Ladders For Magnificent Success

via Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-analytics-ladder-step-by-step-success/

The most common mistakes digital practitioners and leaders make is to either do things in the wrong order, or to try and do too much at one time.

Progress in digital marketing and analytics in either scenario becomes painful (the organization / systems / thinking is simply not in the optimal position). People become frustrated (you hire smart people, they run off to build you the Taj Mahal, meanwhile you don't have a functioning toilet). Business results suffer.

There is something in humans that makes us want to do the hard things, to shoot for the most complex right away, to want to be challenged to infinity. In many cases, it is a tendency we have to learn to restrain.

More often than not, magnificent success results from executing a business plan that is rooted in a strong understanding of the landscape of possibilities, and a deep self-awareness of business capabilities. These business plans will contain a structured approach, do this, then do this2, then make sure we are really good at this3, then this 4 and so on and so forth.

In other words: Evolution. It works.

Said another way, digital revolutions more often than not fail. One day your leadership realizes you stink at digital (all of it or just Facebook or search and display or mobile or whatever). They find the closest industry leader (L'Oreal, Booking, Zyrtec, Innocent Drinks, CSC Consulting). They say: "Do whatever we need to in order to get there in 90 days. Go!!"

If you hear that, run. Else you'll be standing in a place where a flaming crater will appear in the near future.

I'll be the first to admit that selling evolution is hard. Revolutions just sound so darn sexy! Still, reality is reality.

In this post I want to arm you with the evolution you should undertake in your companies when it comes to marketing and analytics. Additionally, I'll make the hard tough difficult painful choices on your behalf and order things to deliver the highest possible impact, so you'll know exactly what to do and what you will get from it all.

In other words: Two inspiring ladders of awesomeness for you! One for digital marketing and one for digital analytics.

Your ladder might look a little different, but I hope the process I follow will help you make the hard choices most relevant for your company and the evolutionary position it finds itself in.

Ready?

Digital Marketing: Ladder of Awesomeness/Sustainable Success.

My current title is Digital Marketing Evangelist so you can just imagine how absolutely excited I am about all the digital possibilities. Owning audiences, instead of just renting them. Earning time, instead of just buying it on TV. Creating persistent relationships, instead of just transient ones. Not letting budgets limit our creativity. And so much more. I'm like a kid in a candy store. I want to do everything right away. I want to go from single cell life to fully formed homo sepians in seven days.

I've also discovered that that is the easiest path to failure. : )

So, based on my spectacular successes and painful failures around the world, I've developed a ladder of sustainable success. Here is what it looks like:

Let's look at each step on the ladder in some detail.

The very first thing you want to do is create an acceptable website. One that reflects the customer expectations of 2013. A good example, for e-commerce and non-ecommerce sites, is http://www.csc.com/. Look at the colors. Look at the icons. Look at the way the text is laid out, how video is incorporated, the structure of the site and everything else. Your first job is to beat them at everything. During this stage you should also invest a lot in Search Engine Optimization. You will have great content, in a good experience, and focus on getting free traffic.

[To learn more about the Do in stage one please review my See-Think-Do-Coddle framework for content, marketing and measurement.]

Second, create the world's greatest mobile experience. Yes. Don't do paid search. Don't run to buy display ads. Definitely do not start Tweeting or embarrassing your brand on Facebook (we'll do that in a bit). Focus on the mobile experience. Because of this lovely graph from Business Insider and it's representation platforms people use to visit top destinations….

Scary, right? Exciting, right? Focus on mobile like crazy, tablets in particular. Beat CSC's experience. BeatMotrin. Beat Beneful. Don't be like IBM's tablet experience (old, substantially brand negative). Or Ford (it is amazing that in 2013, for such an expensive product, it looks so…. 2005).

Now that you have build a decent foundation and are getting a decent amount of free traffic you know what is working and what is not, you are ready to move to step three. Start investing in your email marketing strategyfor extending relationships, and your paid search strategy for brand terms. Email allows you to start building aowned audience that you can (if you don't stink) start relying on (rather than constantly having to rent them from TV or Google). People typing a million variations phrases with your brand terms are looking for you, make sure you show up and capture the traffic you deserve.

Step four is focusing on expanding your reach to new relevant audiences. The cool part about display advertising is that we can build our brands cost effectively, introduce our products to a new audience, and create demand based on a number of intent signals (this last part is often missing from offline media). Based on what people read, what sites they've visited, their demographic and psychographic signals and so much more. Don't go all crazy with display ads, just focus on your brand, products and services. Learn, get better, try some more.

The site is now working well across platforms, we are starting to get a lot of free and some paid traffic, we are optimizing for conversions and task completion rate, time to move to step five in the ladder and focus on creating micro-outcomes on our website. Here is what it looks like for the Venetian hotel and casino in Macao:

In orange is the macro-outcome (number of casino room reservations), in purple are the micro-outcomes. All clustered into See-Think-Do. Less than two percent of people on your website will complete the macro-outcome (conversion). Having a robust cluster of micro-outcomes allows you to deliver something of value to the other 98% and establish a relationship with them (and get some economic value in exchange!). The smartest companies in the world are very good at this, step five. It does require working with your CMO, VPs, Directors, IT, Offline Sales, UX, IT, and more people than you could ever imagine. It is worth it.

Time to start kicking things up a notch in step six. Start investing in creating the world's most beautiful, functional, brand-enhancing, customer joy inducing website! You have content, you have traffic, you have micro-outcomes, you are making loads of money. Invest in the site experience now to differentiate yourself from the competition, and create irrational loyalty. Beat Bonobos (I. Love. Them!). Beat L'Oreal (except for their irritating 40 question survey in a single long window, they are nearly flawless). Beat Palms casino (try booking, try the menu, try anything, pretty awesome all around).

You are a big company and you can do two big things at one time. Now is also the right time to start investing in Facebook and YouTube. These two social platforms (eschew others at this point) allow you to learn how to earn attention in two different form factors. In both cases you'll learn quickly that pimping is the best way to fail. Expressed by me on behalf of all humans on earth: The world's greatest social media strategy: 1. Entertain Me 2. Inform Me. 3. Provide Utility. Nothing else works. Learn that in step six.

[Bonus: Facebook Marketing: Best Metrics, ROI, Business Value ]

Now that your earned, owned and paid media strategies are in full swing, and you are the proud owner of the world's greatest desktop and mobile website, let's focus on enhancing your ability to get a massive audience.(Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod)

Step seven is to to build out an incredible category/industry/ecosystem targeting Search and Display strategy. This will result in you getting magnificent at brand marketing, at the See and Think stages. The result will be an even larger owned audience, less getting into dog-eat-dog Do stage fights. You'll have complete spectrum of coverage, being there from understanding customer intent at the earliest stages and converting that into demand for what you have to offer.

From step five on you were likely already delivering some multi-channel value for your company. Some of your micro-outcomes were likely already connected to your offline existence (maps, phone calls, offer redemptions, etc.). Now in step eight, we really kick things up multiple notches when it comes to creating a truly fantastic multi-channel (or the flavor of the month, omni-channel) execution engine.

The picture above is from my first book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, from page 235. It is a part of multi-channel analytics chapter.

There is a lot of difficult work to be done (systems, processes, integrations, optimizations) in order to ensure that your digital existence is driving nonline value. Now is the time to undertake that work. Not in step three. Definitely not in step one. Now. Step eight (after you've gotten the first seven things done).

The last step before nirvana, step nine, is to focus on getting better at loyalty marketing. (Cartoon by Tom Fishburne)

My definition of loyalty marketing, from the Coddle-stage, is to create unique content and to execute targeted marketing for those people/business entities, who have purchased from you two times or more. I have a higher standard for who our customer is. Not the person/business entity who's purchased from us once (they might not have had a choice), but the entity that's purchased from us twice at least (because the second time they made a choice to do business with us). Have a completely separate and focused set of people and work to deliver joy and delight to these entities. It is the only recipe for long term sustainable success.

Now you know the nine steps to nirvana. And you know exactly the order in which you should consider prioritizing your efforts. If you do step five before two, you can. But your success will be much more limited.

Understand the choices that resulted in what you are supposed to do in each step, then customize this, using the choices above, to create your own step ladder to deliver amazing digital marketing success to your company.

The cool thing about the web is that you don't have to do all of the above based on faith, you have a BFF in data! Let's go there.

Digital Analytics: Ladder of Awesomeness/Sustainable Success.

If you open your copy of Google/Adobe Analytics or CoreMetrics or Webtrekk you'll notice that every single report has a gigantic number of metrics in it. And…. they have many reports!

So on day one, as soon as we get access to the digital analytics tool, we go all crazy. Not only do we puke out a lot of data to every breathing human up and down the chain of command, we treat every bit of data with equal importance. The first part is frustrating, the second part is deadly.

Regardless of if you are a B2B or B2C or A2Z company, regardless of if you are big or small, regardless of how great you think you are, I believe you can benefit from taking one step at a time when it comes to ensuring that data analysis drives business value. It might seem sacrilegious to suggest that you should worry about Visits first and not Profitability, but that is exactly what I'm going suggest because when we overshoot our capabilities, we fail to hit even our local maxima (forget about ever hitting the global maxima !).

My assumption is that everyone on this blog is smart enough to balance for focus and ensuring the company stays a viable entity as it climbs each step in the ladder of success. Hence none of you will mis-understand that recommending a focus on CPA in stage four means you run the company to the ground because you ignore business fundamentals!

[A tiny hidden agenda I have in this post is to share how to make hard choices. You can imagine how difficult it is to say focus on page depth, don't focus on conversion rate, or don't worry about any content metric, focus on clicks. It seems crazy. But a big part of being successful is being able to understand business reality and have the skill to make these hard choices. I hope you'll pick up a couple of tips about making those choices.]

Ready to read something outrageously controversial? ; )

Focus on Visits and Click-thru Rates first. Don't do anything else. Nothing. Just Visits and CTRs. Focus your analysis on looking at dimensions that help you understand where your precious visitors are coming from, if you are doing any kind of inbound marketing (in the digital marketing ladder I recommend SEO in stage one) then what is getting more clicks and what is not. Optimize for Visits and CTRs will help you focus your precious energy on certain geographies, certain referring sources, certain keywords, certain digital activities and optimize to get higher clicks. A very good thing in stage one.

Now that people are showing up, we are ready to see what content they are consuming and how well/badly our welcome pages are doing. Focus on Bounce Rates ("I came, I puked, I left!") to help you optimize your landing pages and the sources driving traffic to those pages. Calls to action, text, graphics, offers, bids, ad text, targeting and more. Your job is to get in front of the right person, get them to the right page, and entice them to stay.

In stage two also focus on Pages per Visit, or Page Depth, (don't use time on site, it is problematic) as in the sample table above. This will help you optimize both for mobile and desktop experiences.

It is time to make some money in stage three. (See what I mean by making tough choices? Obsessing about making money first will cause your company to make the wrong choices initially. Just make sure you are not losing money, then obsess about it only in stage three.) For B2B companies Macro Outcome Rate is related to lead generation, for B2C it is often the e-commerce Conversion Rate. Additionally in stage three focus on Page Value, with it you are not only optimizing for content consumption (stage two) you are also optimizing for which content most creates revenue. Then zero in on that content and people/teams inside the company that create that content.

Your business is now humming on all three of the initial key things you need to do for acquisition, behaviorand outcome. In stage four become an insane fanatic about extracting the highest possible value you can from every dollar you are spending on marketing and advertising. Focus on optimizing your Cost per Acquisition (CPA).

This will not only reduce cost, if you do it right, it will force your company to invest more in activities that improve shareholder value and kill the shiny objects that our management teams chase due to advice from "marketing gurus." This effort is so important that I want you to focus on it singularly (unlike all other stages).

Stage five, as in the case of our digital marketing ladder of success, calls for stepping up our level of sophistication. Focus on cart and checkout abandonment rate (don't combine the two). Go buy a simple A/B testing tool (Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely), go crazy optimizing every little thing to take money from the people who want to give it to you! It is also time to become more sophisticated about identifying the value of your marketing spend, focus on the Assisted Conversions metric (you'll find it in the Multi-Channel Funnels report). Make decisions based on last click conversions delivered AND the assisted conversions. Don't worry about attribution modeling yet. Just focus on the last column in that report, then optimize your campaign targeting, content and success measures.

We've nailed down what we are doing on our owned platforms, time to focus on our rented platforms. You are working very hard by this stage on Facebook, YouTube etc, stay away from awful metrics like Views, Likes, etc. So, in stage six, obsess about Conversation Rate and Amplification, two of my four best social media metrics ever.

The above metrics will force your company to use social for what social is really good at. Force them to execute my recommendation for greatest social media strategy: 1. Entertain Me 2. Inform Me. 3. Provide Utility.

Stage seven where you start to focus on the metric that differentiates losers from winners: Economic Value. We focus on all 100% of our visitors (not just the one or two percent that will convert), we will focus on all of the See-Think-Do-Coddle audience consideration stages. The surest way to do that is if we identify the micro-outcomes and the economic value each outcome adds to our business. This is so amazing because it will force your company to focus on what makes money now, what will make money 90 days from now and 9 months from now!

None of the above was really hard. Stage eight is hard! We are going to obsess about Profitability. Not just the fake "ROI" number in many digital analytics tool, but true profitability. At the very minimum, for a dimension you care about like campaign… Profitability = Revenue generated – campaign cost – cost of goods sold. You can add other costs if you have access to them.

Profitability is one of the main reasons I'm so excited about cost data upload into Google Analytics. Now you can measure what the actual amount of money each campaign/activity delivers to your business. You can do it for Bing, email, AOL ads, social, even SEO! You can finally see that the Conversion rate for Yahoo! ads is 10%, the Average Order Value is $200, compare it to Google ads conversion rate of 4% and Average Order Value of $100, and notice that the Profit per Order from Yahoo! is -$15 and for Google it is $163. #omg

Stage eight also includes improving the sophistication of analyzing the offline impact of our online activities.Multi-channel measurement and optimization. It is a long hard slog, but by the time you get to stage eight, you are ready, your company is ready, you are going to get so rich!

The last stage, stage nine, is also the most strategic and deadly awesome: Optimizing for customer lifetime value.

Asking you to wait until stage nine for LTV is like saying don't believe in Jesus until time x. It seems silly. It seems insane. The sad reality is that it takes a lot (from a data, people, process perspective) to be ready to optimize for LTV. But by this stage you've put all your ducks in the proper order, you've done your multi-channel optimization (and more critically data integrations required between your online and offline sources), you have moved away from considering cookies to be customers to changing your entire Google Analytics existence to focus on people (across devices, channels, online and offline). Now you are ready for LTV. And you are going to do it without frustration and with a huge fast impact on your business. [For more guidance see the LTV post and download the lifetime value model.]

Bish. Bam. Boom! You are there. You've achieved nirvana! : )

Closing Thoughts.

It is hard to have the discipline to systematically get good at one thing at a time. But evolution works spectacularly well. That is what we need.

It seems crazy that you are a large company with tons of people and money. Gosh, you have 25 people just in your digital analytics team and a two million dollar a year adobe analytics contract. Still, for all those people prioritize one stage at a time (while other things can happen, they just won't be a corporate priority), and move your company forward one stage at a time.

It is hard to get nine women to make a baby in one month.

I wish you all the best in climbing the digital ladder of amazing success.

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you agree with the step-by-step approach? Would you change any stage in the digital marketing ladder? Perhaps do Email before SEO, or Social as stage one? How about the analytics ladder? Would you make different choices in the order of the metrics? Is there a metric I'm over-valuing or completely missing from the ladder? If you've been successful getting your company to be good at many things all at one time, what's your secret?

Please share your perspectives, critique, life lessons, and insights via comments below.

Thank you.