INCREASING ONLINE CONVERSIONS AS MEDIA COSTS INCREASE

Online marketing is an important weapon in the marketer's arsenal, but now that we're all here, what should we be measuring to maximize our online investment and convert clicks into sales? Tony Kelly, Marketing's editor-in0chief, sat down with some of Hong Kong's heavyweights to hear what they love, and hate, about the online platform.

Last Picture (Page 4)

This Marketing Roundtable was sponsored by Interwoven.

The Lunch Box - BOX OUT 2 (Just above the last picture on page 4)

THE LUNCH BOX

Starter

• DUCK FOIE GRAS AND GREEN LENTIL SALAD IN BRITTANY OYSTER FOAM

Main Courses

• SCOTTISH SALMON "A LA PLANCHA" WITH NOISETTE POTATOES, ROMAINE SALAD AND BEARNAISE EMULSION; or
• ROASTED RACK OF LAMB WITH TOMATO AND EGGPLANT CAVIAR, CHARLOTTE POTATO GRATIN IN NATURAL JUS

Dessert

• ROASTED PINEAPPLE NAPOLEAN WITH COCONUT MOUSSE AND CALAMANSI SORBET

Venue: Caprice @ The Four Season's Hotel, 8 Finance Street, Central Hong Kong

Quote #1 (Page 2)

"We have the ability to be dynamic and change things up as people interact with us."

Andrew Eldon, Standard Chartered Bank

Quote #2 (Page 4

"Of course measurement is important, but I would say it's still more of an art."

David Garceran Nieuwenburg, Sky Concepts Consultancy

The Protagonists

Matthew Eaton, Editor, Marketing Magazine

Tony Kelly, Regional Editor-in-Chief, Marketing Magazine

Siva Ganeshanandan, Marketing Director Asia Pacific, Interwoven

John Man, Business Development Manager, Interwoven

Natalie Bennett, Regional Head of Marketing Asia Pacific Fund Services, HSBC
Colet Ng, Head of Marketing and Telesales, CitiFinancial
Benjamin Grubbs, Regional Director of Interactive Media, Turner Entertainment Networks Asia

Brenda Lee, Marketing Manager, Friends Provident International

Andrew Eldon, eMedia Manager Corporate Affairs, Standard Chartered Bank

Christabel Cheng, Professional Marketing & Public Relations Manager, Johnson & Johnson Hong Kong

William Chan, Sales & Marketing Manager, Yick Fung Hong Cosmetic & Detergent

David Garceran Nieuwenburg, CEO, Sky Concepts Consultancy

TOP 5 BOX

TOP 5 ONLINE MEASUREMENT TIPS

• Clearly define and understand what you want to achieve online
• Identify and track the main key performance indicators that drive all your other online activities
• Improve your site and online offerings by studying your online customer's behavioral visiting patterns
• Study and compare the success of all your online marketing segments
• Be vigilant about keeping your content updated and relevant

Main Body Text

Tony Kelly, Marketing Magazine: I'd like to welcome you all to our very first Hong Kong roundtable, which is an event we do in Singapore pretty much once a month on different topics. It's an absolute delight to have you all here at our first Hong Kong one. Has everyone ordered? Good. Today we're raising the question about measuring your online marketing, and going around the table, I heard six times the word frustration [laughter]. Why don't we just start there? Let's get a few views of what's actually happening in the Hong Kong market in online.

William Chan, Yick Fung Hong: We are a very local brand of laundry powder. We are not doing much online marketing at the moment - it's a bit difficult to encourage housewives to get online [laughter]. Hopefully this will change soon, because a lot of primary and secondary schools request that the student's parents get online to communicate with them. So we are still in a stage to explore what we can do with online marketing.

Tony Kelly: For those of you who mentioned frustration, what is it exactly? When you talk about frustration, is it with generating traffic, with generating commerce online, with communications or engaging customers and creating that dialogue that everyone talks so much about since they coined the term Web 2.0? What is the most frustrating thing that holds you back? Who wants to start?

Christabel Cheng, Johnson & Johnson: I believe I'm the one who started with the word frustration [laughter].

Tony Kelly: Yes, you're to blame [laughter].

Christabel Cheng: The frustration we had before is that it was very difficult to attract the right target audience to our website, but that was two or three years ago. This problem is pretty much solved, but now the new frustration is how to keep them there, because most of our target audiences for the Clean & Clear website are teenagers. Teenagers' behavior is sometimes predictable, and sometimes totally unpredictable. One thing we're pretty sure about online communication is it seems to be the fastest way to reach those teenagers, and in the case that we can reach them it's a pretty cost effective way to do our advertising and viral marketing. But now that the website's been there for a couple years, we find that its stickiness is bad. We tried many things including banners, games, competitions, but because we are not generating sales directly from the online vehicle, it's pretty difficult to capture how effective it is when it comes to sales.

Colet Ng, CitiFinancial: Can they order online, or do you just direct them somewhere?

Christabel Cheng: We just direct them to all the drugstores, to the markets to buy. We did use e-coupons, but we found that they would download them, but then sometimes they would use them and sometimes they wouldn't, because price isn't a major issue for them.

Siva Ganeshanandan: How did you track the persons who downloaded the coupons?

Christabel Cheng: Those kinds of coupons are only available on the website and we can see how many were used from the retailers.

Tony Kelly: How deep have the sessions been to strategise exactly what you want to achieve with the site, exactly what you wanted the end result to be? Because I'm assuming it isn't just ‘give someone a coupon and go buy one item'.

Christabel Cheng: No, in fact we're trying to spread our new launches and information about our products to this group of teenagers as fast as possible. This is what we're trying to do.

Tony Kelly: So it was as much communication as sales?

Christabel Cheng: The coupons were just a way of getting their attention. But we know that if these kids come across a good bargain, they will tell their friends at school. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work.

Tony Kelly: Who else faces these stickiness issues?

Benjamin Grubbs, Turner Entertainment Networks: I think it's just the nature of operating a website. You can't really go into it expecting that on a continual basis you're going to have the consumer come to the site day in and day out. Some will come in through promotions, promotions will end. Then what? So if there's a strong substance to the site, there's more time to spend on that site. But I also think it has to do with how much the content or service resonates with who they are. I think online banking is pretty core day in and day out, so there's a need to go back to the site and do that, whereas if it's more casual content, you may be sucked in for a while, but it's actually expected that it's going to come down. So from a publisher's standpoint, how do you refresh the site and bring more services and offerings to the consumers?

Siva Ganeshanandan, Interwoven: I guess one of the frustrations is tying that back. If it's online banking, or if it's generating leads from a site, or selling on the site, it's more straight forward to track it. But how do you track from ‘people are coming' to then ‘are they buying something in my shop?' For you, how is it? How to you track the value of the user engagement on their site?

Benjamin Grubbs: If you're completing the purchase online it's quite easy. If it's actually happening offline then you're talking about vouchers and codes and some of the companies have gotten to the point where they've actually produced cards that have member id verification that transfer to online, so you can send them e-newsletters, and when they're in the retail setting actually know exactly what they're buying.

Andrew Eldon, Standard Chartered Bank: The power of online metrics is that you should be able to measure conversion and the success for that conversion, by the traffic streams that are coming in. So we turn off the taps at the ones that are unprofitable or aren't converting very well and redirect spend into places that are profitable and converting well. For me that's the power of online. We have so much more control over who we're targeting and how we get them to behave by giving them different landing pages, different drivers to conversion and different questions for different behavioral types.

Tony Kelly: If you think of the financial and insurance brands, they seem to be better at online metrics than lots of other categories. But how much is there, across all categories, this mantra of people saying ‘online is more measurable' but not understanding how to measure it, not getting the metrics right or doing the right things with their data? Or is it just a perception of these frontline evangelists that ‘oh, yeah it's much more measurable'?

Andrew Eldon, Standard Chartered Bank: Yes it is more measurable, but only as long as you know what you're looking for. My frustration is very different to yours [Christabel Cheng]. Yours is about how your site is effective. Mine's about education. I don't believe there are enough people in our organization today who do understand the value of the metrics and what they should be looking for. So the big challenge for me is which ones are important.

Tony Kelly: Distill it down. At the top level, what do they want?

Andrew Eldon, Standard Chartered Bank: Yeah, what we need to look at is what are those two or three KPIs that drive everything. Which are going to deliver the most value? And they do have to be either some sort of online conversion or lead generation and then what are the drivers from that. In our organisation most people still think print. They'll put up a page online, and then that page just stays there: they don't test it, they don't measure the traffic to it, they don't do anything to it. We have the ability to be dynamic and change things up as people interact with us, but we don't yet - in a creative way.

Tony Kelly: If you had more money for online marketing, how would you spend it?

Natalie Bennett, HSBC: My current and previous marketing roles have been broad, in that I have managed the entire annual marketing budget. Budget can therefore be allocated to a wide range of marketing activities depending on your objectives. If there was a good case for allocating a larger spend to online marketing, I would use it to find out where we're losing people online. For example, if the key objective is online sales, it's important to understand where you're losing customers in the application process. There's a balance between making the application process as simple for the customer as possible and capturing the required data to fulfill regulatory or legal requirements. I would use the money for testing - in this case testing different online application forms. It's all about process optimization.

Siva Ganeshanandan, Interwoven: Has anyone tried testing what Andrew was talking about, this form against that form, or this landing page against that landing page?

Natalie Bennett: In my last role in Australia I worked in retail banking and yes we did test application forms and other online tools. Has anyone here tried A/B or multi-variate testing? I personally hadn't heard of these forms of testing at that time (some 2 years ago).

Andrew Eldon, Standard Chartered Bank: We did some.

Siva Ganeshanandan, Interwoven: We've seen a bit of A/B testing here, but multi-variate testing is quite new to the region.

Tony Kelly: It's interesting how it comes back to measurement. We can't grow online spend in the region until the will to measure it is there and strong robust and the systems we're using are comparable, so that you're measuring apples with apples.

Matthew Eaton, Marketing Magazine: I think another issue is, like in other more traditional media, there is still no consistent measurement platform, it's a problem online as well. A lot of agencies and media companies have their own metrics and tools, but it differs from agency to agency. There's no consistent standard.

David Garceran Nieuwenburg, Sky Concepts Consultancy: I have a slightly different point-of -view when it comes to metrics. When I was with ING the department there was very much inspired by the Blue Ocean Strategy book. One of the chapters there said forget about measurement, because if you're going to move into space that is so unknown, you better just follow your gut feeling and do what you think is good. We applied that literally. We never could have convinced our big boss to let us do it [laughter], so we told them we were going to launch something, and every time a person clicked on it we'd give two euros to a charity fund, and they said ‘oh, great!' We didn't tell him it was Facebook. Of course measurement is important, but I would say it's still more of an art.

Tony Kelly: Well guys, I'm afraid that's the end of the formal lunch. It's been very entertaining. I hope you've all gotten something out of it. I know I have. Thanks so much for coming, and to Interwoven for sponsoring.