Dave Chaffey: The Future of Online Marketing
Dave Chaffey has been in ecommerce since 1997. Previously working in IT, developing and then managing business software, Dave is now recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of the 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who has shaped the future of marketing.
Dave, thank you for agreeing to let RedEye ‘interview’ you! You began your career in Managing Business Software and are now recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of Marketing. Isn’t that a bit scary!?
It’s definitely more of a positive than a negative. I’m honoured to be alongside the likes of marketing legends like Kotler and Porter. It does maybe add some pressure to keep at the cutting-edge of developments and keep providing useful insights; but that’s what I enjoy.
As someone with a foot in academic and commercial work, how important do you think academic models are for online optimisation?
For me, academic frameworks are only valuable if they can be applied to the commercial world. They are certainly valuable in giving a structure to reviewing customer behaviour, developing strategies or reviewing online performance. But I think applying common-sense and practical experience are more important.
If you were in charge of online marketing for a major UK brand today, what would be your number 1 priority?
Great question. The biggest challenge for brands online is how and where to engage their audience with relevant content and experiences. Online engagement is a huge challenge since it must integrate multiple online and offline touchpoints across different searches and site visits. That’s why I call my blog “Right Touching”! Engagement doesn’t only apply to initial purchase or site visits, but involves continuing to stay relevant to a customer through email marketing and community interaction. Different audiences want to interact in different ways.
In your view, who does ‘good email marketing’ and why?
Many companies miss the opportunity of email monitoring to address, track and follow-up individual customers as part of a communications strategy. I admire all companies who had the foresight to resource projects outside their frenetic campaign strategy and develop a communications strategy which welcomes and engages customers through structured rules to help deliver relevance.
Do you see any gaps in what is offered by vendors and agencies in online marketing today?
For 10 years now I’ve used web analytics tools and specialist tools for tactics like email and search marketing. I’m amazed about how little some of them have evolved. I, like a lot of other analysts, still spend a lot of time exporting data into Excel, integrating and aggregating it! There’s a tendency in the software industry to copy features from others and the same is true for websites within a marketer. Doing more customer research, thinking out-of-the box and looking beyond the sector will often give a better customer experience.
I think Google Analytics was such a great leap forward in experience and value for optimisation. It went back to basics centring around tasks needed to review and improve a site.
The big weakness of most analytics systems for web and email is their inability to analyse and visualise customer behaviour through time across multiple channels. For example, most email analysis packages only show point-in-time campaign response, not integrated recency-frequency-monetary value reports.
What do you think is the ‘next big thing’ online?
I’m often asked this and it’s tricky to answer since, as I think William Gibson famously said, “The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed”. So I would always look to startups and high-tech brands to identify future trends.
Everyone is hungry to find out what’s new and try new approaches. It’s why many of us enjoy working in digital marketing. But better results will mostly be achieved by applying existing approaches better and this is often hard graft. There is definitely a tick-box mentality – we need Facebook, tick,;Twitter, tick; Video, tick – but the reality is, the best returns will always be from using the existing, primary channels like search and email better. So I could talk about developments in social media, mobile, video or the semantic web, but I just don’t think they are big in terms of impact for most brands. Sure they can boost niche startup companies, but not the type of established brands I work with.
I was discussing this recently with a marketer for a travel brand, and their focus was “back-to-basics” simply making the key channels such as search and email work better in integrating with the site and offline activity. And this isn’t simple; search, email and web can always be optimised more.
In your opinion, what proportion of online businesses have optimisation as a marketing function?
I’ve talked for years now about the potential of using optimisation software and analytics for digital marketing optimisation and automation and it’s becoming more widespread. The availability of free tools such as Google Website Optimiser has certainly helped. But success is not so much down to the tools; it’s more about the culture. From the earliest days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos developed a “cult of analytics” such that all decisions about experience and merchandising were based on testing and analysis. This is the main difference between companies who do and don’t execute digital marketing effectively. Leading companies are top of their category in Hitwise; having a well-known brand will help online performance, but it will only get you so far.
And finally, optimum conversion rates are the Holy Grail of online marketers. What are your top 3 tips for improving conversion?
1) Segment: Conversion varies dramatically for different audiences referred to a site via affiliates, display, search and direct (just to mention a few).
2) Route the best landing page: Look at bounce rates to see which is best for a given keyword (a category, product or search results page).
3) Optimise your top landing pages by volumes: Relevant titles and product information are an obvious must, but I find that many companies don’t differentiate their offer as a brand, failing to address the “why us” question.
