Back by popular demand, the Adventures of Online Guy returns this time in a battle of life and death between himself and DM Gal. DM Gal of course reports to the villain from the previous adventure, Trad Gal.
DMGal - Hey online guy. We need to talk about your tracking.
OnlineGuy - Hold on a second. I need to finish this report.
DMGal - No we need to talk now especially before you publish that crappy report. We need to talk about your tracking and how you are stealing my widget sales.
OnlineGuy - Steal your widget sales? Listen, I haven't stolen anything unless of course if you count the time I rang up organic bananas as regular bananas in the self check out line.
DMGal - No you are stealing sales. You are counting all sales including what you call latent as yours. And, your latent sales are mine because I dropped a direct mail piece in the last month.
OnlineGuy - Look, just because I can count people that view or clicked on an ad and then within the next 30 days make a widget sale, doesn't mean I should ignore. Besides, what makes you think they are your sales? I spoke with my friend Barry over in customer care and they are still waiting for the first 10 calls from your crappy direct mail piece.
DMGal - Well because it isn't fair. You don't know for sure they bought a widget because of your advertising.
OnlineGuy - Well they clicked on an ad, went to our website which my group runs, and made a sale. Sounds like it belongs to me. Besides, maybe if your direct mail piece included a call action besides an inbound telemarketing number you could have counted more sales.
DMGal - Ummmm
OnlineGuy - And, don't forget I begged you to include an URL and your agency refused saying they didn't like the look of it in the piece. Maybe you should yell at them for a bad creatives and lousy targeting.
DMGal - well, <cough> maybe I could talk....
OnlineGuy - How about the next time you drop a DM piece we create a unique, short URL for your traffic and then you can get credit for any latent sales that visit the page. Also, we should discuss targeting strategy.....
Did this conversation really happen? Yes. DMGal ended up reporting to me and became one of my best marketing managers ever helping me to launch a paid search campaign with the company formerly known as GoTo.com (aka Yahoo Search) and Google when their PPC platformed launched.
Direct mail can still be a useful tactic. In fact, I launched a winback campaign at Harrisdirect using direct mail, outbound telemarketing, and email. A select group of non-internet believers (users but not believers), usually older, still respond to direct mail, so if you ignore that segment with an online only campaign you are really missing out. If only more direct mail marketers could see the light.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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