Case Study Summary new

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Description:

Dell E-commerce Background

million site visits to Dell.com per yearweb store across Europe with 9 different launguages

44% of online revenue is generated by online campaigns such as search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, display ad media buys. Their online marketing or communications mix for these online campaign-related sales is:

Affiliates – approx 30%In house search - around half (didn’t specify split but believe just PPC, SEO excluded from this?), E-mail rented lists around 20%Online advertising is remainder.

They see affiliates as Dell’s equivalent of a retail channel online.

Dell have a central online marketing team coordinating all activity from offices in France, UK and Ireland.

Have worked with TradeDoubler affiliate network since 2001

Objectives from affiliate marketing:

AwarenessSite VisitsOrders

So, affiliate marketing is not just about orders – PC is a considered purchase – 2 to 6 weeks to decide whether to buy according to Dell, so initial awareness important also. These use the AIDA model to explain customer journey.

Awareness - Start by understanding customer journey – which sites do customers use to decide on purchase?

Dell seek to achieve visibility and aim is prominence - to be top of the list for consideration when listed. Use 20,000 websites to reach audience across Europe. In contrast, display ads or banners are placed in Top 20 sites in each country. There is crossover between affiliates and media buying agency – transfer.

Interest – look to deliver strong and consistent message through different sites. Sometimes price offers changed daily in some courses.Desire – they drive to tailored landing pages as expected. Affiliates are knowledgeable about their audience and Dell use focus groups of affiliatesto improve landing pages.Action – mainly deliver online sales, but do track affiliates through offline phone numbers and Dell are starting to use a Pay Per Call approach.

Planned and tactical activity – affiliate marketing works as a contingency if they fall behind sales targets.

Success factors – nothing too earth shattering :

Clear strategy Local teams in each country, incentivised. Incentivisation Creative integration – e-mail, banners, search. BT note that affiliate specific banners work best– so not identical creative necessarily. Targets by major affiliates. Work with affiliates to explain differentiators between products – price and features. They use specific B2B affiliates. Need to monitor and respond to change in affiliate trends – affiliates now need added value content to avoid penalties from Google – e.g. comparison tables and guides – so need to support them to develop this content – and it musn’t overlap with site content. New types of affiliates will come on-stream, e.g. social network sites such as MySpace which give a new way of reaching the online audience.

BT.com Case Study and Deal Group Media Case Study

A different way of looking at KPIs for affiliate marketing - they measure affiliate success by:

Sales levels. Conversion rates from affiliates for different product categories. Number of active affiliates and presumably revenue per affiliate

and presumably cost of acquisition (CPA), profitability although they didn’t mention those.

Range of communication channels for affiliates according to their preferences and your view on their importance: E-newsletters, Forums, e.g. ww.auforum.co.uk, Phone, E-mails

Cash rich – have to give them something they can’t buy easily, e.g. World Cup tickets

Affiliate has a unique reference code and phone number on affiliate sites – 20% growth monthly. Monthly converts at 40%. In future call-centre agents will be able to see which sites calls are referred from.

Apply traditional marketing segmentation, e.g. age or regional. Compare affiliate results to these – affiliate gap analysis and then try to recruit affiliates to target those specific demographics.

Affiliate Paid Search Integration

Perhaps unusually, both Dell and BT enable affiliates to bid on brand only terms and on brand + generic terms.

BT supports brand-term bidding – just 6 affiliates are permitted with well defined rules – affiliates are not allowed to bid above clients listings. Need to be responsive. These are also allowed to bid on generic terms. To track this, these 6 super-affiliates have different accounts to track.

The main argument in favour of enabling affiliates to advertise on brand terms is that because of competitors advertising on broad matches, you are less likely to have competitors advertising on terms, e.g. Dell Laptops or BT Broadband if you permit those.

Now finding that affiliates using paid search must have detailed content to improve Google Quality Score. They must have different content on their sites to avoid Google duplicate content penalty. Different content may need different landing page on BT.