The Key to Unlock Performance Out Of Digital Brand Strategies Online users prefer to shop between Monday to Friday, 12:00pm – 5:00pm, during office hours.
By Anubhav Sonthalia •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
In the last 9 years of my experience with online advertising in India, I have seen a steady shift in marketing. It is not called just marketing anymore, it is infact reinforced as Performance Marketing. Every dollar that is now being spent has to generate revenue multifold, to the extent that many brands that we work with need marketing dollars to be less than 3% of the revenues generated. Different verticals within Performance Marketing have different macro objectives. Businesses with higher ticket values like cars, premium jewelry & home-buys focus on getting audiences who can be nurtured through the buy on a longer timeline. In comparison, businesses with lower ticket values like food or grocery ordering want to ensure better repeats from their customer and hence would focus on frequency of purchase. Verticals like Insurance have strict KYC norms and need marketing to measure the entire funnel, including not just online but offline conversion behavior as well.
The fundamental element of performance marketing is tractability. And unlike any other mode of advertising, online advertising has all the right elements for performance marketing. To be able to generate an exponential return on marketing dollars, the following 3 levers need to be rock solid: Audience, Timing & Messaging. In essence, show the ad to the right audience at the right time with the right message so that the audience become consumers. And to achieve it every element and interaction has to be tracked and recorded. This provides psychographic analysis of user profiles which in turn gives insights into purchase patterns & consumer behavior.
In our recent white-paper, insights into over 2 million transactions across 100 online retailers in first quarter of 2016 were published. The insights are fascinating, and at times, counter-intuitive to the traditional shopping behavior. Traditionally, we believe shopping happens only on weekends; ironically, online users prefer Monday to Friday between 12:00pm – 5:00pm, during office hours. Many insights such as shopping behavior, informed decision making and their road to making a purchase decision can be discovered through studying online consumer behavior. These insights help in developing an optimal and impactful digital strategy reflecting on the performance of the company.
Let's look at some more insights that were observed across over 2 million transactions of this past business quarter:
- Difference between web-based purchases & mobile purchases
- 65% online purchases happen through PC's
- 40% higher average order value from iOS users compared to Android users
- 23% Higher Average Order Value (AoV) from PC's compared to smartphones
- 70% of the online orders are made for Cash on Delivery
- Indian men shop online three times more than Indian women
- 60% online purchase are made up of impulsive buys like apparel and electronics
- There has been a 65% growth in Indian ecommerce sector from last year
Imagine the remarkable insights we could learn as we go deeper and deeper into the online consumer psyche. This will also guide in creating well-organized and fruitful strategies, and more importantly, confident strategies as they are co-created using online consumer insights. The key to performance of digital strategy is tracking and understanding consumer behavior. The more we understand, the more it helps to create an efficient strategy. It also helps us in making decisions like the amount for budget, where it can be used, the appropriate time to use it and why it is to be used.
Just like frequency trading categorically changed the way brokerage firms had operated making them profitable overnight, programmatic buying and performance marketing is shifting the tide in favor of businesses adopting the same. Any brand that has not adopted performance marketing will infact lose its competitive edge. Performance marketing is in fact utilizing your marketing dollars in the most efficient way, thus improving the fundamental business metrics. Every dollar spent efficiently is dollar saved and eventually dollar earned.
