The first result that came up is Maybelline’s website and is titled Maybelline New York: Products: Age Rewind The Eraser Treatment Makeup.  First of all, the name is just way too long.  I found out that “Age Rewind” is the collection name and “The Eraser” the product name.  Why not just say “The Eraser” and drop “Age Rewind” for simplicity?

The Maybelline website is not optimized for phone viewing, which is important these days especially for a consumer goods company.  Instead, the site comes up as several large buttons:

• Find Your Mascara << I was looking for The Eraser, not a mascara.
• Find Out More About Great Lash BIG! << I have no idea what this is and I don’t care.
• Wallpapers & Ringtone << What, are we in high school?
• Great Lash BIG Takes NYC: Watch The Video << I don’t yet have a phone that supports video, and I still don’t care.
• Sign Up for Text Alerts << There are no compelling reasons to sign up for text alerts.

On my desktop, the website does show information about the product but some of it makes me laugh and some things I would like to see aren’t there.

• They boast a “patented Micro-Corrector Applicator.”  The bottle looks like one of those glue bottles you get from an office supply store, that you squeeze to wet a sponge on top.  You know marketing has gotten a little out of control when a sponge is now a “Micro-Corrector Applicator.”  Just call things what they are and don’t get silly about it, please.  There is some concern about the sponge getting gross, but apparently most reviewers are satisfied by the “antimicrobial fibers” in the sponge.  I still would be concerned.
• On their site, they offer a “MyColorAdvisor.”  I simply click on my skin shade (light) and eye color (hazel), and (gasp!) they suggest my best color tones as all of the light tones.  What amazing powers of insight they have!
• I wanted to know the ingredients of the makeup but this is nowhere on their site.  I went to Target to see the product in person.  Looking at the ingredient list was like reading another language.  The only thing I noticed that is natural is water, and it was the second on the list.  It’s amazing what women will put on their face.
• It’s a “breakthrough formula with active ingredients!”  I looked at what “active ingredients” there are, and found it said 7% Octinoxate, an organic compound found in some sunscreens.
• The site could be more interactive.  Something that makes more sense than MyColorAdvisor?  Please?
• Where can the product be purchased?  I found it at Target, but where else? Why don’t brands tell people where to buy their products?
• At Target this product is $8.99 on sale but $10.99 regular price.  The exact same product in a regular bottle is $6.09 on Amazon and in a pump for $2.49 – $5.98 on Amazon.  Instead of paying such a premium for packaging, I’d rather go buy some good applicator sponges.

The next search result was a review of the product by Elke Von Freudenberg, who says the sponge doesn’t cover well and is too small.  She said the product has an oily feel to it, but after setting it with a powder this goes away.  On the positive side, she likes the coverage and long-lasting results.  A few more results down, another review of the product at Frugirl said she likes the product’s coverage also, and felt it absorbed into her skin rather than sat on top.

I then looked at their Facebook page.  Despite taking time to scroll all the way to the bottom, which wasn’t difficult as it was only a month old, there is nothing said about this product.

In summary, were I in the market for The Eraser, I would have been turned off when I couldn’t access the Maybelline website on my smartphone, by the price when the same product is available for much less in different packaging, by the lack of information on the brand’s Facebook page, and lack of interactivity on their website.  The couple of reviews I did see, however, might have made me reconsider.  It would be in Maybelline’s best interest to address these Fails and send influential bloggers in the beauty space a free sample for review.

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One good way of arriving at social media metrics is postulated by Heidi Sullivan of Cision Blog: “There are two basic types of ways to measure your impact on the Web: passive and active.” Furthermore, she attempts to break it down into the five senses: sight (where are you seen), sound (who’s talking about you), scent (do they stick around to “smell what you’re cooking”), taste (can they taste what you’re offering through search engines) and touch (are they taking the next step to touch others with your information).

Going back to the passive vs. active concept, here are metrics she suggests as well as from other sources (numbers refer to sources at bottom):

Passive

• Number of unique visitors to your blog.1
• Monthly site views aka page views.1 – Definition: Request to load a single HTML page.  Page views are only important to the degree they play a part in a site’s revenue model. If a site earns much of its revenue from advertising, then page views are important because of their contribution to ad inventory. If a site only earns revenue on sales, then page views are not a key statistic.
• Number of page views per visit.6 – Try landing people on an engaging page that funnels them through a messaging sequence that builds your brand and escalates sales. Measure the results and optimize the path that gets people to the end of the sequence. Also, measure the lift in total page views of your site’s high-value product pages.
• Monthly unique sessions.1 – Definition: In tabulating statistics for Web site usage, a user session (sometime referred to as a visit) is the presence of a user with a specific IP  address who has not visited the site recently (typically, anytime within the past 30 minutes). The number of user sessions per day is one measure of how much traffic a Web site has. A user who visits a site at noon and then again at 3:30 pm would count as two user visits.
• Number of return visits.6
• Search trends.7

Active

• Number of influencers (track who they are for targeting) that share your content through inbound links, citations, tweets, viral videos or other forwarding of information that result in transactions.1,4,6 – put a call to action in your campaign that will lift this metric.
• Number of company/brand mentions in blogs, on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, as gauged by a social media monitoring solution, especially when supplemented with sophisticated sentiment analysis that discerns positive brand mentions from the negative. 1,7
• Number of people clicking on your images, watching your videos, using your widgets, and spending significant amounts of time on your site.1 – by tagging videos and applications, companies can track each occurrence of sharing and estimates frequency of exposure to particular media.6
• Number of and which keywords/other sites referring visitors to your content.1
• How much money social media has saved or created for your brand: How many issues that you solved, questions that you answered, leads that you created, products that you sold, call volume that you decreased, etc., through social media engagement versus traditional resources.2
• Time spent across an entire campaign.3
• Click rate [on an ad].3 – not the best metric to use.  People can accidentally click and then drop off, or they can click and see it’s not for them and drop off.
• Interaction rates [with an ad].3 – may be influenced by the creative and not a true representation of their interest.
• Conversion rates – doesn’t take into account return conversions or other offline results, e.g. visit to a store for further research.
• Time spent throughout cross channel engagement with the brand – forecast the number of touches a customer can have with a brand and the resultant amount of time spent with the brand, e.g. total number of exposures, visits you’ll drive to the site, increase in total mentions that can be measured with social media monitoring tools.3
  • Once you understand the total touches, you can either measure directly or assume through general patterns what the time spent is across each of these vehicles, and then create a cumulative time spent for the campaign. When you break down the individual media vehicles, time spent is actually quite easy to report on.3
• Lifetime value of customers based on their purchasing activity, which could be higher depending on their level of social media influence, e.g. if a customer is worth $9 dollars alone, but that person has 500 Facebook friends, and is able to drive even 1% of them (5) to make a purchase, that individual’s value could be as high as $54 dollars.4
• Number of people who you capture data from – Eyeblaster has found that the ability to capture data within a banner is nearly eight times more effective at addressing conversions than click-through rates (CTR), revealing that consumers are more likely to fill in a banner than click on it.5
• Number of people who opt into your e-newsletter/email updates (e-newsletter metrics to be discussed under separate, future posting).6
  
• Number of people who download materials from your site.6
• Number of phone calls you receive and source.6
• Number of people that share comments and opinions.6
• The impact individuals exert on wider audiences – a combination of data obtained from buzz-tracking with data from surveying (see below), to determine the probability of viewing buzz by taking into account the volume of relevant posts and amount of time spent by panelists on a website.7

And there are also metrics that can only be obtained via surveying, which is what the company work with, C.A. Walker, does:

• Awareness.
  
• Interest.
• Desire.
• Lifts in brand awareness and attitudes attributable to a social media campaign.
• Various actions taken throughout engagement with the brand.
• Usage – may be of a particular website or of a product.
  
• Consideration – may also be inferred from measuring the things that drive people into your (or your client’s) stores.  Actions like store locator queries and rep searches should always be measured and are clear indicators that a future purchase may be imminent.6
• Intent to purchase – may also be inferred from Time spent throughout engagement with the brand. If consumers spend more time than the average, they must be interested in your product or service — and if they are interested, that is a measure of intent.3

If I’ve missed any applicable metrics, please let me know so I can grow this list.

Sources:

1Cision Blog: Five Senses of Online Measurement

2Mashable: Twitter Brand Best Practices

3MediaPost: Time Spent Is The Right Metric To Measure Engagement

4MediaPost: Marketers Search For Social Media Metric

5Eyeblaster: Conversions Remain Important Metric

6ClickZ: 11 Things to Measure Besides Clicks and Conversions

7MediaPost: Media Metrics: Let’s Get This Party Started

Related posts:

1. Tracking Return Conversions
2. Email Marketing Provides BEST Marketing ROI?
3. How To Do Sponsorship Marketing

Why is this important?  Because it’s so expensive to find a new potential customer that it is of value to invest in retargeting that customer who now knows about you.  Of course, the company offers a solution to this problem which is to somehow tag that person and no matter where they go online, they will show your ad to them.  Pretty nifty for a marketer.

As a strategist, I like to see what companies are doing in one area of business and think through how I might apply it to another area of business.  It’s good mind exercise.  I have a friend who is considering taking over a hair salon and running it, so while they could use this for their online marketing, how could this work in a real-life scenario?

Say that she successfully takes control of this business, and decides to throw an “open house” to invite as many people as she can to visit.  Some are current customers, some are their friends, and some are other people that she meets or who see her ad/press release.  She could have a sign-in book which requests name, phone and email.  After the event, she then has to sort through to categorize them as either current or potential clients.  Now, how to retarget?

Some ideas:

• See if they are on LinkedIn, Facebook or Myspace and connect to them, thanking them for attending and offer an incentive to schedule an appointment.  A larger incentive within the next 30 days, a smaller one for the next 60 days, another smaller still for next 90 days.
• If, after 30 days, they do not take her up on the offer remind them again of the smaller incentive for the next 30 days.  Same for 60 days.
• If, after 90 days, she still has not received a response, follow up again with another offer, say  a free haircut if they refer 2 friends who make appointments or a free haircut and color if they refer 5 friends who make appointments.
• Send them an email asking if she can add them to an email update list that shares specials, or possibly an e-newsletter, no more than once a month.
• For those she connects with on social media, she could send them a note saying that she’d like to offer THEIR friends a “2nd degree discount,” meaning that if they forward her offer to all their friends, the friends will will receive a discount on a service within 30, 60 and 90 days plus get a free [trial sized bottle of a hair product or whatever].  They just have to connect with her via one of the social sites (give the profile address) and provide the name of the person referring, which can be verified through their friend listing on their profile, unless they have hidden this view.
• Those new first degree friends can then be provided the same opportunities as the previous.

Of course, it is important for her to track metrics for her business that would be applicable:

• Number of customers who have made second appointments.
• Number of customers who did not make second appointments.
• Number of return conversions (those who did not initially make appointments, but later returned and did).
• Number of customers who have been customers longer than one year.
• Number of customers who have referred someone else.
• Number of customers who purchased hair products but did not make appointments.
• And so on

Does anyone have any other thoughts on how she could “follow” a potential customer around to retarget?

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Like a PB&J is not possible without peanut butter, behavioral marketing is not possible without an investment into understanding a company’s customers through segmentation.Segmentation is the foundation of behavioral marketing, but unless you are in the business of market research you may not understand how segments are derived and why the manner in which you derive them is important.

Of course, you can classify using a simple segmentation based on demographics (age, ethnicity, female/male) or by usage (heavy, light), but these rarely yield needed information.  In a true segmentation, people are typically grouped by how alike they are in terms of their behaviors and attitudes towards life or a particular topic.   This type of segmentation analysis is conducted by carefully constructing a questionnaire so that some questions are behavioral in nature and others attitudinal.

Results are then viewed by an experienced researcher, who identifies patterns in the data through the use of “cluster analysis.”  There are  multiple sub-types of cluster analysis (“algorithms”) that can be used to view the data from differing  vantage points, allowing the researcher to see the “stories” in the data.  From there, certain attitudinal questions are identified that yield the strongest differences, which are then used as the basis of behavioral analysis.

The resulting data cuts are then analyzed and clever segment names are created to represent different types of customers who share similar values or lifestyles.  For example, “Facebook Fanatics” or “iPhone Moms.”

Now the trick is…how to translate that customer knowledge into a marketing strategy that captures people’s attention at their interest points – their behaviors and attitudes.

A way that this data can be used is to evaluate which segments are worth pursuing through the creation of indices.  By looking at each group size, their spend levels, and how much the group likes the company/brand, it can be determined, for example, that segments 2, 3 and 5 are best to target.  They are the largest that spend the most and like the company/brand best.  Furthermore, we can look at their wants/needs and what they have in common with each other for marketing messaging.

As an aside, the company that I work with, C.A. Walker Research Solutions, regularly conducts segmentations for its clients, if you need assistance in this area.

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