I started my consulting practice, Details Interactive, 10 years ago. It was the first time in my career that I did not have a job working for a company and I had no idea if anyone would actually pay me for what I had learned over 20 years working in the direct to consumer space. One day I was working, the next day I set up shop for the first time. It took 60 days but I got my first assignment, an e-commerce project for the Maidenform brand.
Over these last 10 years, I have spent 7 of them at Steve Madden as President of E-Commerce. I have also consulted for many other direct to consumer brands and they all had two things in common— They did not pay enough attention to the “basic blocking and tackling of their business” and they all told me that “they did not know what they did not know.”
The name of the consulting practice, Details Interactive, was born out of my attention to detail. Years ago, while at Hanover Direct, I worked with someone who was sometimes frustrated by my attention to detail until one day he said, “now I know where they got the phrase, the devil is in the details!” That was intended to be a compliment because he saw that we were getting real value in the time being spent to get the bottom of the issues we were having.
Well, it’s really true; companies very often do not focus on the details. I have been lucky enough to be able to bring strong strategic thinking along with the ability to roll up my sleeves and get into the details of making brands stronger.
Sorry for the long introduction but as we all think about how we come out of the current crisis and get back on track; it’s the basic blocking and tackling that will become even more important. Do not mistake the basics as being easy, but those things that you really need to know and understand about the business so that you can make informed decisions.
Here are some things that MUST be on your radar.
1) E-mail programs
- STOP that batch and blast and finally make the leap to some sort of personalization
- Trigger programs- if you do not have multiple touches for abandon carts, you must be doing that at a minimum and then let abandoned browse and others follow along
- How far back are you mailing address without engagement? If beyond 6 months, you need to rethink that and set up a reactivation journey
2) Analytics
- You often get what I will call “tag-creep”– as you make changes to your site and people forget to make sure that Google Analytics or whatever tools you use, are formatted and tagged correctly, you run the risk of relying on bad data. Execute a quick check and make sure that all is reporting as you expected.
3) Paid Search
- Revisit your ad copy and the testing you are doing. You should ALWAYS have your control and testing against it. Especially now, as people might be thinking differently about your brand as they sit at home.
- Is your acceptable ROI the same as it was before the crisis started? Maybe you have a business that will take longer to come back and since cash is king, maybe you revisit what your near term value of new customers will be. Don’t forget however, new customers are your life-blood so you cannot walk away from capturing new people.
- Double check your PLA feeds. Are they optimized? It’s probably been a while since you have done a check-up.
4) Leveraging your Partners
- Think through all of the relationships that you have—marketing, infrastructure and otherwise and those that you do NOT have now and see if you have opportunities to do more with what you already own. Most of us buy tools and forget that we need people and often times, content, to make them work as advertised. And we likely are only using 50% of the capability.
- For those that you do not have, can you evaluate and implement quickly- installment payments to drive conversion and AOV or post purchase conversion paid loyalty, as examples.
If you would like to discuss your business with me, you can email me at mark@detailsinteractive.com.