Posts Tagged ‘ecommerce’

Welcome to a new season of the SDMA

Posted: August 21, 2009 in Ascentium, SDMA
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In addition to my role at Ascentium, I have been privileged to be elected president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, SDMA, and as we kick off our new 2009-2010 season of events I’d like to welcome back all our members, colleagues, friends and everyone that has an interest in the marketing profession.

We’re in the home stretch of summer. Our sub-baked brains are shifting from vacation to back to school, from playing hooky on a sunny Friday afternoon to getting the next proposal out the door. In other words, the fun’s over. But wait a second! Just because it’s no long 103 degrees outside, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look forward to. The SDMA is here and it’s time to kick off another great season of speakers, events, networking and the continuation of our exploration into the art and science of modern marketing.

Last year we debuted a new tagline for the SDMA, “thinking outside the mailbox” in recognition that direct marketing has evolved into integrated marketing. We’ve taken the expertise direct marketers have gained in the areas of targeting, segmentation, analytics and ROI and are applying it to email, online advertising, search and social media. We’re extending brands across multiple new channels like mobile, branded content and the Web. And all while remembering that traditional media and direct still make up the lion’s share of marketing budgets and are evolving just as much as the new media is coming on the scene.

This season, the SDMA is going to mix things up a bit. In response to our success last year in Bellevue, we’re going to host some events on the East side and some in Seattle. We’re going to experiment with different formats including thought leader interviews, competitor panels and bring you real-life case studies showing how companies are using new ideas as well as re-inventing established methods to produce tangible and measureable results for their businesses. For this year’s calendar, visit www.sdma.org/events

In addition to our monthly events, we are partnering with the PSAMA and the Social Media Club to produce the region’s premier marketing conference, MarketMix 2010, to be held on March 10, 2010, at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. Mark your calendars today.

If you haven’t checked us out in awhile, visit our website at http://www.sdma.org, our groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, or even better, join us for our season’s kick-off on Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 5:30-8:00p at The Bellevue Hyatt for our evening event, “Transforming your Marketing and Customer Relationships with Social Media – Real Tweets from Real Practioneers at Leading Northwest Firms,” with panelists from Alaska Airlines, REI, PCC and Comcast. To register, visit, http://www.sdma.org/events .

Looking forward to seeing you and having your participation in another great year for the SDMA and for the marketing profession in the Pacific Northwest.

On behalf of the entire SDMA board,

John P. Kottcamp, President

Who’s Really the Competition

Posted: July 2, 2009 in Uncategorized
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Who’s minding the competition?
I just wanted to pass along a personal anecdote about buying a book. Last weekend we had some friends over and my wife and a couple of friends started talking about a great new book they wanted to read. All I heard was that it was from the same author of The Shadow of the Wind.

To make a long story short, I went into a nearby Barnes and Noble today to buy the book for my wife. Since I didn’t know the name of the book, I binged (the verb to Google is sold school) the shadow of the wind from my mobile and got sent to Amazon. From there it was easy to click on the author’s name, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and find the name of his new novel, the Angel’s Game.

On Amazon it was $16.17. Staring in front of me at Barnes and Noble, it was $26.95, or 40% more. So wanting to save some money and a bit out of principle, I walked out of the store, planning to buy the book online when I got back to the office.

On the way back to the office, I stopped into the Deli counter of my local grocery store, QFC, to buy a sandwich to take back to my office. Walking through the store, I see an end cap display of new books including The Angel’s Game, at 25% off the suggested retail price. I ended up leaving the store with a roast beef sandwich and a copy of the book. I saved almost 7 dollars and I had the book in my hand instead of waiting for shipment.

The moral of the story is, well… purchase behavior is a fleeting thing. I represent a modern multi-channel shopper. I used a mobile interface to help me find what I wanted and compared prices. And the significant discount online was enough to alter my purchase intent. But then a completely different channel became open to me, one that provided me with enough of a discount to get me purchase on the spot and change my typical behavior. In the end, the grocery store won my book purchase. Knowing the competition isn’t always enough.

Forrester Research features Ascentium among the top Interactive agencies

Posted: June 9, 2009 in aQuantive, Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, ecommerce, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, microsoft, social media, social networking, Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0, web marketing
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On Friday, Forrester Research published its Forrester Wave™, Interactive Marketing Agencies – Web Design Capabilities, Q2, 2009. Ascentium was covered for the first time along with other top digital agencies including Sapient, imc2, Razorfish, IconNicholson, IBM Interactive, Organic, Blast Radius, iCrossing, OgilvyInteractive, Resource Interactive, and Rosetta, Critical Mass, Molecular, R/GA, VML, Whittmanhart and Arc Worldwide.

In addition to just being favorably reviewed among such a great group an agencies, we take pride in that Ascentium scored the highest out of all the agencies in the category or customer satisfaction. We credit that in large part to emphasis we have given to growing customer loyalty and constantly measuring it with tools like Net Promoter Scores.

When I joined Ascentium almost four years ago, we were primarily a technology consulting firm with strong Web development skills and some good design talent, but we hadn’t yet made the commitment to become a true full service digital agency. But we got together as a team and agreed that the future was in leveraging technology to advance marketing and to move from advertising to engagement.

Three years and a roster of blue chip clients like Microsoft T-Mobile, Dell, Cisco and Random House, later. We have garnered the attention of the likes of Forrester Research and have grown from a local Seattle-based firm to an agency with offices across the country and internationally as well.

It’s been a privilege to be a part of this journey and to have helped nurture it along the way. It wasn’t always easy teaching technologists and marketers to not only get along, but to actually work synergistically, to create a new model for what Forrester has called, the agency of the future.

So congratulations to all the other agencies featured in the Wave, thanks to all the analysts at Forrester who have seen value in what we’ve created and well done to each and every employee I have the privilege of working with at Ascentium. Just wait for what we have in store for you next.

The Future of eCommerce and The Customer Experience

Posted: July 22, 2008 in Closed Loop Marketing, Customer Engagment, ecommerce, enterprise marketing platform, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, microsoft, online marketing suite, web marketing
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I’ve been thinking a lot about contemporary ecommerce customer experiences lately. Besides fixing the obvious problems like having to register before you buy, going all the way through the purchase process before seeing the shipping costs or taxes and of course the all too frequent screw up that makes you start all over again and hope that your credit won’t be charged twice, I wonder who is really looking at commerce as just one piece in the overall customer experience.

In the technology world, ecommerce usually refers to the actual shopping cart/order management application that enables a company to sell products online, order and fulfill and take payment. Companies with recurring payment plans like cell providers and cable companies even allow you to add services, increase plans and in some cases refer a friend. But from a customer-centric perspective, ecommerce needs to include analytics applications that track what is important to a customer by their actions of the Web site, i.e. where they have spent their time, which pages or products they have shown interest in. Once you start wanting to remember anything about a particular customer, you will need a CRM system or customer data management program. And if you’re going to provide a personalized customer experience you will need a robust enough campaign management system to present unique combinations of relevant content.

Who’s going to provide all these systems? Amazon? Microsoft? Salesforce.com? It’s another case where what Forrester calls the enterprise marketing platform is a need waiting for a solution.