Media Insights

Do You Know the True Enterprise Value of Your Digital Properties?

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When measuring and valuing their digital properties, Ovative has found that 80% of organizations we work with only reference ecommerce sales, which can lead to an underinvestment in their digital experience and sub-optimal customer experiences. Read on to learn about Ovative’s approach to Digital Experience Optimization, which measures and optimizes against ecommerce and digitally-influenced store sales to give you a more holistic view of enterprise growth. 

How Are Marketers Missing The Big Picture? 

Historically, there haven’t been many ways for marketers to tell if an online engagement drove a store sale (or vice versa) because of a lack of measurement capabilities. When marketers are focused on measuring and optimizing individual sales channels, rather than optimizing to a holistic metric, it can prevent them from seeing all potential marketing impacts throughout each step of the customer journey.  

Similar to measuring channel performance in a silo, their organizational structure often leads to teams having siloed goals. Ecommerce team goals are based on ecommerce sales, and store team goals are based on store sales – which often results in an underinvestment in the digital experience and a disjointed customer experience.  

Why Is This Problematic? 

We know that customers do not shop in siloes and that their experience includes both in-person and digital touchpoints. Marketers should be measuring and optimizing accordingly. The digital experience should facilitate both online and offline shopping and the in-store experience should reflect customers’ digital experience. Consistency is key.  

Only giving your website experience credit for ecommerce sales undervalues the impact that your digital experience has on the customer journey. Instead, marketers should be designing and optimizing their site experience to support offline transactions and then factoring those sales into their performance metrics.   

Why Is This Relevant Right Now? 

During Covid, brands were forced to rethink strategies and build hybrid models that brought together digital and traditional channels. Many brands combatted the decrease in in-person shopping with services like Curbside Pick-Up and Buy-Online-Pick-Up-In-Store (BOPIS). Now, they need to step back and think about the role their site plays in driving both online and in-store sales as people return to stores.  

Customer behavior has shifted dramatically during the pandemic, impacting new customer acquisition, retention and loyalty. As marketers, the goal should be to retain the new customers you acquired digitally during the pandemic and convert them to shopping your physical locations. You also want to be able to get your existing customers coming back to your stores and engaging with your brand again as they were likely exploring and engaging with other brands throughout the pandemic. 

Ovative’s Approach: Shifting To An Enterprise Mindset 

At Ovative, we believe maximizing return is about more than a marketing metric. We apply a strategic framework to think beyond individual sales channel performance, identifying and unlocking opportunities for profitable enterprise growth with the customer at the forefront of all decisions. Marketers can use this same approach when optimizing their digital experience.  

Thinking Customer-First

We deploy site measurement, analytics, and optimization programs that drive the best experience for where your customer is shopping. This includes considering how offline transactions and interactions can help shape the digital experience and asking questions like, “what percent of  in-store sales were influenced by online behavior?”. Rather than focusing solely on metrics like CRO, we measure the long-term impact of marketing on a healthy customer file including acquisition, retention, and lifetime value. We can also use this data to inform how certain content gets built or prioritized on a site. For example, if we see that a homepage banner is leading to significant in-store transactions, we would recommend featuring that more prominently or repeating that promotion again in the future.  

We also work to understand customer attributes and digital behaviors onsite that over-index to offline transactions, which can unlock new areas of growth. With one client, mobile often made up over 50% of traffic and was growing year over year, but ecommerce conversion rates were typically 30-50% lower than desktop.  When we layered in site-influenced store sales to understand site-influenced enterprise sales and conversion rates, mobile had a higher conversion rate and revenue contribution. 

Measuring and Optimizing to EMR

Enterprise Marketing Return (EMR) takes into account enterprise revenue (online and offline sales), future customer value, incrementality, and profitability, focusing on the metrics that impact business the most. When measuring and valuing digital properties against ecommerce and site-influenced sales, enabled through tech like Ovative’s Marketing Analytics Platform (MAP), we can get a holistic view of the enterprise value of the digital experience.  

Using this approach, Ovative’s DXO team helped one client shift focus from a digital experienced tied solely to online enrollments (only 1/3 of digitally attributed apps), to a holistic DAA-focused digital experience, inclusive of site influenced apps converted via phone.  

How Can Marketers Shift To An Enterprise Mindset? 

Have a relentless focus on the customer 

• • Pay attention to how your customer is shopping now vs during the pandemic. Are they spending more time in-store or utilizing curbside pick-up?  
  • Understand what your customer’s journey looks like. They likely span across both physical and digital channels. 

Understand the role your site plays in offline transactions 

• • Measure engagement with site sections and features that can serve as a proxy for understanding a user’s likelihood to visit a physical store (store finders, find product at a store near me, etc) 

Develop reporting that provides you a holistic view  

• • Ensure your reporting incorporates performance of key actions across your website along the path to purchase, not just the final conversion event  
  • Bring in online and offline sales value to ensure that you are valuing site touchpoints appropriately 

Want help getting started? We are experts in helping you optimize your digital properties and improve your customer experience. Contact us today to learn more about how we can partner together to give you a more holistic view of how your digital experience drives enterprise growth.  

Ovative is a digital-first media and measurement firm seeking to transform the measure of marketing success. At Ovative, we help brands move the needle. We are curious. We value your brand. We want to see you succeed. Connect with us to learn more!