Monetate - Test, Target, Personalize

I can’t remember who was president the last time I took a day off work for President’s Day. It’s not that I’m lacking respect for our past presidents but—like a lot of other people who work in I.T, retail, marketing, and a range of other industries—I usually find that the work has to go on despite this particular holiday.

However, I did do some Presidents’ Day shopping, starting with special offers that arrived via email first thing in the morning. Here’s one of those emails, sent to me under the very simple subject line of  ”Presidents’ Day Event — Save up to 70%” from OfficeMax:

Obviously, OfficeMax was following the time-honored Presidents’ Day marketing tradition of promotions that discount a select group of products.

One product promotion that caught my eye was the Brother Labeler (putting labels on things is something I’m always planning to do, but somehow I never get round to it, often because I can’t find the last labeler I bought). From a marketing perspective, OfficeMax was already making considerable progress with this particular consumer. I had not only opened the email but paid attention to the contents. Then they scored a “click-thru” as I clicked on the labeler offer and arrived at the product page on the OfficeMax web site.

You can see the product page here. What you can’t see, because it wasn’t there, was any reference to Presidents’ Day. The price of $9.99 matched that quoted in the email offer, but this was referred to as INSTANT SAVINGS and not a Presidents’ Day promotion.

And that raises an interesting marketing question: To what extent is conversion affected by discontinuity of messaging?

Note that I am not criticizing OfficeMax here, for all I know I was in a control group or A/B test of visitors who were shown the product page without a Presidents’ Day sticker on it. Furthermore, I’m not saying that adding a Presidents’ Day sticker would have clinched the deal for me or any other shopper. What I’m saying is that it might make a difference, might trigger a conversion, but you don’t know unless you test.

There is plenty of evidence that marketing around real-time events is effective (heck, in the world of brick-and-mortar retailing it’s a tradition far older than Presidents’ Day). Where online retailing can really shine is in testing the extent to which degrees of real-time connection prove effective for virtual shoppers, then capitalizing on those test results. Of course, doing that requires a very nimble real-time marketing platform. Fortunately, such things do exist and can be put in place very quickly, hopefully in time for the next big real-time marketing event.