The holiday season is upon us, but for most marketing departments this is one of the busiest times of the year as plans are laid for the critical autumn quarter. And one of the greatest challenges we marketers face is getting focus and support from IT – many of them will be off on their holidays! So, we take a look at how you can ensure you get the support you need with three simple things you can do that will help. Secondly we feature a fascinating study from Google and Neilsen that challenges much conventional thinking on E-commerce. You can download the full report from our website (see below for details). And finally there’s the latest update of our hugely popular guide to the new EU/UK cookie laws – essential reading even if you’re off to the beach!
Have a great month, enjoy!
[private_Atrium Insight]
How can you improve your relationship
with IT?
Let’s face it, most of the time we marketers get very short shrift from our IT departments. Yet technology is becoming more and more critical to marketing and it is changing with bewildering speed. So, we’ve looked long and hard at our clients and what it is that the ones who have a good relationship with IT do, compared to the others who don’t.
Talk their language
Sign up for some e-newsletters that can keep you informed about what is going on in IT-land. We’d recommend CIO, from IDG. It’s fairly high-level, so you won’t get mired in deep techie stuff. And if you want something a little irreverent, try The Register (tagline, “biting the hand that feeds IT”!). If you can, consider hiring people into marketing with strong IT backgrounds – it’s easier to teach an IT person marketing than it is to teach a marketing person IT in my experience!
Explain what you want the solution to do
Make sure you are describing the end-point you want to get to, not an intermediate step. For example “we need an email engine” is an intermediate step – “we need to have a platform that enables low-cost, near real-time, trackable 1-to-1 communication with customers and prospects that will boost sales, lower costs and improve marketing ROI” The former will engender a response of “so what’s wrong with Outlook?”, the latter will trigger the response you really want – without you having to say “Outlook is no good for marketing”
Outsource
IT’s job is to ensure that critical financial and “business as usual” systems stay running. Few marketing systems ever fall into this category unless you are an e-business. Assuming you’re not, accept that you will never get the support you need when you need it and lighten the IT load by proactively looking for outsourced solutions. In-sourcing often looks cheaper, but almost never is – the costs are just hidden better! Outsourcing stops you being a daily pain to IT, which will improve your relationship with them! And they will then stop being the “computer says NO” department.
Ecommerce isn’t “instant commerce”
A new study by Google and Nielsen has proved what many e-commerce professionals have long suspected – that the online buying process is far from instant. In fact it often lasts more than 30 days.
Google and Nielsen assessed behaviour across seven product categories, with sample sizes varying from 15,453 adults in the travel segment to 1,700 shoppers interested in loans. The key findings are:
- 27 days in the clothing sector
- 24 days for travel
- 23 days for mobile phones
- 20 days for utilities
- 12 days for car insurance
In a third of all cases, this process took at least 30 days after initial research began, with only 20% of people in apparel and travel completing a transaction in 24 hours, measured against 54% for gas and electricity.
Consumers use differing tactics for different products – for travel they use 7 different types of site from airlines and hotels to user reviews, while for car insurance it’s just search, aggregators and direct providers.
Download the full report
You can download the full report by clicking here
New Update on UK/EU “Cookie Law”
We’ve been keeping a very close eye on developments in the great “cookie law” saga for you (so you don’t have to!) Our hugely popular report on the topic has been downloaded over 500 times to date so if you don’t have your own copy, now’s the time to get one.
Updated at the beginning of this month it tells you the current state of play across the EU and, specifically, what the current situation is in the UK. Many lawyers are spreading “feat, uncertainty and doubt” on this topic across the land. We’re not. We’ve spoken with Chris Graham, the UK Information Commissioner in person and we have his candid view. Yes, you need to be doing something no, you don’t need to panic, yet!
Get the full story by downloading your copy of the report from our Reports & Guides page.[/private_Atrium Insight]
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