Mark Eddings is the Internet Manager of HP’s Americas eBusiness Web Merchandising Unit. This means he’s responsible for selling lots and lots of product.
Discuss Online Marketing at WebProWorld.
For every marketing purchase he makes he has to demonstrate a return and he makes all his decisions based on metrics.
They tag and record all their data so they can track every purchase back to their cost, and they use five key metrics when making decisions:
clicks
conversion rate
roi
unassisted revenue (no added support personel cost)
cost per click
He considers himself to have had a marketing success if he makes back 25 dollars for every dollar he spends.
When looking for new methods of marketing he may ask one of their few agencies for any ideas, any new trends. And, of course, he watches what his competitors are doing.
He prefers to advertise in places that are customer driven, such as search engines and price comparison sites. He goes, he said, for easy wins (low hanging fruit).
They have thousands and thousands of product pages, but they’re all database driven and have proven difficult to get spidered. Their solution was to hire Quigo (who I’ve been hearing a lot about lately), who spidered their site and created a feed to Froogle and other shopping search sites.
An audience member asked what some of their more unique solutions have been lately.
Eddings mentioned both their 3d modeling function, which allows users to rotate products with their mouse in a 3d environment, and their ability to generate unique 1 800 numbers with cookies. These unique phone numbers allow them to track calls back to specific actions online.
Another audience member asked him how he gets more funding for his division. He said that dollars come from ineffective programs or programs that can’t, with certainty, demonstrate their effectiveness. Hazy results, he said, don’t justify spend.
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
