Macy

This comes to us from DMNew’s Chantal Tode.  For their “Believe” campaign Macy’s deployed a microsite at www.macysbelieve.com that included a feature that allowed visitors to create a custom e-card that could be sent to Facebook, MySpace, and cell phones.  According to the article,  250,000 visitors have completed the “BeClaus” process since early December.

The article also included some data points about Macy’s ecommerce activities:

- They have spent over $300MM in the last 3 years on their direct to consumer initiatives.  (Macy’s did $25B in revenue last year with 3B ebitda)

- Consumers that shop both online and at the stores spend twice as much as a consumer that only shops one of the channels.

- Online sales, mail, and phone orders are to add up to $950MM in 2008

Quantcast puts Macys.com at around 6MM visits per month with a holiday spike up to 8MM.

The process to create your e-card took 6 steps and was pretty robust.  The first image I selected to upload into the Santa maker was rejected for size.  The camera I took that picture with is a 3.1 mega pixel.  Which is about 5 years old — so that may be the experience of a lot of folks.  After I found a smaller image to use I completed the 6 steps it got stuck at 82% complete — I didn’t try again.

The 250,000 number is impressive — if Quantcast is correct (and in my experience it is close) that comes to 3% of their traffic sending an e-card.  The article did not mention it, but I presume there was an ad buy that also drove traffic to the microsite.

Macy

I wanted to link over to this article from Online Media Daily because it includes some specific numbers around an effort to tweak a paid search campaign.

The gist is that Smith Micro (makers of StuffIt and other software) worked with Digital River to tweak their SEM campaign resulting in the following:

• “logged a 23% quarter-over-quarter increase in paid search results”
• “about an 80% uptick in delivery of trial products”
• “and a 3% lift to 18% in paid search e-commerce revenue.”
• “…and a 14% increase in sales from Apple Mac users”
• “Landing the consumer on the correct page gave Smith Micro “14% of the 20% overall lift in sales”

I’ve worked with Digital River and other SEM firms to tweak key words, landing pages, offers, and copy till I was blue in the face.  It’s a tough business and to show any growth in an existing SEM campaign is notable.

What I gather from this example is that Digital River started to drive mac users to landing pages that offered mac versions of StuffIt and Smith Micro’s other applications. The increase in mac users, Apple’s market share is now at 20% in the US, propbably drove this SEM success.  It’s a good example of taking an opportunity, tweaking the delivery, and ringing out a couple more pence in sales.  Anyone in the software business should take note that Mac centric keywords and landing pages may pay off.

One last note, when I used Digital River as my SEM agency they were super secretive about the key words they bought and the return on those key words. They would only report on the aggregate number.  I hope they have since changed their policy.  If not, at the very least make sure DR reports the ROI on branded key words verse non-branded key words.  Other than that I really like the folks at DR — they are very proffesional and their annual retreat is a blast.

According to an article from InternetNews Dell has generated over $1MM in the last 18 months by posting sales and promotional messages out to their Twitter followers.  The Dell Home Outlet currently has over 3000 followers.  Although $1MM is not a huge amount for Dell the example does show that the Twitter audience is somewhat in the buyer mind set.

This is a pretty standard use of Twitter in these early days of the service.  Companies are creating Twitter accounts to push product information, special offers, or customer service updates.  Once Twitter determines a business model I’m sure there will be additional opportunties for marketers to leverage this micro-blogging technology.