Smart selling

A consumer-centric market is demanding innovations in digital marketing.

When Wal-Mart designed and implemented a real-time order-management and fulfillment system, added an integrated commerce channel that allowed for next-day delivery and provided an automated returns process, the results were felicitous.

The global retailer created a web-based shopping channel that can accommodate more than 1 million products, 60,000 concurrent users, 11 departments, and thousands of categories and subcategories.

Result: a 214 per cent increase in the number of unique visitors, a 385 per cent increase in daily traffic count over one year, 95 per cent inventory accuracy (an increase from 65 per cent the prior season) and 99.5 per cent on-time delivery (an increase from 70 per cent).

"Speed in the delivery cycle is good news for the industry," says Gaston Legorburu, chief creative officer, Sapient.

He adds, "And this should be attributed to the demands made by the growing Internet and e-commerce enthusiasts." The customers want the same level of personalised service wherever and however they interact with the company "" retail outlets, customer agents or website.

"Now, the new challenge for the marketers is to integrate old and new systems to provide the level of service customers demand," emphasises Legorburu.

So, when a recent survey of Fortune 1000 firms conducted by the Kellogg School of Management claimed that more than 70 per cent of organisations do not use advanced technological tools and analytics to guide their marketing campaigns, companies like Sapient and a host of Indian consulting firms decided to jump the gun and work with marketers to deliver digital marketing, product promotion and web analytics services. The time seems right too. Online advertising expenditures totalled $9 billion by 2007, approximately 18 per cent lift over the year-ago period, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

"Consumers don't really care about technical and cost challenges of integrating disparate customer data warehouses," says Soumya Banerjee, managing director, Sapient (India).

Simply put, Banerjee helps businesses that are grappling with the burgeoning availability of consumer data "" from loyalty card usage and e-commerce sales to online advertising clickthroughs and point-of-sale credit card data to analyse data in multidimensional ways.

Hilton Hotels, for instance, decided to invest its energies in reducing distribution costs while supporting global brand value, turning itself into a preferred online booking channel and successfully rolling out a content management system over 400 hotels worldwide that enabled individual properties to control online content. Seems like 2007 is well on its way to become the year of smart digital marketing.