Rob Silsbury, Marketing Director, Glasses Direct presents at the TagMan client event TagMeet 2

1. Glasses Direct – Gaining a single customer view across media channels
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2. Glasses Direct – Who Are We?
• Founded in 2004 by Jamie Murray-Wells.
• The first online online prescription eyewear store.
• Backed by 3 major VCs in 2007 and started bringing in a serious management team.
• Built our own £300k robotic lab in 2010 and brought the majority of jobs in-house.
• We sell great looking, high quality prescription glasses at lower prices than the high street.
• Customers enter their prescription details and then search our extensive range to find their
ideal frames. All orders are approved by qualified opticians.
• The UK’s largest online prescription eyewear store shipping over 500 pairs a day.
• Recently acquired a pan European sunglasses business.
• Launching new brands currently.
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3. Glasses Direct – A Quick History
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4. Glasses Direct – Our Brand
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5. Glasses Direct – Our Brand
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6. Glasses Direct – What do we stand for?
• Value - Our customers save an average of 68% on the high street and receive a free
second pair on all frames costing £49 or more.
• Service - In addition to our excellent website, we have a call centre manned with very
real people including qualified opticians. These are available for our customers to talk
to whenever they like. All of our orders are checked by our team of opticians to
ensure that we get everything spot on.
• Quality - Cheaper does not mean lower quality. Glasses Direct buy frames from some
of the most established manufacturers who also supply the high street.
• Range - Customers can browse thousands of fashionable and affordable frames over
hundreds of brands across designer and own label collections.
• Convenience - Glasses Direct is never shut and customers can browse our range
whenever they like. They can have their glasses delivered directly to their door
without having to travel back and forth to an optician. The high street sale process is
often very hard sell.
• Home Trial - Customers can select 4 pairs to be sent to them for free before they buy.
• Delivery - 80% of orders are shipped within 3 days. The high street can often be
considerably longer than this, sometimes up to a couple of weeks.
• Money Back Guarantee - 100% satisfaction with our ‘14 day’ no quibble money back
guarantee.
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7. Glasses Direct – Our Customers
• Over 50% of all adults wear glasses so our potential market is significant.
• While we are currently working hard to properly profile and segment our existing customer
base, the typical Glasses Direct customer can be split into two main groups.
• The first is 50+ and attitudinally sees saving money as a stronger motivation for purchasing
than fashion. The potential market in this respect is limited by the number who actually shop
online.
• The second is younger, typically 35 – 45 and see fashion as a very important element in
purchasing eyewear. This group are far more likely to be seasoned online shoppers and
responsive to advertising in general.
• Our potential UK market is around 8 million households and in socio-demographic terms, our
customers fall neatly into intelligent and relatively affluent bandings.
• MOSAIC shows that groups such as ‘Symbols of Success’, ‘Happy Families’, ‘Suburban
Comfort’, ‘Urban Intelligence’ and ‘Rural Isolation’ all over index on the UK average. Value is
far more important than cheap.
• Gender wise we have a slight male skew 55/45 female biased.
• We have a slightly younger customer today than we had two years ago, but around 60% of
our customers are aged 45+.
• Geographically we are fairly evenly represented across the UK. Only Wales and Ireland stick
out as being particularly weak.
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8. Glasses Direct – Our Market
• The UK optical market is worth around £2.5 billion PA
• £1.7 billion of this is spent on glasses.
• The market is dominated by the high street ‘big 3’.
• Online share of voice just between 1.5% and 2%.
• Competition is fierce and all about pricing.
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9. Glasses Direct – The New Proposition
• The business started selling cheap glasses online.
• ABV was sub £40.
• Hard to build a business on a £40 ABV!
• From 2008 we have focussed on increasing ABV.
• It is now over £100, much closer to the high street.
• Lost customers and volume as a result.
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10. Glasses Direct - The Task
• The aim for 2011 was to return to unit sales levels similar to 2009, but with the price
point and profitability of 2010.
• Key to success is interrupting and then educating 26 million UK glasses wearers
that buying online is not just possible, but better than the high street.
• Glasses Direct must be seen as ‘the’ online destination for prescription
eyewear through building a brand that people both like and trust.
10,000
9,000
8,000
7,000 ORDER VOLUMES
6,000
2008/9
5,000
4,000 ORDER VOLUMES
3,000 2009/10
2,000
1,000 ORDER VOLUMES
0 201011 (Target)
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11. Glasses Direct – Our Strategy
• Marketing strategy operates on 2 separate levels;
– Customer Acquisition
– Customer Retention (CRM).
• Financial tolerances for acquisition are based on a lifetime value calculation from our CRM
program, allowing us to optimise efficiency but focus on growth.
• An integrated multichannel strategy is employed which spans both on and offline channels.
All core areas are supported by a test campaigns which will allow us to continually try new
channels and activity.
• Current channel mix is response based and very much BTL.
• We balance bottom line CPA.
• 90% of business is done online.
• Everything is judged on ROI performance.
• We believe future success depends on many factors, but at the core is understanding
channel integration and overlap, both on and offline.
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12. Overview of Core Channel Mix
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13. Overview of Expanded Channel Mix
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14. Glasses Direct – Current Challenges
• Things not exactly going to plan!
• Retail market in general is not great, but the optical space is really suffering from a lack of
demand.
• High street being very aggressive.
• Economic doom.
• Lots more online competition and noise.
• Some really aggressive online offers.
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15. Glasses Direct – What We Are Doing
• Developing our strategy for an imminent recession and an further drop in consumer
spending.
• Solidifying our proposition and market positioning.
• Concentrating on core channel activity.
• Targeting hyper efficiencies and a 25% bottom line drop in CPA.
• International.
• Increasing our reach in core areas such as the affiliate market where we can be aggressive
and agile with our price proposition and offers.
• Investing in content and SEO, which will provide support to multiple channels and open new
doors.
• Investing in data allowing direct marketing to be more effective.
• Improving our segmentation and understanding of both the customer and behaviour.
• Building data driven and automated CRM campaigns from a rich central repository of
customer insight.
• Using mass group purchase channels (e.g. Groupon) to grow the database and employing
long term communication methods to retain their business and drive LTV.
• Using social media (on and offline) to leverage word of mouth and member get member
referrals.
• Separate attribution / optimisation and better understanding channel overlap.
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16. Glasses Direct - Key Strategic Areas
Content
•Content is the sweet spot for three vital areas; SEO, PR and the social web
•You can’t expect to shout when you have nothing to say.
•Convergence is blurring the lines between traditional PR and the social web.
•Present the right messages in all communications and maintain our position as the market
leader by engaging consumers outside of regular ‘push’ marketing channels.
PR SEO
Content
Social
Media
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17. Glasses Direct - Key Strategic Areas
Understanding and segmenting our customer base
• We have built a new marketing database with a single customer view.
• Significantly improved our ability to segment our customer base into different cohorts giving
rise to more targeted campaigns across multiple communication channels.
• A central repository has been created to house all customer data and provide a much more
accurate way of tracking and learning from our successes and failures.
• Ability to import data from multiple external sources giving rise to greater data driven and
automated campaigns.
• Use this insight to model our available market and accurately target new customers.
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18. Glasses Direct - Key Strategic Areas
Separating Attribution and Optimisation
• Implementing TagMan V3.
• Give Marketing control of tag management and therefore campaign agility.
• Improve site speed.
• Deliver a real-time, de-duplicated view of our PTC and allow us to separate attribution and
optimisation.
• Feed PTC data into the marketing database and improve our customer insight.
• Piece together the PTC channel jigsaw, improve campaign efficiencies and deliver the
bottom line CPA target.
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19. Glasses Direct - Attribution
The Path To Conversion
1st Click 2nd Click 3rd Click Last Click
Generic SEM Email Affiliates Retargeting
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20. Glasses Direct - Attribution
Last Click
100%
% Value of Order
75%
50%
25%
0%
1st click 2nd click 3rd click 4th click
Generic SEM Email Affiliates Retargeting
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21. Glasses Direct - Attribution
First Click
100%
% Value of Order
75%
50%
25%
0%
1st click 2nd click 3rd click 4th click
Generic SEM Email Affiliates Retargeting
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22. Glasses Direct - Attribution
Averaged
100%
% Value of Order
75%
50%
25%
0%
1st click 2nd click 3rd click 4th click
Generic SEM Email Affiliates Retargeting
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23. Glasses Direct - Attribution
Fractional
100%
% Value of Order
75%
50%
25%
0%
1st click 2nd click 3rd click 4th click
Generic SEM Email Affiliates Retargeting
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24. Glasses Direct – Separating Attribution & Optimisation
• The main use of an attributed view is for reporting.
• On it’s own, a single attributed view is limiting.
• Attribution and Optimisation are very different and need to be
separated.
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25. Glasses Direct - Attribution
Generic
PPC
Clicks Orders % Conv Sales AOV
Last Click 46,452 892 2% £80,638 £90
• Generic Search is low sales, high cost using last click attribution.
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26. Glasses Direct - Attribution
Generic
PPC
Clicks Orders % Conv Sales AOV
Last Click 46,452 892 2% £80,638 £90
First Click 46,452 3,347 7% £337,081 £101
• Move to first click and we capture more sales.
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27. Glasses Direct - Attribution
Generic
PPC
Clicks Orders % Conv Sales AOV
Last Click 46,452 892 2% £80,638 £90
First Click 46,452 3,347 7% £337,081 £101
Averaged Clicks 46,452 1,523 3% £142,993 £94
• Which view do we optimise to?
• Are we simply moving numbers around?
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28. Glasses Direct - Attribution
Generic
PPC
Clicks Orders % Conv Sales AOV
Last Click 46,452 892 2% £80,638 £90
First Click 46,452 3,347 7% £337,081 £101
Averaged Clicks 46,452 1,523 3% £142,993 £94
All Clicks (Assists) 46,452 5,466 12% £530,871 £97
• Only by ignoring attribution and looking at ‘assisted sales’ do we see the whole picture.
• By optimising towards any one attribution view we optimise away from other conversions.
• Without understanding of other channel interactions these conversions are at risk.
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29. Glasses Direct – Separating Attribution & Optimisation
The Way Forward
• Optimise the PTC, not the channel.
• Identify ‘golden combinations’ that drive sales.
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30. Glasses Direct – Separating Attribution & Optimisation
Working With The PTC Data
• Difficult to manipulate and make sense of the data.
• Import into your database alongside other customer and
marketing data.
• Gain powerful insight into what channel interactions drive sales.
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31. Glasses Direct - Optimisation
Generic
PPC
All Clicks (Assists)
Orders %
Total Generic PPC 5,466 100%
• Let’s return to Generic PPC to look at
the other channels in the mix.
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32. Glasses Direct - Optimisation
Generic
PPC
All Clicks (Assists)
Orders %
Total Generic PPC 5,466 100%
• High number of overlaps across all
Paid Search Brand 2,877 53% channels.
Natural Search Brand 2,247 41% • Generic Search assists with
Direct To Site 2,087 38% conversions outside of last click.
Affiliates 1,803 33% • High percentage of new customers
Email 1,338 24% across all clicks.
Display Advertising 729 13%
Display Retargeting 351 6%
Natural Search Generic 164 3%
Comparison Shopping 74 1%
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33. Glasses Direct - Optimisation
Generic
PPC
All Clicks (Assists)
Orders %
Total Generic PPC 5,466 100%
• Matchback of offline data shows 40%
Paid Search Brand 2,877 53% overlap with Direct Mail.
Natural Search Brand 2,247 41% • Generic Search is valuable to offline
Direct To Site 2,087 38% and online acquisition.
Affiliates 1,803 33% • Optimise using assisted conversions.
Email 1,338 24%
Display Advertising 729 13%
Display Retargeting 351 6%
Natural Search Generic 164 3%
Comparison Shopping 74 1%
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34. Glasses Direct – Efficiency
Affiliate Deduplication
• Everyone wants to remove overlap.
• Must be aligned to your channel goals
• Collaborate with your Affiliate network and partners to work towards your goals.
• Be based on knowledge of channel interactions.
• Our channel goal here is true, efficient conversion.
• PTC analysis shows interactions with all channels.
• Overlap with email is high with email clicks after affiliate clicks being performed
by existing customers.
• We will dedupe affiliates vs. email as last click.
• CPA will decreased by between 15% and 20%.
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35. Glasses Direct – PTC Project Goals
• Gain Marketing control of tag management and therefore
campaign agility.
• Improve site speed.
• Deliver a real-time, de-duplicated view of our PTC and allow us
to separate attribution and optimisation.
• Feed PTC data into the marketing database and improve our
customer insight.
• Integrate offline touch points by using match-back data and
deduping against online with transaction IDs.
• Move quickly to a fractional view and the ability to apply
different models to each channel.
• Piece together the PTC channel jigsaw, improve campaign
efficiencies and deliver the bottom line CPA target.
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36. Rob Silsbury – A Shameless Plug
THE END
@robsilsbury Linkedin.com/in/robsilsbury
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