My name is Cathy Bittner, and I'm a business developer at Canon.
Today, I'm delighted to introduce you to a presentation from our latest
Canon Future Promotion Forum from Ludovic Martin.
He's an e-commerce specialist and web to print consultant.
And his presentation tells about the changing landscape
in e-commerce and the opportunities for print in the mix.
So I hope you enjoy it and lots of other content there as well.
Hello, good morning.
Welcome to this webinar from Canon.
I'm Ludovic Martin. I'm an independent consultant in web to print
and e-commerce, and I'm also a blogger publishing print.watch blog
about online printing industry and e-commerce.
So today I'm going to talk about
how printing can be more efficient
than online advertising in the e-commerce funnel.
What's happening today
after the COVID crisis? We saw during this crisis
that e-commerce has boomed both in B2C and B2B thanks to remote
working, for example. But has accelerated the digital transformation.
And today, even in the B2B environment,
purchasers are looking for online solutions for their procurement.
And as a consequence,
the number of e-commerce stores has increased at a dramatic speed
during the COVID crisis. For example in France during the 2020 year,
you have more than 17,000 additional sites created.
That's quite good news. But at the same time, it has a tremendous consequence
on the advertising industry, as you have
more advertisers on the market.
The consequence is
the advertising space available on the market is not extensible.
So the consequence is that
your costs are increasing because you have more competition
and also you have more advertising
on social media, on Google and so on.
And the consequence is that customers are today suffering
what scientists calling the ad fatigue.
It means that there are too many ads
available on websites, on newspapers,
online or social media. So people are
tired by this. So they develop what they call banner blindness.
The brain is hiding banners and ads.
Also, they are suffering
questions of privacy because they understand that are tracked
on different devices they use. New features
like what's happening in iOS 14 are preventing tracking of customers.
So they are understanding that advertising becomes too intrusive.
And that spirit has revealed some weaknesses of digital marketing.
For example, what I was just talking about before is non-respect of user privacy.
People understand that they are tracked everywhere. You even see advertising
from Apple about this. Things that are on their devices
are not tracked compared to others.
The big model is leading to explosive costs because of this competition.
So lead acquisition on digital marketing is costing higher and higher.
You also have the question of fraud.
Many of clicks on banners
and videos and so on are generated by robots.
And this is a real problem because it participates in the increase of cost.
Also what is complex today was at the beginning
easy for someone to create campaigns on Google ads or Facebook ads.
But now it's really complex.
You can lose a lot of money
If you want to be efficient, it's really technical and hard.
So you need to hire people that are trained and
that are costing a lot. It's a kind of black box syndrome.
And one of the latest weakness is the recent taxes
that the government puts on GAFA, especially on Google and concerning
advertising, as these taxes as being transferred directly to advertisers.
So they are paying 2% or 3% more because of these taxes.
Today, marketers are
seeing something that is
opening up a kind of warning in their mind.
This increase of cost per clicks or cost per Mil. So that the cost of one
click on the banner is really increasing month after month.
At the same time, the click through rate, so it's the ratio
between the number of
displays of banners and the number of clicks that are generated
and visits to your website is decreasing So the ratio is not good.
And once customers are arriving on the website,
the conversion rates, which is the ratio between number of visits
generated by a campaign and transactions
generated by these campaigns, it's also decreasing, which is not good.
So the global performance
of web marketing campaigns is really decreasing at this time.
Today, e-commerce advertisers and shops are looking for different
aspects. The first one is transparency. They need to understand
how they spend their budget, what customers are really seeing,
clicking on and feeling.
And the real performance of their campaign.
At the same time, they want to increase performance
at every step of the customer journey using the right
channel and the right media to increase this
revenue generated by their campaigns.
For that, they need triggers because they need to plug
that into their marketing platforms
to use the right tool at the right moment
to increase customer lifetime value.
And also more and more advertisers today are looking for sustainability.
They understand that digital advertising
has a very poor carbon footprint. They understand that for video
formats and social media, the carbon footprint is not very good.
And so they are looking for alternatives to reduce the carbon
footprint of their campaigns and improve
the global performance in the carbon footprint of that company.
The problem is that modern marketers are digital natives.
So they have a language that is
focused on web marketing.
They are talking, for example,
about ROAS, which stands for Return On Ad Spend,
which is a ratio between what you spend and what you generate in terms of revenue.
CPC for Cost per Click,
CTR for click through rate
triggers, marketing automation software and so on.
So this is their mindset, and the problem is that the printing
industry doesn't talk the same language.
It's always in an old fashioned language, and
the language they talk is not compliant
with the language of modern digital native marketers.
So I wanted to explain to marketers that often
print is more efficient than search engine advertising or social media advertising.
If we compare on the same basis
and the first one is ROAS or Return On Ad Spend.
I've made a comparison on my blog between Google ads, Facebook ads, email marketing
for digital and direct marketing campaign
and inbox flyers for printing industry with postcard or leaflets.
And I compare it to the final performance
and the ratio between revenue generated and the cost of these different channels.
And in many cases, the Return On Ad Spend of print campaigns
is really higher than digital marketing.
Why? Because the performance of printing is higher,
because often the accurate media that creates surprises
and show that the brand is paying attention to their customers.
Also, it provides different
senses like smell,
feel, touch, things that you don't have in digital marketing.
So the lifetime
is longer because
you can read the flyer multiple times, you can give it to someone else.
So the lifetime of the advertising is longer.
And also you can have a longer message and show different things
and more things than just a banner or a shorter video.
And also today with cost per clicks
that are reaching often to more than €10.
print is cheaper when
you calculated the cost per click of a postcard or leaflet.
It's lower, but marketers don't know that. They still have an old fashioned
way of thinking.
So what I try to do is not to oppose print and digital in the marketing mix.
I just want to advise marketers to combine them.
They are different tools and you should use the right tool,
the right weapon at the right step of the customer journey,
based on cost, ROAS, reactivity, or carbon footprint.
What I try to do is to show that I illustrated that
in this diagram. I will send it to you
or it will be available after the webinar.
You will be able to to see it in a higher resolution version.
What I'm doing is here just showing all the channels
you have in both digital media, print and offline media.
And here it's the customer journey from acquisition
to conversion, retention and after reactivation.
So that is the standard customer journey in e-commerce,
which now becomes a kind of standard in web industry.
And I try to show that depending on the step
you are in this journey, you can use different
triggers, different channels, both from digital
or printing at different steps to generate loyalty.
And believe me, that's working.
So as an example, I've done that with companies
in the automotive industry, and
they started making magazines, for example, when they shipped parcels.
Magazine about their industry, showing new products and so on.
And the result was quite crazy because it generates really a real interest.
Customers were happy to have these gifts.
They received that as a gift,
not an advertisment, and they take took time to read it,
and they took time to see products on the store front.
And at the end, they generated
two good consequences an increase of the average or the value,
and also an increase of the number of orders per customer.
So I hope I have convinced you
and that you will take into consideration printing in your marketing mix.
Thank you very much. Bye bye.