By Alan Coleman on 8 Mar 2018
Research Online Purchase Offline, or as we call it - ROPO, is a massive area of digital marketing that businesses are grappling with in 2018. Give just 3 minutes of your time and in exchange, Al and Roisin will give you the best ammo to gain a bigger slice of your company's marketing spend.
Wolfgang Bites: Watch Alan and Roisin Discuss ROPO Reporting
Wolfgang Bites: Listen to Alan and Roisin Discuss ROPO Reporting
If you think ROPO is something you'd like to know more about, you can read Anna's article on The Reporting Iceberg Moment or Rob's ROPO Reporting for DID Electrical.
Wolfgang Bites: Transcript
Alan: How do you do? Myself and Roisin here to talk to you about a new report for multichannel retailers, which we believe is probably the most important report marketers can be looking at. Facebook has only gone and cracked ROPO; the research online purchase offline phenomenon. We believe this is really important because retailers have 100% visibility on the sales we're making online, but very little visibility on the in-store sales impacted by online. So Roisin, can you tell about how Facebook has solved ROPO?
Roisin: Facebook has released the offline conversions report. Basically, what this is: someone goes into a store and buys something, you collect information from them at the point of sale, you log this information back into Facebook. So for example, their name, their email address, their phone number - as much information as you can get from the customer when they're purchasing something. You put this back into Facebook and Facebook then matches that to a profile and lets you know if those people have clicked on, or seen one of your Facebook ads. So you can basically track from the Facebook ad to the sale in store. It's absolutely deadly.
Alan: So people who are maybe sending e-receipts, or even loyalty cards - it's the information they're gathering anyway. Is that good enough?
Roisin: Yeah. So the more information you can get the better, but if you think about the amount of information you actually give Facebook - your name, your email your phone number. Basically, the more information you have, the easier it is for Facebook to match data person to a Facebook profile. Or if all you have is an email and a name, or just a name, it's worth doing it anyway and seeing what your match rate it.
Alan: What kind of match rates are we seeing when we just have an email?
Roisin: We're seeing a match rate of like 50%. Because if you think about it, the email that people have hooked up to their Facebook is usually their main email because they want to get notifications in their email every day. So with an email, we've seen around 50% match rate, which is really good.
Alan: That's wild. Facebook really knows who these shoppers are. Tell me this, as digital marketers, we've always felt that we're undervaluing ourselves and that we've 100% visibility on the online sales that we're creating. But we've next to no visibility in the offline sales. We've often wondered, maybe for every one we're making online, there could be another one in store. What kind of figures have you been seeing for the ratio of online sales to in-store sales so far?
Roisin: Yeah, we've seen a bit of a range. But what we've seen so far is for every one euro spent online, we're generating between five euro and even 10 euro in some cases online, for like the higher end brands. So yeah, it's amazing.
Alan: Wow, okay. So huge. You can imagine lots of marketing, will come flooding towards digital marketing when people see this. Are there any, we love an advanced usage in Wolfgang Digital, have you any advanced usages of this new report?
Roisin: We do. As I said this report is great for reporting purposes; to track people that have seen your ad, and how they act in store. But you can take this to the next level and you can actually use this report to target people. For example, you can target all of these people who've just purchased in your store a week ago. That's a goldmine of information. If you think about what would you want to say to people who've just purchased in your store in the last week for example, it gives you so much opportunity there.
Alan: That's class. You could be cross-selling something new, or you could try and be useful and giving someone extra information on their purchase.
Roisin: Yeah, there's loads you could do.
Alan: That's class. What I love about that, I think for me, is this is going to reshape how retailers view their marketing efforts. The way a lot of retailers think about their online source; I think we've got multiple offline stores, and we have an online store, and it's just another store. But when people start seeing this report, and they see that online's actually part of the journey to all of their stores, I think it'll totally reshape how they view the customer journey. In turn, that will mean that they'll reshape how they plan their marketing campaigns.
