Today’s Economic Times: This is No Time to Joke
Let me first start off by saying that most of the time I enjoy reading the Bazaarvoice Blog – it’s well written and certainly at times a viable source for our ecommerce industry. But the most recent post by Sam Decker, their CMO, really caught my eye and made me do a double a take.
The gist of his posting “The CFO’s Favorite Marketing Program in Tough Times” is to justify paying $100K for a customer review solution that is available elsewhere in the marketplace for, well, let’s just say at a price which is normally 95% less than that.
And at the end of what has to be one of the longest posts I have ever read there, Sam summarizes the options facing online merchants today in these tough economic times:
“There are two responses to tough times – retreat and cut costs or be intelligently aggressive. When you’re intelligently aggressive, you choose effective marketing investments that hit the ‘market bulls-eye.’ driving long-term, sustainable P&L impact.”
Upon reading this, two things immediately jumped to mind:
- There is of course a THIRD OPTION – cut costs AND be intelligently aggressive. Why not seek out and then switch to a highly comparable (if not superior, due to our tag-based review functionality) review solution and save yourself $100K to your bottom line (or $500K in incremental sales to support the tool assuming a 20% average margin)
Now that is what I I would think is a truly sustainable P&L impact.
Some of the folks we’ve talked to as their contracts are up for renewal, share with us that on average they are shelling out close to $20 for each review generated. So what do we tell them? That importing content is not a difficult a task for us. If they switch over to PowerReviews, we will ensure all existing reviews remain and they do not have to start over from scratch – we do this all the time with legacy reviews.
- An old phrase my daddy used to say about selling ice cubes to Eskimos
