Wine Enthusiast’s Glenn Edelman on Multichannel Order Tracking

TM: How did you decide on the placement for your order code?
GE: We used to put it in various areas, but we found that telling customers, "Scroll down to the bottom, right-hand portion of the page"-there's even a question that says "Ordering by phone? Use code XYZ"-makes it clear. I've wanted to test making it visible on other areas of the [landing] page, but right now it's simple. And someone who's not on the phone and is ordering online, 99 times out of 100, is not going to see it. So, it's not intrusive or confusing to them.

Personally, I have no problem with driving the customer to the phone, but I don't want to do it out of confusion. I want to do it because they're more comfortable with the phone or they want to speak to a wine cellar consultant.

TM: What challenges have you encountered in trying to account for the roles different channels play in driving sales?
GE: The biggest challenge I continue to have is how many touches per order do we really see? You drop a catalog. You send an e-mail. You have affiliate programs. We're starting to dabble in social media with blogs and Facebook and things like that. Every touch, I spend a dollar or two. On every order, how much is that true cost per order? It's getting harder and harder to find that out. And then also throw into the mix that we do a lot of print advertising in Wine Enthusiast magazine as well as in national newspapers. What our true cost per order is continues to be a challenge. I know everybody has that challenge.

You can't do a matchback on someone who saw an ad in a newspaper but didn't reference that ad when calling the call center or placing an order online. We'll be doing some postpurchase surveys [to assess media mix], but you can't do it down to the order level sometimes.