In an interview with Adexchanger.com, Shutterfly Inc.CMO John Boris says the nearly two-decade-old photo site “probably shouldn’t have made it” in the transition to a mobile-centric world, but recent revenue increases have shown the company is competing with giants like Apple, Google and Facebook.
Some highlights from the interview:
How iterative is Shutterfly as a marketing organization?
Shutterfly CMO, John Boris
We are pretty relentless with our testing. We test, analyze [and] iterate over and over again. The gold standard for us is true lift tests.
We’d love to have a team 10 times our size full of data analysts so we can run true lift tests all day long. But as with any road map, there’s a greater list of wants than an ability to deliver, so we are judicious about the way we test.
We take true lift tests [and] update and recalibrate our multitouch attribution model, which we use to influence our iROI model. [That] informs adjustments around our investment strategy.
How has your media mix changed?
When I joined five years ago, we were very bottom-of-the-funnel-focused because we’re a pure-play ecommerce company. Over the last five years, I’ve emphasized building brand, which helps aid the performance of the bottom of the funnel and other DR channels. Direct mail is a good example and we continue to push into that, which seems counterintuitive for a pure-play ecommerce company.
But we tested, iterated and became one of, if not the single biggest, catalog drop in Q4 for holiday and several other campaign drops throughout the year. We’ve done television in the past and have done tons of earned media.
