A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

Q. What is your process for getting the right investment in marketing channels?

Sajjad Bhojani, Dunelm:

 How we assign our online marketing budget overall is 

simple ‑ it’s based on Return on investment (ROI); for every £1 of investment we have 

to return £X either through the site or in‑store, although we need to understand contri‑

bution to in‑store better. Within this you have to think about different types of invest‑

ment, for example brand investments such as display advertising and direct response 

elements such as paid search (Google AdWords). Direct response is directed at hitting 

the sales target, with investment re‑reviewed each month. What’s important is how 

you test and learn. It’s an evolving strategy, with separate budgets identified for each 

and different KPIs for search and display since the intent is different.

M08_CHAF6542_06_SE_C08.indd   327

7/23/14   1:50 PM

---

328

Part 2  Strategy and applications

 Search is hugely important, it’s core to most retailers including us, but you have 

to separate investments and analysis for brand and  non‑  search behaviour. Brand 

searches are where people know about us already and they search for Dunelm on 

its own or with a product name or category. It’s important to connect these search‑

ers with the right product, but even more important to attract visitors searching more 

generally. To help here, we have invested in a  non‑  brand SEO strategy, which has 

involved improvements to site content and architecture, on‑site optimisation and  off‑ 

 site optimisation looking at linking patterns. This is a  fixed‑  line investment, which has 

seen significant improvements year‑on‑year. 

 Have a 12‑months sales and profit target, then build in flexibility to change brand 

and direct response marketing activities within this, separated into brand and direct 

response. 

 It can vary between test and responsibility – we have a display retargeting budget 

where we conduct different trials each month. We are reviewing budget for prospecting – 

attracting new customers via Ad networks too. 

 We also have an affiliate programme set up within the last 12 months. At the same 

time we need to review investment. 

 As we review the effectiveness of our media spend we review relative return on 

investment from different categories, for example focussing on higher average order 

items. With the breadth of our product range we need to! For each category we review 

brand,  non‑  brand, direct response and email sales for the current year against the 

previous year. 

 With the importance of branded search,  non‑  branded search visits are separated 

out as a separate channel in our analysis. The team has a weekly visit and sales target 

to hit. Year‑on‑year performance weekly review is a key part of setting performance 

targets and spend analysis. We also have separate targets for Reserve and Collect 

against home delivery linking through to profitability of these channels.    

 Digital marketing has been described simply as ‘ achieving marketing objectives through 

applying digital technologies ’ (Chaffey and  Ellis-  Chadwick, 2012). This succinct definition 

helps remind us that it is the results delivered by technology that should determine invest-

ment in Internet marketing, not the adoption of the technology!