March 2008 - Electronic Retailer Magazine

caseSTUDY
tomers chose to buy from the website
rather than by calling an 800 number.
Until the steam mop show ran, no
more than 15 percent of respondents to
a Euro-Pro infomercial had ever bought
the advertised product online, says Jeff
Frankel, the company’s vice president of
international and direct consumer sales.
Yet, more than 32 percent of all steam
mop sales have come via the web.
That represents a lot of money. As of
mid-January, Frankel says, total sales
from the infomercial have amounted
to more than 200,000 units at an average
gross per sale of about $127. That’s
more than $25 million in revenue, a
third of it generated online.
The high online response rate is
due in part to careful search engine
optimization, but certainly not to a
glamorous website for the product.
Far from it, Frankel says. The dedicated
site to which infomercial viewers
are directed, sharksteammop.com, is
a bare-bones affair, constructed on
what he calls a “quick and dirty” basis
in about two weeks by a low-priced
vendor in India. “I’d have made the
site prettier and given it more features
if I had time,” he says. “But it’s giving
us better performance than anything
we’ve had in the past.”
“If you put up an
infomercial with a
URL and a phone
number, 95 percent
of the activity would
come in by phone.”
—Paul Soltoff, SendTec
Frankel suspects that the unprecedented
online response rate for the
Shark Steam Mop is not a peculiarity
of the product or the campaign, but
more a sign of the times—and a sign
of things to come.
So does Paul Soltoff, CEO of SendTec
Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla. SendTec is the
multichannel marketing agency that
46 electronicRETAILER | March 2008
helped produce the steam mop
infomercial and that handles
search optimization and other
aspects of online marketing for
Euro-Pro. Soltoff has worked
with Frankel on a number of
campaigns for the past several
years, during which, he says, “we have
watched a paradigm shift.”
As recently as five years ago, Soltoff
says, “If you put up an infomercial with
a URL and a phone number, 95 percent
of the activity would come in by
phone. Then it went to about 10 to 14
percent online, which was great
because [on the web] you have no callcenter
expense for inbound operators.”
But an online response upward of
30 percent? That isn’t about site design
and it isn’t just about steam mops,
Soltoff says. Rather, it points to a rapidly
growing change in consumer
behavior. “Consumers are deciding
where to engage advertising, where to
research products and where to buy,”
he says. DRTV advertisers now routinely
put URLs in their commercials,
but they have grown accustomed to
“looking at web sales as incremental
pickup—as cream.” When a full third
of an infomercial’s sales can come in
via the web, he suggests, “marketers
have to rethink their online strategies.”
If this much traffic is moving
online, Soltoff says, DRTV advertisers
“have to be in position to intercept it.
And to assess it. And to measure it.
Otherwise, they might not get it.”
THE SHOW
This was an infomercial that almost
didn’t happen. Steam cleaners in the
past have not panned out as a steady
source of business for Euro-Pro—
The challenge Euro-Pro had
while creating its Shark
Steam Mop infomercial was
breaking through the perceived
value barrier by making
viewers feel as if they
actually had used the mop.
“more of a roller coaster—some years
hot, some years cold,” Frankel says.
Euro-Pro’s strategy is to use infomercials
to build demand for products that
can be taken to retail, from which most
of its business comes, so the company
doesn’t look for quick-hit directresponse
offerings with short lifespans.
Corporate skepticism had to be
battled, and the project got underway
with a bare-bones budget. But
Frankel fought for this particular
product because he thought it was a
breakthrough device that anyone who
mopped a kitchen floor would love.
Early research showed that consumers
did, indeed, love the steam
mop—but only after they used it. “If
we just showed them the product,”
Frankel says, “people said they’d pay
$30 to $60 for it. For that, we couldn’t
do a successful infomercial. But once
they used it, they said they’d pay $80
to $130.” The challenge, he says, was
to produce an infomercial that “broke
through the perceived value barrier”
by making viewers feel as if they actually
had used the mop. “That was the
challenge we gave to SendTec.”
Soltoff then suggested an additional
way to break the value barrier: offer
an unusually long trial period to
encourage customers to use the product.
To get it into the buyer’s hands,
the Shark Steam Mop comes with a
60-day, money-back satisfaction
guarantee. That’s risky, Soltoff
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