Cover Story > Susan McKenna
was acquired, it was really critical for
gaining more organic customers through
search. Borba also uses its pay-per-click
(PPC) channels and paid advertising on
the search engines to drive people to the
site. Consumers also see Borba in the
stores — in Saks Fifth Avenue, in Gel-sons, in Henri Bendel’s, in Ulta — and
they seek the brand out online.”
Borba worked closely with online
DR agency Livemercial and Web design
company Nfusion on the site and its
sales capabilities. “We worked with Livemercial on our microsite for our DRTV
campaign,” she says. “They were been a
great partner to work with. Nfusion, based
in Austin, Texas, designed Borba’s main
Web site. It was a collaborative project
between myself, my team and their agency. Originally, they designed and built the
site Borbaskinbalancewater.com, which is a
Flash-based branding site, with no commerce application. We took that design,
with their permission, and leveraged it for
an E-commerce site.”
McKenna says that
powering up the company’s Web capabilities was
a “really clear” decision.
“Skincare and cosmetics
are items people require on
an ongoing basis,” she says.
“Anything that has some
necessity around continuity is a product that you
can market through direct
response online. Obviously,
the margins will be bet-
The Borba.com Web site, designed with the help of Austin,
ter when selling direct to Texas-based Nfusion, is a strong E-commerce partner for the
consumers. From a business brand and boasts social networking capabilities.
standpoint, it just makes
sense.”
The Brand
DRTV Agency
Innovative marketing through
direct response television.
creative
production
management
strategy
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Portland, Oregon 503.296.6131
Making the Web Work
What’s worked best in an online
marketing space, not only for Borba, but
also for McKenna’s own business and past
employers?
“I’ve found that pay-per-click works
best,” she says. “E-mail is a close second.
E-mail response is better, but the conversion — from a dollar amount — is less
than on a PPC campaign. I get more people responding and interacting with my
brand from E-mail. But my revenue dollars will be much higher from my pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click is probably
the best direct response tool online.”
This means, for Borba, “The primary
channel is pay-per-click and E-mail
marketing,” McKenna confirms. “Search
engines and social networking are big
components of what Borba does online.
They are less about paid placement or
paid advertising, like E-mail or PPC. But
it takes a lot of time and effort to make
them work.”
Under McKenna’s direction, Borba’s
online marketing plans also included
banner ads and some affiliate marketing
programs. At the same time, Borba is beginning to explore the mobile space.
“With the banner ad campaign, Borba
only runs on cost-per-acquisition (CPA),”
McKenna says. “We worked with networks that usually buy remnant space.
Actually, online, there’s about 40 percent
of space still available on any given site.”
She adds that most Web publishers
continue to charge for banners on a cost-per-thousand basis, but she sees change
coming. “It’ll be like the music or entertainment industries fighting online music
sharing and movie sharing,” McKenna
contends. “They’re going to fight it because they make a lot more money with a
CPM campaign. The smart publishers are
using CPA campaigns because they are
willing to stand by the context of their
audience.”
McKenna is a believer in the affiliate
space, and says Borba’s efforts were successful during her time there. “Affiliate
marketing can be very powerful,” she says.
“But it’s a numbers game. You have to
have thousands and thousands of affiliates. To me, affiliate marketing was one
of three partner programs. The others are
online resellers — for instance, Borba
works with Victoria’ sSecret.com, Beauty.
com and so on — and strategic partners.
Strategic partners are not necessarily
measured from a commerce perspective,
but in that they drive traffic to my site
and give me residual value. For example,
PersonalShopper.com has a community of
people who are of interest to Borba.”
McKenna gets excited when she talks
about exploring the mobile space and
vendors she’s been in contact with. “I was
working with a company called Shop Text
at Borba,” she says. “We’d been talking
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