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Facebook Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/154374-1/facebook_etiquette_five_dos_and_donts.html

Balancing your work and personal life on social networking tools such as Facebook has become more complex than ever -- and the dangers go beyond the well-publicized examples of posting party pictures to your profile.

A more subtle faux pas can affect your online reputation and even future job path, as your friend list on Facebook includes both personal and professional contacts. Information you post can mess up your work relationships and personal ones in one quick swoop.

For example, the immediacy and ease with which you can post a quip on Facebook may get you into trouble if you're teasing your significant other -- plus tell work colleagues more than they need or want to know about your relationship. This recent story of a man caught cheating by his wife when she perused his iPhone got us thinking: In this day of gadgetry and near-constant contact via social networking, how can you avoid blunders that will deem you a thoughtless spouse, friend or colleague?

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http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/154374-1/facebook_etiquette_five_dos_and_donts.html

Texas Tech Tuesday – It Ain’t Just About the Website

http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/11/18/texas-tech-tuesday-%E2%80%93-it-ain%E2%80%99t-just-about-the-website/

As part of my Texas Tech series, I’ve been corresponding with West Texas entrepreneur and football fanatic (sorry for the redundancy), Tom Grimes, who has consistently offered outstanding commentary and feedback on the Texas Tech and Coach Leach phenomenon.

In fact, his last e-mail was so good and applied so well to most lead generation websites that I thought I’d share it with you directly:

“…Leach recruited the BIGGEST OFFENSIVE LINE in college football (bet it’s bigger than most pro teams as well). These guys make the offense that Leach runs possible. They wear down defensive lines, protect the passer, open up running lanes … but guess what … THEY DON’T SCORE. They only make it possible to score.

I think great websites similarly open up the door of possibility but no matter how big the website is … and how many bells and whistles it has … there is a lot more to scoring points with the customer.  You still need to do all the other things right.

Southwest Airlines is aggressive online. I print boarding passes through the website.  I get my seat assignments through the website. I also get regular email offers from them. Sounds hunky dory but the Website AIN’T the reason I am booking flights. It is the cost, convenience and great service Southwest has been delivering to ME for a long time. The WEB just made my ongoing relationship with them even easier.

Amazon isn’t just a website … they do an incredible job of shipping my books to my doorstep … and yep, they send me customized emails about new books on subjects I read.

UPS lets my company do all its shipping on line … but it is the guy in the brown truck who picks up my packages on the day I want to ship that I am interested in … the UPS website is merely a tool.

The same concept applies to your clients. The WEBSITE is an extension of the business … it ain’t the business. The Man-Giants for Texas Tech don’t score … they make it possible for Graham Harrel and Michael Crabtree (i.e., the SALES TEAM) to connect and put points on the board  … the defense is the OTHER stuff we do that people may not notice (like delivering really awesome service).

I think that more and more energy is being put into websites (the Offensive Line) … and it is vitally important … but you still have to have a sales force (QB & Receivers) and combine it with excellent core service & products (Defense). Put it all together and you can win a National Title.

t”

Yet while Tom was taking this from a somewhat negative light by asking “are your company’s QB/receivers up to snuff?”  I was taking this from the opposite perspective of, the better the offensive line blocks, the more successful the rest of your offense will become.

More specifically, clients with lead generation sites are always more than happy with the increased number of sales leads we can create through Website redesigns and optimization, but that’s not what the rave about.  What they’re usually blown away by is the increase in lead quality and reduction in sales cycle time.

Why?

Because most clients weren’t thinking about – and therefore weren’t expecting improvement in – that aspect of lead generation when they hired us, so success on that front is more of a WOW for them.  And also because those factors can be even more important in bottom line success than increasing the raw amount of leads.

Of course, when you really focus on the fact that the website itself won’t complete the sale, it becomes second nature to ensure the sales team gets the best possible hand-offs and the most protection from time-wasting tire kickers “sacking” your QB.

So if you already have a solid sales team, the question I’d ask you is: how good is your offensive line, and how much more could you be scoring with a better one?

The disturbing inaccuracy behind Google Analytics

By Brandt Dainow

 

imediaconnection.com 

It is critical to know how any web metrics package calculates its numbers, even Google. You cannot assume, no matter how big the company, that the numbers will be correct. 

Google Analytics is probably the most popular web analytics tool in use today. It is certainly the best tool you can get for the price -- it's free and worth every penny. Unfortunately, like every web analytics tool, it is not 100 percent accurate. There are reasons why it is impossible to build perfectly accurate web analytics software, which I have covered previously in "Things that throw your stats," so we should not blame Google for this. However, Google Analytics is different from other products in that it has been intentionally designed by Google to be inaccurate over and above the normal inaccuracies that are inevitable. These inaccuracies are so glaring that most people are getting a very false picture of what is happening in their sites. This article will explain where these inaccuracies lie and provide methods to correct for them.

Visits and bounces
Firstly, we must remember that Google did not create Google Analytics.  The company bought a product called Urchin and rebranded it. After about a year, it then released an upgraded version. Urchin had contained a very big mistake in its calculations, which Google fixed in the upgrade. The problem lay with counting visits. According to all the web analytics standards, a "visit" only happens when someone reads more than one page on a site. If someone comes to your site, looks at the first page, then leaves, this is not a "visit" -- it is a "bounce." The best way to think of this is in terms of a shop. If someone looks at the store window but moves on, they have bounced. It is only when they enter the store (or site) that you have a visit.

This is a very important definition to grasp because it fundamentally affects how you see the performance of the site. The reason we need to distinguish between bounces and visits is that we can't tell how long someone spent looking at a web page. We can only tell what time they accessed it. We calculate the time spent looking at a page by comparing what time they accessed it with what time they accessed the next page.

For example, if someone accesses my homepage at 2 p.m., then accesses the next page at 2:15 p.m., we assume they spent 15 minutes reading the homepage. If someone only accesses one page -- in other words, if they bounce -- we have no way of knowing how long they spent looking at that one page. So you can only calculate visit duration when someone reads two or more pages.

A key metric when analyzing the performance of a site is the average duration -- how long people are spending in the site. You need to know your overall average duration for the site, and you often want to know the average duration for visits from certain ads or for specific products. It's a very good way of assessing engagement. Average duration is calculated by totaling up all the individual visit durations and dividing this by the total number of visits.

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The Short Head of a Long Tail

http://seekingalpha.com/article/106314-google-apple-amazon-the-short-head-of-long-tail-aggregators?source=email

Over the past few weeks there has been a flurry of reappraisals of the Long Tail, most of which center around the question of whether it creates bigger blockbusters or smaller ones (more concentrated markets or less concentrated ones). 

My predictions have always been that massive increase in variety plus massive improvements in "filters" (tools to make it easier to find new stuff that's right for you) would tend to reduce the blockbuster effect and redistribute attention over a wider range. And, indeed, that's what the data I cited in my book showed, where online markets of books, DVDs and music saw between 20% and 40% of the demand shift to products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores. 

But there were clearly exceptions to this. One of the main ones was the irony that there was a very short Head of Long Tail aggregators: Amazon, iTunes, Google and their kin dominate their markets to a blockbuster-like degree. 

I blamed this on a still-young market and assumed that even aggregators would fall victim to the flight from one-size-fits-all someday. But new research from McKinsey (free registration req'd) suggests that this sort of radical inequality is increasingly the norm as markets get more networked. 

The past decade has seen the rise of many “mega-institutions”—companies of unprecedented scale and scope—that have steadily pulled away from their smaller competitors. What has received less attention is the striking degree of inequality in the size and performance of even the mega-institutions themselves. Plotting the distribution of net income among the global top 150 corporations in 2005, for example, doesn’t yield a common bell curve, which would imply a relatively even spread of values around a mean. The result instead is a “power curve,” which, unlike normal distributions, implies that most companies are below average.

Here's an example: the increasing gap between the top two or three financial services companies and everyone else since 1994 (the recent collapse of many financial firms and the roll-ups that have led to three "megabanks" will only accentuate this):

 

And it's not just companies. The Long Tail--the powerlaw created by network effects--may be creating super-celebrity, too. Here's what Google CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured above) says about the Long Tail and blockbusters (I've transcribed his interview with McKinsey):

I would like to tell you that the Internet has made such a level playing field that the Long Tail is absolutely the place to be, that there’s so much differentiation, so much diversity, so many new voices. I’d love to tell you that that’s in fact how it really works. Unfortunately, it’s not. What really happens is that we follow what’s called a powerlaw. A powerlaw has the property that a small number of things are very highly concentrated and most things have relatively little volume. And virtually all of these new network markets follow what’s called Zipfs’s law, or a powerlaw. 

It means unfortunately for our political point of view, although the tail is very interesting and we enable it, the vast majority of the revenue remains in the head. And this a lesson that businesses have to learn. While you can have a long tail strategy, you better have a head, because that’s where all the revenue is. 

And in fact it’s probable that the Internet will lead to larger blockbusters, and more concentration of brands, which doesn’t make sense to most people, because it’s a larger distribution medium and when you get everybody together they still want to have one superstar. It’s a bigger superstar. It’s no longer a US superstar, it’s a global superstar. Global celebrities, global scandals, global politicians. And just to be clear, it’s a 90/10 model. We love the long tail, but we make most of our money in the head, just because of the math of the powerlaw. But you need both. You need the head and the tail to make the model work.

Since Google is the canonical Long Tail company, I should probably have a good response to this. But the truth is that he's no doubt right. Powerlaws do imply wildly unequal distributions of money, power, celebrity and everything else. But this is nothing new. The rich get richer, fame snowballs, and so on. Vilfredo Pareto spotted this in 1906 in Italian wealth distribution, which is why a powerlaw is more commonly known as a "Pareto distribution."

So how to square this with my own prediction of more widely distributed markets? Three ways:

1. There's a big difference between a highly concentrated market with a small number of players and one with a huge number of players. If there are ten stores in the world, having one of them with 70% market share smacks of a monopoly. If there are ten million stores, it doesn't. Amazon may be by far the largest e-tailer, but there are hundreds of thousand of other, smaller specialists. Google may be the largest online advertising company, but there are again many thousands in its wake. The Tail is Long. As Schmidt notes, these countless specialists are essential to a well-functioning market, but it's true that few of them are getting rich at it.
2. The consequence of the above is that it's very hard to measure the entire market. Schmidt rightly notes that network effects on a global scale mean that Paris Hilton is more famous today, in terms of the number of people who have heard of her, than she would have been a half-century ago. But at the same time, there are millions of microcelebrities (of which I am one, I guess) who are also more more famous than they would have been a half-century ago, for the same reasons. What is the total market of celebrity, and what is Paris Hilton's share? We have no idea--it's practically impossible to measure, to say nothing of how it has changed over the years. But I would bet that the aggregate market for microcelebrity (think: Facebook) is gaining share on traditional celebrity.
3. Finally, it's not all about money. As I've said many times, both in the book and elsewhere, most of the rewards in the Tail are non-monetary: a larger audience for producers, and more choice for consumers. Sometimes those can lead to economic benefits, but often they can't. Today, a decade into the arrival of unlimited variety online, the Long Tail is still more of a cultural force than an economic one.

I'll end by conceding a point: It's hard to make money in the Tail. As Schmidt notes, it's also hard to make money if you don't have a Tail (to satisfy minority taste, which improves the consumer experience), but the revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change, but what will change is our definition of Head. Once that was choice counted in tens or hundreds of items. Now, especially in Google's world, it's counted in tens or hundreds of thousands.  Powerlaws may indeed create bigger fish, but the Long Tail is all about the bigger pond.

urship Blog Preparing Retailers for Economic Downturn: An Interview With eCommerce Analyst Linda Bustos

From plumbingsurplus.com

As we head into a holiday season that is projected to be the slowest in our near history what advice would you give online retailers and multi-channel retailers?  Which do you think will be impacted by the economy more (Online only or Multi-Channel retailers), why?

Rather than increasing spending on PPC or shopping engines (buying traffic), work on optimizing landing pages to squeeze more profit out of the traffic you’re already getting (including “free” customers like repeat, type-in visitors and organic search referrals).  Not to mention your email campaigns would also be more profitable, which is a nice segue into…

Market to your existing customers (provided they have granted you permission) and those who have subscribed to your email list and segment, segment, segment.  It’s still true that it costs much more to attract new customers than keep existing ones, and segmentation is key to effectively delivering relevant offers.  If you throw random offers at your entire list, you’ll likely lose subscribers.

Jeanne Jennings’ Really Simple Segmentation Framework is a great resource for segmenting by behavior, but you should also allow customers to self-segment by indicating their preferences.  Disney Shopping and GAP are examples of retailers who do this really well. 

So change your email signup form to allow self-selection of what kind of offers or products the customer wants to receive, and how often they want to hear from you and ask existing subscribers to update their preferences.

It’s also important to have a strong value proposition that is clearly communicated on your site.  Not a slogan, not a tagline, but a clear statement that answers the question: “why should I buy from you and not your competitor.”  If you don’t have a clear value proposition (most retailers don’t) make sure you read up on value propositions at Marketing Experiments’ blog.

To answer the second part of your question, I don’t think one or the other will be better or worse off.  Because we know many people will use the Internet only to research purchases they prefer to make offline, the online retailer with a local store can offer free ship-to-store, inventory lookup and free returns to store – multi-channel retailers have an advantage -- while the pure-play has a small chance of converting that customer, and may even be paying high CPCs to provide the research service to a non-buyer.

But retail stores carry overhead that pure plays don’t have.  Also, multi-channel retailers may treat ecommerce as a separate operation, and the online channel may have to fight to prove itself and win human and financial resources.  Pure plays give their all to their online business and may be more advanced in efficiency and effectiveness.

How to Avoid Gridlock in Web Traffic Analysis

Ecommercetimes.com

You've launched an online campaign. Now how do you measure its success? Despite all the data that can be sliced, diced, scrutinized and parsed, the process of tracking what's working -- and what isn't -- doesn't have to be overly complicated.

If you set a clear, reasonable objective and have a system in place to measure a campaign's success, the process doesn't need to be a daunting one. Analytics Tips Here are seven tips for getting the most out of your analytics -- without getting bogged down in the minutiae:

1. Develop a "success metric." The "success metric" is the desired action that takes place when a visitor arrives at your landing page or Web site. Success metrics all invariably fall along the "conversion continuum." The continuum starts with advertisers whose goal is to simply generate a site visitor and it ends with advertisers whose goal is to complete a transaction and capture payment on that visit. In between, there are advertisers who have "soft" offers, where there is some desired action on the part of the site visitor, but not a credit card transaction.
2. Establish an allowable cost. You've established your success metric, now you need to understand what that action is worth to you. There is a direct correlation between where a success metric lies on the conversion continuum and what the cost for that conversion will be.

   Many advertisers do not have a handle on their allowable marketing cost for achievement of their online success metric. A discussion around allowable cost is one of the first conversations you should have with the decision-makers at your company. Understanding your allowable cost will help you optimize your campaign, and help you set more realistic expectations if you don't believe you can achieve allowable cost goals.

3. Gather the right data.> Employ a promotion code or similar method to measure the traffic that arrives at your site and track it as it proceeds through your conversion funnel to the completion of their success metric. Each creative version and traffic source should have its own promotion code.
4. One variable is better than two (usually). Unless you have a very sophisticated testing platform that allows you to track and optimize multi-variant tests, limit testing to single variable tests so you can understand which variables are effective and eliminate the ones that are not.
5. Don't succumb to analysis paralysis. In the days before e-commerce, the challenge for brick-and-mortar retailers used to be gathering enough data to inform their actions. They'd rely on interviews with patrons during store intercepts to build a data set. Today, the opposite challenge is true: There's so much data that it's easy to get overwhelmed. You can literally measure everything about how consumers interact with your site right down to the individual user level. But do you need to? Limit data collection to what's actionable and limit testing scenarios to what's measurable.

   For many campaigns, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Analytics offers everything you'll need at no cost, and they do a pretty good job of presenting data in a user-friendly format. For more complex analysis, products like Omniture's SiteCatalyst and Web Trends offer sophisticated measurement, analysis and optimization tools for online marketers (at a price).

6. Find partners that support your analytics efforts. Most online advertising networks limit the data they provide to their advertisers. Look for companies that pass the most critical data back to you -- either raw or analyzed -- to help you optimize your campaign. Getting the whole picture lets you hone in on where you're most successful, and where your efforts are falling flat.
7. Test, measure, validate -- repeat. Online advertisers can learn a lot from their direct mail marketing counterparts when it comes to testing. The long established rule of direct mail is to test to establish a control. Validate that your control results are repeatable and test against your control until you can beat it. Online marketers would do well to embrace this paradigm.

Net Google Score

[Editors note - from time to time, we'll publish guest blog posts.  This one is from Kevin Hillstrom, President, MineThatData. 

A New KPI: The Net Google Score

I recently met with two executives, an EVP of Merchandising for a traditional catalog brand, and a CEO of an online pure-play. Both made interesting comments about traditional advertising and direct marketing.

The EVP of Merchandising lamented the fact that as he improved his ability to execute catalog advertising, his competitors benefitted from his efforts. In other words, his catalogs created demand, driving the customer to Google, where the customer discovered a dozen competitors with comparable items at comparable prices. This executive felt that his business was losing volume simply because of the dynamics of an online ecosystem fueled by his advertising strategy.

Conversely, the CEO of the online pureplay told me that improvements in natural and paid search performance were correlated with traditional advertising campaigns launched by larger and better funded competitors.

Each executive observed the same phenomenon from a different perspective. Customers turn to the internet, Google in particular, to learn as much as they can about products and services. Google re-distributes demand on the basis of the ability of a brand to create demand, to execute natural and paid search well, and to offer quality merchandise at a perceived fair price.

We need a new metric to measure this dynamic. I call the new metric the “Net Google Score”.

Simply put, the “Net Google Score” represents the net impact of Google on our business. We sum all of the demand generated by Google, then subtract all of the business that Google re-directs to our competitors, demand we would have otherwise generated. We do a great job of measuring the positives, quantifying ROI down to the penny. We don’t have a good methodology for measuring re-directed demand.

The EVP I mentioned earlier in this article surmises a Net Google Score that is negative. Maybe he manages a $25,000,000 product line, with $4,000,000 demand generated by Google. If his catalog marketing activities result in $6,000,000 demand being re-distributed by Google to competitors, he ends up with a Net Google Score of ($2,000,000). At a forty percent contribution level, the EVP is losing $800,000 of annual profit based on having a negative Net Google Score.

The CEO of a $5,000,000 online pure-play might generate $1,000,000 demand thanks to paid and natural search programs. If the CEO sees just $250,000 of demand re-distributed by Google to competitors, he ends up with a Net Google Score of $750,000. At a forty percent contribution level, he generates $300,000 profit, thanks to Google.

As business leaders, we need to carefully consider the impact of traditional advertising and direct marketing on the e-commerce ecosystem. Are our efforts working against us, fueling growth among competitors? Or do our efforts create online buzz, causing Google to send more business our way?

In 2009, we’ll collaborate with vendor partners to build tools that calculate the Net Google Score. We’ll better understand how our relationship with Google impacts growth and profitability. And if the Net Google Score is negative, we’ll need to evaluate our approach to traditional advertising and direct marketing. Clearly, the Net Google Score is an important metric for us to calculate in 2009.

Kevin Hillstrom, President, MineThatData.

Should Retail Email Sell or Inform? An A/B Split Test Case Study

Marketing Sherpa recently published an email marketing case from Drs Foster and Smith which tested the impact of mixing educational content with product promotions, whereas in the past their emails were either informative or sales-oriented. The results of mixing content were 7% boost in click through rate, 6% lift in conversion and 15% increase in sales (meaning average order size was higher). The campaign involved segmenting the “dog owner” customer, and performing an A/B test using email creative that offered products and discounts comparable in value proposition. As you can see, both emails below include an offer for a free pack of BioSpot and an article about protecting your home and pet from fleas. The difference is which call to action appears first (and more than double the size) in the content area. Week 1: Week 2: The winning design in both tests was information more prominent, offer less prominent. Remember, the informational call to action translated to a 15% increase in sales over the promotional offer. The all-important landing page used shorter copy with a top image hot-linked to a product page where readers could purchase products relevant to the information. In a sense, readers were being pre-sold on an item with expert advice which further motivated the purchase. Marketing Sherpa summed up the key takeaway as “Their audience responds better to relevant content than to a heavy-duty sales pitch.” This is a perfect example of what Marketing Experiments’ Flint McLaughlin recommended in the recent web clinic Ecommerce Holiday Playbook: 13 Ways to Maximize Revenue and Beat the Downturn. If If you skip to slide 31, Flint explains that the goal of the landing page is to sell (or in this case, pre-sell) the product. The goal of your email (or PPC ad) is not to sell, but to generate interest. A mistake is to try to sell in the email then sell again on the landing page. Offering educational content within emails is a great way to generate interest — it’s non-committal and it builds trust and long-term loyalty. Even if the customer doesn’t buy from you today, he or she is more likely to open your email expecting to receive valuable knowledge in exchange for their time. Two additional takeaways noted by Marketing Sherpa: Wisely placed educational articles may heat up sales in a blue economy. With consumers tightening purse strings, Web shoppers are not likely to be in as much of a hurry as they used to be. Therefore, holding people’s hands with educational content can be worthwhile for your brand. Educational content can create a comfort level for Internet shoppers who don’t have the luxury of physically assessing products the way brick-and-mortar shoppers do. Hence, relevant content can help bridge that gap between the product and the shopper. Here’s an action item: McLaughlin suggests you look at your last 5 emails you sent, or the next 5 you plan on using for the Christmas season, print them out and lay them on the table. Look at the messaging and ask yourself if the email was written to get a click, or to sell something. Also, take a couple hours to watch the replay of Ecommerce Holiday Playbook: 13 Ways to Maximize Revenue and Beat the Downturn. There’s a lot of valuable information here.   Next Free Ecommerce Webinar... Multi-Store Retailing Online: Perks and Pitfalls November 19th, 2008 @ 9am PT/12pm ET Panelist: Jason Billingsley, VP Innovation, Elastic Path Software Register to Attend...   You may also like these s imilar posts: Who Writes Short Shorts? Email Subject Lines That Is Trigger Email 101 Making Emails Enticing to Everyone Recovering Sales from Abandoned Shopping Carts With Email Consumers Believe Spam Means Unwanted, Not Unsolicited Email

How one niche e-store tackles some classic e-commerce challenges

from blog.sitebrand.com

feelbest.com

For online stores like feelbest.com using Sitebrand’s Segment&Serve Web personalization technology, creating more relevant experiences is comparable to having a virtual sales assistant. The concept behind Web personalization is very much based on what consumers have come to expect from the traditional brick and mortar shopping experience. Consider the traditional brick and mortar store where a sales person
easily observes and responds to variousshopping behaviors and body language. If someone is a repeat customer, they get to know their buying habits. If someone is a new customer, they work to build a level
of trust by offering helpful suggestions, sharing information about a hassle-free return policy, showing the layout of the store and so on. If someone is looking at high end fashion apparel, they look to cross-sell high end accessories. If someone is looking at sale items, they show them all the sale areas and so on.

Understanding visitor intent

But move online and suddenly the visual cues are gone. However, thanks to Web analytics, there are other cues the online marketer can follow. From the moment a visitor arrives, there’s intent to do something – to research, to buy, to register etc. And every move is monitored through Web analytics. The bottom line is that every move a visitor makes tells a story – from how they arrive to what they click and how long they stay on any given page. If someone arrives using the keyword “sunscreen”, they’re looking for sunscreen. If a Web site responds appropriately by showing a selection sunscreen and the visitor clicks to learn more or buy, they are that much closer to buying. They are being guided through the sales funnel. But if they bounce out of the site before converting – either pre-checkout or during check-out – something went wrong. And it likely relates to lack of guidance and direction from the Web site.

Responding to classic e-commerce challenges

Feelbest.com is Canada’s largest online health and beauty aid store and it faces many of the classic ecommerce challenges, including low conversion rates. As such, it is always looking for innovative ways to convert a higher percentage of Web traffic into buyers. The company also wants to recognize and respond to visitors’ geolocations; especially in terms of seasonality trends associated with many of its product categories, such as sunscreen. And it wants to create a superior, personal online experience that makes feelbest.com the online retailer customers turn to when they can’t find what they need in a regular store. The company actively encourages customers to tell it what they are looking for, no matter how obscure it may seem. The retailer specializes in finding and offering hard to find health care and beauty aid products. “If there’s demand – even from just five or ten customers – and the product is available somewhere in the world, we’ll go directly to the manufacturer and make it available to our customers,” says Darrin Pickard, feelbest.com’s sales and marketing manager.

The need to convert more traffic into buyers

The retailer’s approach is quaintly reminiscent of the corner-store owner who would get to know his/her customers one person at a time and stock accordingly. Although this personal approach to serving customers is like those of days gone by, the scale of the operation is surely different. Products are shipped to clients around the world with roughly 65% heading to the US. That’s also the nub of the challenge: motivating feelbest.com to explore an alternative strategy for further customizing and personalizing the Web experience of all visitors. The explicit goal was to find a solution that would convert a higher percentage of new and repeat traffic into sales. “Back in the late 1990s, it was easier to stake your claim as a top online retailer. But today, it’s much more competitive and you can never be complacent,” says Pickard.

Changing each visitor’s experience in real-time

Feelbest.com chose Sitebrand with its promise of superior traffic conversion to literally change the experience of every visitor in real-time while on a Website. What the retailer particularly appreciated
about the Sitebrand solution was the extensive support provided to help get up and running with a customized solution quickly. “Sitebrand is like a natural extension to our marketing team,” says Pickard. “It’s not a one-strategy-fits-all approach. What Sitebrand does is analyze your traffic and provide you with customized solutions based on your business goals and what your customers are looking for.” In the case of feelbest.com, the Sitebrand solution resulted in recommendations for the type, placement and frequency of marketing campaigns to target specific customers and boost sales in specific product categories. In Pickard’s words, “I think any online retailer worth their salt knows you can’t mass market on the Web and expect to achieve success. As best you can, you must try to speak to each site visitor as an individual. When you show people you are interested in getting to know them, they’ll show interest back. It is “Customer Service 101” and we’ve seen this with the personalization campaigns we’ve built with Sitebrand.”

Leveraging best industry practices to create smart content

All Sitebrand’s recommendations are based on industry best practices, backed by hundreds of successful implementations in similar industry sectors. This enabled feelbest.com to quickly develop “smart content” for specific customers and product categories. With the Sitebrand solution, specific areas of a Web page are allocated for the strategic placement of ads or campaign messages. Campaigns are developed around various criteria, including geo location, keyword searches, seasonal promotions, product categories, and many others.

Salvaging underperforming segments and sales

Campaigns result in a highly customized and personalized Web experience for all visitors from the moment they land on the Web site. In doing so, online retailers like feelbest.com report immediate and measurable increases in sales lift, superior click through, and higher conversion of existing traffic. “We see an immediate increase in the number of existing visitors converting in the checkout process,” says Pickard. “Seeing success around existing customers in currently established product categories makes us want to leverage Sitebrand to build campaigns around new, underperforming product categories. These new product awareness campaigns will be designed for existing and new customers,” he adds. In this way, feelbest.com will be able to test different offers with respect to new product categories. This ability to raise the profile of lower performing product categories will be designed to help increase average cart spends and total sales.

Close-up of first-time visitor promo

Recognizing a first time visitor has its rewardsTapping into underperforming segments, like first time visitors, has also proved highly successful. The first time visitor needs a different experience than the repeat visitor. They want a feeling of trust. They want to feel reassured they’re on a credible site.

When this first time visitor segment is served personalized messaging that reinforces credibility and trust versus the control group segment that receives no reinforcement, the personalized messaging always sees higher revenue per impression.

In the case of feelbest.com, the revenue per impression lift for personalized first time visitor campaigns is 207% higher than the default control group campaigns with no personalization.

Increased ROI from the feelbest.com e-newsletter

Sitebrand also provided feelbest.com with specific recommendations for print ads and its e-newsletter to create a more holistic and integrated marketing program. The company sends monthly emails to roughly 25,000 opt-in subscribers to promote the e-newsletter. Sales generated from the newsletter had begun to drop. Once the Sitebrand solution was integrated with the email program, feelbest.com saw an increase of 34% in the number of orders received within five days of the newsletter being broadcast. “Whenever we send emails, there’s an instant spike in Website traffic,” says Pickard. “It’s going to get even more interesting when we start adding more automation into the mix.” For an online health and beauty aid store, it will be a highly beneficial to trigger purchase reminder emails, i.e. “Your 90-day supply of vitamins is almost gone. Don’t be disappointed. Buy more now…”

The power of personalization for unique market segments

“The way I see it, not having a personalized approach to online marketing is like calling every one of your customers ‘Bill’. Worse yet, it’s like expecting them all to take advantage of a deal on mint toothpaste. But in reality, your customer’s name might be ‘Susan’ and she wears dentures…” says Pickard. “Website personalization allows you to find these unique market segments so you can serve up relevant offers that will convert visitors to buyers.”

NOTE: This post is also a featured article I contributed to the October 2008 issue of ”Direct Marketing” - a Canadian publication about interactive marketing and sales. Since it’s print-only (odd for an interactive pub, and apparently a website is in the works…but hey!) All that said, I felt compelled to share it online. I hope you enjoyed the read and I welcome your comments!