The Disruption Tour - Run To Survive A Social Media Revolution

Opinions Matter...ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network

According to a recent LightSpeed Research study most consumers consult the Internet while researching products and services, with online reviews and referrals playing a vital role.

During the purchasing process price comparison may well be the most popular research activity online, with 75% of those surveyed by Lightspeed Research having compared prices online in the last six months, but the online opinions, referrals and experiences of other consumers play a vital role, too, for many (61%).

Consumers expect to find product reviews on shopping websites (72%) while around half (47%) seek them out on company websites (trusted referral pages) and 43% on price comparison sites. The majority use search engines to also find reviews and referrals.

So influential are the opinions of others that over two-thirds (67%) of consumers would be deterred from purchasing a product or service if they were to encounter two or three negative reviews, found Lightspeed's online survey.

In fact, a quarter (24%) said they had changed their mind about buying a product or service after reading two bad reviews while a further 39% said three negative reviews would deter them from making a purchase.

What are you doing to stimulate 'Trusted Referrals'?

At ShoppeSafe we know the incredible power of reviews and more importantly 'Trusted Referrals' as we've built our business around "Trusted Referrals". They are deeply integrated into every offer or content feed from our ShoppeHub merchant network pages and as such an integral part of our selling engine for both merchants and consumers. Why do we know how powerful 3rd-party 'Trusted Referrals' are? Because our ShoppeStats social and mobile analytic reporting metrics shares and supports our business model as each of our merchant shopping/content pages generate visitation from our website, email and Facebook merchant Power Buttons to their specific ShoppeHub pages which then generates higher order conversion, increased average order and enable new consumers to find merchants of their choosing.

How does all of this work so well? Well for the first time consumers are in total control of the offers and content that they want to receive and has given the merchant permission to reach them multiple times a day, 365 days a year wherever they are. They have opted-out of traditional Push-N-Pray marketing efforts and now opted-into the new world of Pull-Place-Buy-Share(tm) marketing.

Pull - consumers receive only the offers or content they want. They allow targeted and highly relevant offers of their choosing.

Place - your offers or content and in some cases your website goes where your consumers are. You only have to look at the growth of Facebook, Twitter, MyHome pages and mobile selling to know the world is no longer hanging out or exclusively coming back to your website.

Buy - through our ShoppeStats analytics we see consumers buying more from ShoppeSafe merchant posts and starting the program than they did and this has been confirmed by A/B split tests and at greater frequency of purchasing while also feeling better about your brand.

Share - Now with one click, consumers can easily move your offers and content to their friends/Likes on Facebook, Followers on Twitter, email their contact list, text their address book or print an offer and bring it into your store.

At ShoppeSafe all of these options are now easily and efficiently available to participating merchants and they provide new social and mobile sharing tools, which also immediately open up the opportunity for your business to engage in facilitating 'trusted referrals' with your consumers. Why wouldn't you want to further engage with consumers who are already stopping by your stores, sites, Facebook and email not to mention now also shopping with their smart phones. These are the next obvious waves of marketing opportunities for merchants.

And you know for yourself when you are in the market to buy, probably one of the first things you do is seek a "trusted referral".  So influential are the opinions of others that over two-thirds (67%) of consumers would be deterred from purchasing a product or service if they were to encounter two or three negative reviews, found Lightspeed's online survey.

With these ShoppeSafe "Trusted Referrals" tools from ShoppeSafe's ShoppeHub along with the consumer's understanding that their shopping experience is safe, private and anonymous your business through the ShoppeSafe network will engage and have new levels of social and mobile conversations with not only your consumers but their friends and family as well.  Imagine the exponential leverage of that marketing opportunity and its selling power.

So why not give The ShoppeSimple Network a try? Your ShoppeSafe business channel will be up and running on the ShoppeSimple Network including ShoppeSafe.com, your Facebook ShoppeFans Pages, your Twitter Store pages, new Personal MyHome pages on iGoogle, MyYahoo and MyMSN, email, mobile smart phones and your very own merchant ShoppeHub pages. You will get all of this up and running for your business in less then 10 days with zero implementation fees and at an affordable monthly rate based on your business size. Plus, we guarantee you must be successful or you don't pay us.

What could be more simple than that. Plus if you give me a call 612-249-2740 or email [email protected] by May 30th, we will also provide a FREE social and mobile consultation for your business.

Best,

Jeffery

Making money with Social Engagement with ShoppeSimple

Moving ahead with ShoppeSimple. ShoppeSimple allows your business to track Social Commerce Engagement through our sophisticated analytic reporting while you generate serious Social Commerce revenue.

Taking a holistic, integrated approach can be the key to effective customer engagement. While specific tactics will vary based on marketing and sales priorities, the new engagement model requires more insight into audience needs, habits, and preferences, as well as a concerted effort to engage what could potentially be a brand’s most influential advocates—the company’s employees.

Only then can a merchant deliver consistent and seamless experiences across the plethora of customer touch points. Companies that factor in engagement when setting marketing objectives and determining campaign goals stand to achieve greater success than those that do not. To go deeper with their customers, marketers must understand how they engage with their brands, and use that knowledge to create the most optimal marketing mix. Forbes/Insight

The world is becoming more social and connected daily and so must retailers.

Give us your take on social media marketing. How should retailers allocate resources when it comes to jumping in the social media world?

The world is becoming more social and connected daily and so must retailers. Go where your customers are. That’s not an opinion or a suggestion. It’s a fact: retailers ignore at their own peril. Nevertheless, it is not about setting up accounts and buying tools to connect with customers. Those are the means to an end. The end result is thrilling customers and having them share that experience.

The key is to make yourself remarkable so that people want to talk to you. This is truly about your brand and products, and not always directly correlated to immediate sales conversions. It’s more like dating to find a partner for life then scoring every night. Today, branding is so much more about what you do than what you say.

Shop.org interview with Brian Eisenberg

Social Media Snake Oil? Yes? No?

The broader trend is that social media is infiltrating daily life for those who choose to let it in. In five years, you'll view the communication tools (i.e. Twitter) much like you view your telephone in your office. Did you know that your telephone is an old-school version of social media? It allows you to communicate with other people. Did you know that e-mail is an old-school version of social media? It allows you to have communications with multiple people at the same time.
 

Both telephone and e-mail simply become part of the fabric of your daily life. Social Media, for those who want to invite it into their lives, will become another tool, like the telephone or e-mail. That's pretty boring, isn't it?

It's time for your business to join the 'e-commerce Social Media arena' and RSSCheck is here to help you do just that!

RSSCheck is a Social Engagement firm that's developed an efficient way for your business to directly deliver permissioned based relevant content to consumers.  As provider of category specific communications selected by your consumer to all social media communities and mobile RSSCheck remains ahead of the consumer privacy curve.  RSSCheck is a publisher of content when and where your consumer wants it.

In short, RSSCheck is the company that helps you monetize your social media selling channels.

RSSCheck delivers your website to consumers!

For a demo email us at [email protected] or call 612-349-2740

 

How Consumers Balance Openness and Privacy

emarketer.com

Millennials savvy about online reputation management

Privacy is not a dead letter for consumers on the Internet, even young adults. Rather than simply give up control over all personal data, many Web users have become educated about how much information is available about them online, and have taken steps to limit it.

According to a 2009 study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 30% of all Internet users ages 18 to 64 were worried about the amount of information available about them on the Web. Fears were greatest among 30- to 49-year-olds and fell to just 23% of the population over 65.

Those percentages were down across the board since 2006, as were the proportion of Internet users who reported making an effort to limit how much could be found out about them online. Millennials ages 18 to 29, however, were the most likely age group to take matters into their own hands, and showed the smallest drop in such behavior since 2006.

It makes sense for young adults to be the most vigilant about their personal information, since they are also the most active when it comes to photo sharing, status updates and other user-generated content on sites such as social networks. Many have also learned their lesson the hard way: According to Retrevo, Internet users under 25 were twice as likely as older users to say they had posted something online they later regretted.

The Pew survey showed that for many social network users this did not necessarily translate to sharing less but to making use of the privacy settings that would allow only trusted friends to see certain items. Older users were less likely to have changed default settings.

“Contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations, young adults are often more vigilant than older adults when it comes to managing their online identities,” said Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew, in a statement.

Across all age groups, Pew found about one-fifth of social network users thought they could trust the sites at least most of the time. Trust was actually lowest among millennials, 28% of whom said they never trusted such sites, compared with 18% of over-50s. When Insites Consulting asked users worldwide about trust in specific sites, 28% said they put “a lot of trust” in Facebook.

Keep your business ahead of the digital curve. Learn more about becoming an eMarketer Total Access client today.

Websites are nor ends onto themselves: they are simply a means to an end. You don't want your customers to move into your stores -- you want them to buy into whatever your selling and take it with them into their own homes, where they consumer it, share it, and tell their friends and family that they enjoyed it. So why would you expect something different from the web? Consumers digital homes are their Facebook pages, blogs, customer created communities. That's where they "live" in the digital world., and that's where we need to be invited to hand out from time to time, not the other way around.

Think of the web like a hub or train station; it can be a point of origin or a destination. Some people begin their journey there while others are ending it; some are just in transit, or meeting someone, or taking refuge from the storm.

Hubs need to be open, fluid, and infused with "sociability" -- teeming with life and alive with conversation. They are decidely nonlinear and diverse by nature, and they need to be loaded with content, information, and features.

In a world of multiple personalities and personas, the key to digital success is "not one size fits all approach. The goal is to co-exist in multiple places at any given time. With a bit of effort, determination and luck consumers will take us with them to their homes, communities and meeting places.

Consumers live their online lives is a distributed fashion. It is incumbent for us a s marketers to play into this -- be where they are and most importantly give consumers a way to take what we offer back to their digital or virtual homes.
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When you consider customer acquisition for your business, think about this question for moment; how much of your sales come from repeat business versus first time customers? Now contast that against how much money you spend against each segment. If you are embarassed by by the gaping disconnect, don't worry you are not alone. But what if you did something about it? What if you turned every on its head and instead of ending with a customer purchase, you began with it? What if you focused the lion's share of your effort, energy, and budget on keeping customers versus attracting them. What if you could correct this imbalance and in doing so, not only get your consumers to keep coming backfor more, but tell to do so as well.

From the book Flipping the Funnel by Joseph Jaffee

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thegies says, I met Joseph in 2005 and as you can tell we have very similar thoughts. RSSCheck TransactionalRSS program was built upon the core value props of providing the merchant the opportunity to use laser focused communication to reach consumers who want to hear from these merchants multiple times a day, 365 days a week. No other online marketing program can deliver these results (15-30% Average Order, 20% lower Cost Per Order and 25% New To Files) because these same consumers have given the merchant permission to reach them and deliver infomation to their digital homes and communities. They are the most loyal  of a merchant's consumers since they buy more frequently and at higher amounts. So now is the time for more merchant To learn more about RSSCheck check out our program by seeking a demo at RSSCheck.com

Triple your marketing effectiveness with TransactionalRSS, Email and Social Media

Combining the Strengths of TransactionalRSS, Social and E-Mail

Why not find out about RSSCheck.com. There is no other online program in the market today which gives you the Merchant the power to communicate to your consumer valuable and relevant messaging multiple times a day, 365 days a year. For more information on RSSCheck's TransactionalRSS programs checkout RSSCheck.com and ShoppeSimple.com

emariketer.com

Double your marketing effectiveness

In 2009 e-mail marketers started to get social, but 2010 will be the year social media makes e-mail marketing more powerful. Social media is a partner, not a threat, to e-mail marketing because it provides new avenues for sharing and engaging customers and prospects.

“Even though people are spending more time using social media, they are not abandoning e-mail,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Maximizing the E-Mail/Social Media Connection.” “The two channels can help each other, offering the opportunity for marketers to create deeper connections.”

More than four in 10 business executives surveyed by StrongMail said integrating e-mail and social was one of their most important initiatives for 2010, just after improving e-mail performance and targeting and growing opt-in lists.

About one-quarter of respondents had already implemented an integrated strategy, and another 24% had formulated a strategy and were researching how to put it in practice. But 18% of business executives wanted to add social components to their e-mail campaigns and did not know where to begin.

So far, the consensus of the value social media adds to e-mail marketing has been in the area of softer metrics. Four-fifths (81%) of marketers surveyed by MarketingSherpa in summer 2009 said social media helped to expand the reach of their e-mail content, most likely because of sharing buttons incorporated into e-mail newsletters. A further 78% said social helped to increase brand awareness.

But the fact that so many are unsure about lead generation represents an opportunity for e-mail marketing firms to extend lead-generation measurement techniques into social media.

For more information, join us for a free Webinar and learn from Ms. Williamson how to succeed by combining e-mail and social media. Register now.

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The full report, “Maximizing the E-Mail/Social Media Connection,” also answers these key questions:

• How important are social media and e-mail to marketers?
• How do consumers use the two channels to communicate?
• Why is social sharing important?
• How can integrating social media and e-mail give consumers more control over their brand experience and a broader platform to act as advocates?
• Which e-mail metrics can also be used to measure social media success?

To purchase the report, click here. Total Access subscribers, log in and view the report now.

More Marketers Making It Difficult To Unsubscribe From E-mail: Study Shows

RSSCheck.com / ShoppeSimple.com can help you migrate email opt out consumers into your TransactionalRSS communication management using our Social Media SaaS tools. For more info contact Sales at RSSCheck at [email protected] or 612-349-2740

From DirectMarket.com

Should it really take three clicks to unsubscribe from a retailer’s e-mail list? A plurality of marketers seems to think so, as 39% require at least this many.

What’s even more distressing, according to Responsys’s Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study, is that this trend seems to be accelerating. The 39% represents jump from 7% in 2008. According to Responsys, “It's a worrisome trend since anything beyond two clicks simply represents poor process design.”

The study also found that 30% of retailers send one or more e-mails following an unsubscribe request, up from 26% in 2008.

"When you're competing against the ruthless efficiency and trustworthiness of the 'report spam' button, your email opt-out process needs to be friction-free and provide options ISPs can't give their users," said Chad White, research director at Responsys and author of the study, in a statement.

See bold section below...from Directmag.com. Thanks Tim for sharing

Should it really take three clicks to unsubscribe from a retailer’s e-mail list? A plurality of marketers seems to think so, as 39% require at least this many.What’s even more distressing, according to Responsys’s Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study, is that this trend seems to be accelerating. The 39% represents jump from 7% in 2008. According to Responsys, “It's a worrisome trend since anything beyond two clicks simply represents poor process design.”

The study also found that 30% of retailers send one or more e-mails following an unsubscribe request, up from 26% in 2008.

Other findings revealed in the study include:
In order to keep subscribers, marketers are giving subscribers more control over email frequency, with 35% of retailers allowing subscribers to reduce the number of emails they receive, up from 16% in 2008.

Marketers remain icy and indifferent toward subscribers who opt-out, as evidenced by the fact that only 16% of retailers say "Goodbye" or "Thank you" to departing subscribers. That's down from 18% in 2008.

Marketers have been slow to present alternative channels like RSS and Facebook pages to departing subscribers. Only 7% of retailers do this currently, despite the fact that more than 30% of them include community links in their emails.

Due to failures to honor opt-outs, 4% of retailers are not in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act, which is similar to 2008 levels.

"Savvy marketers respect their email subscribers and provide relevant content to drive engagement – and they also let subscribers go when they're not engaged," said Ed Henrich, VP of professional services at Responsys, in a statement. "Marketers need to make it easy to unsubscribe and to re-subscribe when the time is right. One of my favorite ratios is the number of buyers divided by the number of unsubscribers: how many people today thought you hit the

5 ways startups can slay giants

Venture Beat

Posted: 23 Mar 2010 06:00 AM PDT

(Editor’s note: Dave Kellogg is CEO of Mark Logic, an information infrastructure software company. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.)

I’ve spent my career competing against companies 10 to 1000 times bigger than mine, winning more than my fair share of skirmishes along the way. It’s definitely an uphill battle, but here are five rules I’ve developed that will maximize your odds of success when pitting your startup against the giants of your chosen industry.

Split pins – Many technology strategists are familiar with Geoffrey Moore‘s “bowling alley” model, which says that startups should view markets as bowling pins, using one market to knock down the next. This model encourages startups to skip through markets hastily, like American tourists skipping through countries in Europe.

Instead of skipping pins, though, split ‘em. At the risk of sounding too cosmic, look for micro-alleys within bowling pins.

When I started at Mark Logic, I thought “publishing” was a pin and that all publishers were basically the same. Yet when I focused on publishing and looked for differences between publishers, I learned that STM (Scientific, Technical, and Medical), education, news, market research, credit/financial, legal, trade and B2B publishers were all dramatically different.

I like to say that all beagles look the same … unless of course, you’re a beagle. By splitting pins instead of skipping them, you learn more about your customers’ unique needs, which in turn allows to you to serve them better. Best of all, you’ll discover that the market you were about to skip over is significantly bigger than you originally thought.

Work together – There are too many examples of divisive, prima-donna-laden startup cultures where staff meetings devolve to finger-pointing contests. Startups can’t afford to waste energy. When you’re competing against giants, you need the extra advantage that comes from brilliant people – working together – to solve problems.

It took years to get this lesson through my head, spurred by an exercise at a leadership program where each individual rank-ordered a list of items required for wilderness survival. Then we broke into about eight groups of six and re-did the exercise. The worst group score beat the best individual’s score, and one of the participants was a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army.

While it may sound hokey, teamwork is an amplifier of talent. That’s why All-Star teams often perform below par in sports. While each individual may play superbly, the team just doesn’t play well together.

Concentrate force – The easiest way to be bigger than your competitor is to focus. It’s hard, though, because there’s always the distraction of opportunities you’re not pursuing. You need a clear sense of your growth goals to decide rationally if you can meet them with your chosen focus areas.

Hire stars – Giant-fighting startups are not places for the weak or squeamish. They’re also lousy places to learn on the job. That’s why VCs tempt experienced managers with safe jobs in big companies with nice chunks of equity. They want to lure them into startups and compensate them for the risk in so doing.

In the end, VCs are not risk takers; they are risk eliminators. They strive to isolate all risk to the fundamental innovation and do so by setting every other lever of the business to standard.

That’s why you need to build an A-team and be sure the people on it are scaling with the company. Rest assured, even if you’re not asking the “Can they scale?” question about your team, the Board is asking it about you.

Be the best - Face it, no sane person wants to buy software (or any other service, really) from a startup. Most IT folks sleep much better at night buying from the mega vendors, even if they feel they’re getting gouged on price. People buy from startups because they have no choice … not because they want to.

So how can you give prospects no choice but to buy from you? Solve one problem better than anyone else in the world.

Admittedly, that’s easy to say, but hard to do. The trick is determining the one problem that you can really solve better than anyone else in the world – and not tell yourself a white lie about where you can win, often in hopes of addressing a bigger customer base.

If you fall into that trap, you’ll almost certainly spread resources too thin and end up with multiple mediocre products instead of one great one. Andrew Carnegie said it best: “Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch the basket.”

At RSSCheck.com / ShoppeSimple.com we provide the Merchant with relevant and precision communications tools that help sell product and increase margins. Our social media tools enable Merchants to communicate with consumers who have chosen to hear messages 365 times a day, 365 days a year. No other email or online tool can accomplish this consumer experience. This is precisely why RSSCheck/ShoppeSimple is growing exponentially. Check out the company we keep at ShoppeSimple.com

Mobile Application or Mobile Website or Both?

Dennis Newel is a business analyst and ecommerce consultant at Elastic Path Software.

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 03:03 AM PST

With the continued popularity of smartphones, more and more retailers are launching either mobile websites or mobile applications by the day. Many who haven’t yet taken the plunge are wondering what to invest their resources in first.

Aside from “doing nothing,” retailers have 2 options when considering mobile commerce: building an application (or “app”), or creating a website specifically for mobile devices. As Graham Charlton of Econsultancy has observed in the UK, some etailers are opting to bypass the mobile optimized website and go straight to a mobile app. This post continues the conversation and examines the differences of each and how you might choose between them.

Do Not Nothing

Smartphones are built for web browsing and users will generally be able to access your web site through a mobile browser even if you do not do anything. But this is not the optimal user experience, as pages designed for the web render very poorly on small screens:

Above left: Sephora.com website as viewed through mobile browser. Above right: Mobile optimized website at m.sephora.com viewed on mobile device.

While doing nothing is an option, any retailer who anticipates driving any sales through mobile devices needs either a mobile optimized version or a mobile application.

Mobile Applications

A mobile application is essentially software developed to run on mobile devices. Apps were popularized by the iPhone and Blackberry, but also may be developed for the Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems.

Mobile applications may serve as a mobile storefront, allowing in-app purchases. For example, the iPhone eBay app generated $400 million in revenue in 2009. It’s a tiny bit of eBay’s $59.7 billion in revenue but still impressive for an application people voluntarily install on their iPhones.

Pros & cons

Pro: User experience

The main advantage of building an app is the user experience. Most mobile browsers can’t handle JavaScript and Flash. A properly built app gives a developer control over the way text and images are displayed, as well as the use of sounds and videos. Apps can utilize the whole screen of the phone and remove other distractions from the shopper like address bars. There are also no compatibility issues when apps are dedicated to the device they were developed for. Screen size and features are consistent for all users.

Pro: Hardware features

GPS, camera and “shake” functionality can all be baked into apps. For example, a customer could add an item to cart by shaking her phone. For multichannel retailers with local stores, mobile applications can offer a GPS based store finder, or “augmented reality” where you can view a street through your iPhone’s camera and it will tell you the nearest gas station or fast food restaurant.

Pro: Loyalty

A customer who actively downloads and installs an app has a pretty good chance of using it. The app on the “desktop” is top-of-mind.

Pro: Off-line usage

Even when wi-fi or 3G is unavailable, a customer can browse your catalog or other application features which do not require Internet access.

Con: Development resources

Mobile apps take longer to develop than mobile websites. Not only because the look and feel of the app will usually have to be built from scratch, but also because you will need to create multiple apps to reach a wide audience. The iPhone currently dominates the app market, but with the large amount of other devices and app stores popping up, that will not last forever. Some think that Android-based mobile phones will surpass the iPhone in market share by 2012.

Con: Adoption and usage

Before a customer can experience your app, she has to download and install it. You will mainly reach your most loyal customers who are fairly invested in your brand. Just as with PCs, most people think twice before they install an app on their phone.

Con: Nascent market

Despite all the press coverage, the app market in total is not that big. Only 13.3% of the phones sold in Q3 of 2009 were smartphones, and of those only 17.1% were iPhones. With Apple controlling the app market for now, that’s a very small number of potential customers.

Mobile Optimized Website

As mentioned earlier here on Get Elastic, there are many ways to build a mobile optimized site which each have their own pros and cons.

Pro: Less required resources

Mobile sites will most likely be quicker to implement compared to building an app with a unique look and feel. Note that due to the wide variety of handsets available, you may have to optimize your website for more than one phone and/or screen size. In most cases, depending on your ecommerce platform, you should be able to reuse large parts of your existing infrastructure and focus on changing the website’s look and feel so that it fits a smaller screen.

If that’s not fast enough for you there are services like Usablenet and Mobile Aware that will take your existing ecommerce site and build a mobile optimized version in a few weeks without you having to lift a finger.

Pro: Accessible to all

If a user is not heavily invested in your brand chances are slim that they are willing to download an app just to be able to find the nearest store or buy the thing they’ve just seen an ad for. But a mobile site is accessible on any device with a mobile browser, including non-smartphones, as most of these have some form of WAP-browsing. Though WAP is fast becoming a long forgotten technology it’s still worth considering depending on the customers you’re trying to reach.

Con: Limited functionality

Even though all smartphones have browsers, most of them are very simplistic and cannot handle the same complexity and dynamic behavior as browsers on a PC. Flash is especially an issue, as hardly any of the smartphone browsers support it. Even some JavaScript that should be simple can be problematic.

Being confined to working with what the phone browser can handle means you cannot use any of the phone’s other features such as GPS for a location-based store locator. It also means the customer must have network coverage to continue to use your website. If the connection drops for any reason you could potentially lose a sale. As mentioned previously, building an app would help you avoid these restrictions as an app has better access to other features the phone offers, as well as being able to store information locally until the phone regains network access.

Con: Customer satisfaction

A mobile optimized site may not have the same appeal for a loyal customer who might expect a greater interaction or immersion on your brand.

How do you choose?

It should be clear now that neither solution alone is perfect for reaching all your customers, and if resources were not an issue the optimal solution would be to do both. So the question really becomes “If I can’t have both, how do I choose?”

The short answer is (as always): It depends on your target audience.

Apps are great when you have a segment of loyal customers who interact with you on a regular basis and want a fuller experience on their mobile. You can provide special news, content, offers etc. to these customers, leveraging the hardware of a device such as GPS, camera and “shake.” (Hint: Survey your customers through email, on-site surveys or social media like Facebook or Twitter).

In some cases, your customers are already screaming for a mobile app and are making their voices heard in online communities like the Sephora Facebook page:

Unless there is sufficient customer demand, an optimized mobile website is your best bet. It requires less commitment from a potential customer and allows access to all.

Besides considering your target audience, it’s also vital to consider the impact on your brand and how your mobile strategy in general fits with the rest of your offerings. You can still offer special content, products, offers to a select group of customers in other ways like SMS/text messages, email newsletter, physical newsletter, personal promotion codes, etc.

Dennis Newel is a business analyst and ecommerce consultant at Elastic Path Software.