The Disruption Tour - Run To Survive A Social Media Revolution

Sustaining Social CRM...ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

Dictionary.com lists the following definitions for the words:

"Sustaining"

1. to support, hold, or bear up from below; bear the weight of, as a structure.
2. to bear (a burden, charge, etc.).
3. to undergo, experience, endure without giving way or yielding.

"Social"

1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.
2. seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable: gregarious

"Customer Relationship Management (CRM)"

1. The practice of building a strong relationship between a business and its customers and potential customers.

Dear Erin,

I hope this question has a resounding positive answer: What if your business could get higher average orders values, higher frequency of ordering, higher conversion percentages, more new customers, reactivate of older buyers and have multiple brand impressions that are permissioned every day?

Would you test a program that could deliver to your business any one of these metrics or any combination of them? Of course you would under two conditions:

First, the program would generate an ROI your business could afford; and second, you are not just moving dollars from one channel marketing program to another.

So if it can be proven to you that both case 1 and 2 occurred. Should you test this program? Of course you should. This is what the exact nature of market testing is all about. I sense your business does this all the time. If you could get these returns would you make this market testing a priority?

Well, this is exactly what The ShoppeSimple Network program is providing our clients and what we would like to test with your business.

In fact, we are so convinced that this program will work for your business (like it has worked for every other client) we have a special and guaranteed offer for your business.

I will tell you about this guaranteed offer in a minute please read on...

Have you done a Groupon/LivingSocial offer?  Have you sent out a catalog or a direct mailing with a planned 60-70% list rental and 30-40% buyers?  How many of your do a PPC program?

In any of these cases, what do you do once you land a new customer? What do you do to capture another order from this first or repeat buyer? How much money are you willing to invest to get another order?

So let's look at the Social Coupon business model which is essentially a revenue share, new customer acquisition business and let's run some simple math

Let's say you have a product and you gave 50% off on this offer and you had a 50% product margin. So a product which sells at  $50 retail is now being sold to the consumer for $25. Now these Social Coupon businesses take another 50% so you are left with $12.50 to cover your new customer acquisition. Let's say you were very successful with your offer and landed 1,000 customers. That would mean you paid 12.50 times 1,000 customers or $12,500 for this offer. A revenue share deal.  But when you planned this offer did you consider you would be out $12,500?

But you are now also under water by $12,500 and what do these Social Coupon sites do to help you recoup your new customer investment. NOTHING...NADA... ZILCH!   The only thing that could make this scenario worse, is if your existing customers are also the ones redeeming the deal.

What do you do to maintain a Sustaining Social CRM program with these consumers?

For those in the catalog space or pure ecom space...I can hear you thinking, "I would never do a deal like that."

Well, let's take a look at a pure ecom company who uses Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. You manage 100 keywords and you pay .75 per click on average.  You spend $12,500 a month on PPC instead of social couponing and you get a 1% conversion. So what does this look like from an initial customer acquisition cost perspective?

Let's keep the same margins and spending level. $12,500 dollars is 16,666 clicks and the number of orders at 1% conversion is 166 orders.  At 166 orders you brought gross profit to the business at $25 per sale which is $4,125. So your out of pocket loss to do PPC per customer is $8,375 ($4125-$12,500)/166 orders = $50.45 (LOSS) Gulp. If your conversion is 2% just half this number.

Would you have guessed that PPC cost per order was $50.45/12.50 or 4X more expensive than Social Couponing for your business?

It's no wonder that in two years Social Couponing has exploded to a 3 Billion industry and is projected to be 6 billion in 2 years.

Pareto's Principle from Wikipedia...(also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. You can restate the 80/20 as it applies to CRM where your customers drive 80% of your revenue so why is there such a missing focus on retention marketing (CRM). Now, adding the Social layer, why are you not focusing energy, resources and budget on building lifetime value of your business?  They would argue that they are, just maybe not in the coupon space yet

Proof in point

The ShoppeSimple Network's Sustaining Social CRM

Now, for the first time you can manage  your consumers' Lifetime Value efficiently and effectively. We simply plug into your business and in less than 10 days you are driving Sustaining Social CRM eCommerce sales. We don't replace what you are doing in social and mobile commerce we enhance it.

Let me show you how...Let's follow what we are doing for Signals.com. Signals has loaded our "Push The Button" widget in their website header and in their email and Facebook Store. Because of this, they are also mobile enabled and their consumers can mobile order through The ShoppeSimple Network's digital properties directly to the Signals website shopping cart. It is important to note ShoppeSafe doesn't collect any personal identifiable consumer information/data.

Take a look at the top right of the Signals website. Consumers see this Push the Button everywhere they go on their website. By the way, you can manage the copy as you would like and you do not have to focus on deals. This is client dependent.

When Consumers Push the Button they are taken to a trusted 3rd party page we build for every client and it can match the look and feel of your branding. From Push The Button widget to your branded ShoppeHub page, consumers now can Pull-Place-Buy-N-Share relevant and targeted offers.  These offers can also be pulled by the consumer to appear on their ShoppeHub page which they bookmark or subscribe too.  Click here for an example.

On Facebook ShoppeFans Store.

The consumer can also place these offers on Shoppesafe.com, their personal home pages on iGoogle, MyYahoo and MyMSN. Plus from the merchants ShoppeHub page consumers can text, email, Like, Tweet offers to their "Trusted Referrals and print or enable digital coupons with barcodes.

You may be thinking, "why would I want to direct my valuable traffic away from my site and onto your ShoppeHub page?" The answer lies in our secret sauce. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, would you do this if you could increase average order values, conversions, order frequency, new customers, reactivations and brand exposures? Of course you would.So now is the time to provide your business with a "skin in the game" guarantee. You must be happy with the program results or you just don't pay us. Period End.

My hope is that you will contact me to start your Sustaining Social CRM program for your business. Please reach me by phone at 612-349-2740 or by email [email protected].

Best

Jeffery

PS. Please join me for our June Webinar "Is Your Social Toast Burning" on Wednesday June 22nd at 2 PM ET.

Feel free to forward this eNewsletter to colleagues who might find the topics covered here of interest or would be interested in learning more about working with The ShoppeSimple Network.

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

Why work with ShoppeSimple?

THE SITUATION ANALYSIS
Ever have a radio you couldn’t turn off? That’s advertising in our world today. It’s interruptive and annoying. It clutters up in-boxes and mail boxes, computer screens and TV screens. And it’s largely ineffective. To defend against this advertising assault, consumers arm themselves with email spam filters, pop-up blockers, TiVo, and do-not-mail and do-not-call lists. Consumer advocacy groups lobby for more privacy regulation with increasing intensity. But merchants in 2008 spent $136.8 billion* annually to reach consumers with their messages, 95% of which fall on deaf ears. Online advertising reached a record high in 2009 at $24.5 Billion according to eMarketer and it is expected to grow to $28.2 billion in 2013 — and yet, this form of advertising still continues to assault the consumer with the assumption that a simple search is a request for advertising.

THE SOLUTION
ShoppeSimple delivers the answer. Known and used by as many as 150 million people according to 2009 Razorfish FEED study, ShoppeSimple lets people choose the  products and offers from the merchants they want to hear from multiple times a day, 365 days a year. The service to the consumer is relevant, free, anonymous and private.
ShoppeSimple is a Social Engagement firm that delivers targeted and relevant communications directly to consumers
who have preselected themselves to receive them. Our targeted communication tools strengthen customer relationships and drive more online traffic.

Bottom line: ShoppeSimple increases direct to consumer sales revenue and profits

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

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

Quieting the lizard brain

If you are looking for challenging and a rewarding career, send us your resume at [email protected] We are looking for "risk takers" who are also not scared to be trailblazers at RSSCheck.com and ShoppeSimple.com

Onward...Upward...Believe...

Thegies

by Seth Godin

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don't read that book the boss lent us.

The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we're amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can't help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we're going to do?

The lizard brain.

Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long off to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That's because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to.

Want to know why so many companies can't keep up with Apple? It's because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain. Late launches, middle of the road products and the rationalization that goes with them are others.

The amygdala isn't going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.

Now you've seen the icon and you know its name. What are you going to do about it?

ShoppeSimple Launches a New Way to Shop

Use ShoppeSimple.com to Explore and Track Hot Deals and Exclusive Offers Anonymously, When and How You Want Them

MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Post-holiday shoppers can explore hot deals and exclusive offers from great brands at ShoppeSimple.com, a new service of RSSCheck. Open for business now at www.shoppesimple.com with a fast-growing list of more than 50 online stores, ShoppeSimple is the first completely opt-in shopping portal – it’s easy, anonymous and absolutely free.

At ShoppeSimple.com, shoppers can browse and track the newest offers and deals when and how they want – in a reader, on their mobile device, personal homepage or via their browser’s bookmarks. Shoppers can hone in on their favorite online stores, explore stores by category, and discover new opportunities to find the things they want.

ShoppeSimple features offers from more than 50 stores – like this one for a $349 food processor on sale for just $179 – but the ShoppeSimple experience is about more than simply finding discounts and deals.

“ShoppeSimple lets shoppers be surprised and delighted by the deals, offers and exclusives they find here,” says Jeff Giesener, ShoppeSimple’s founder and CEO. “Most brands market by interruption; we market through permission. ShoppeSimple is about discovering a new opportunity to get a product you’ve wanted to buy, or to learn something new about what a store has to offer.”

The idea for ShoppeSimple comes from Giesener’s realization that most advertising and marketing is wasted on people who aren’t listening – a realization born from more than 25 years in the direct marketing and Internet business. What if, he thought, people could choose the deals, coupons and offers they want to receive, and decide for themselves when they want to shop? And what if they could do this without having to give up any personal data?

ShoppeSimple makes it easy for people to explore and hone in on their favorites – a wide range of stores delivering great deals, sales, coupons and offers, and easy tools let shoppers track offers from their preferred stores via personal home pages, bookmarks, RSS readers, social media and mobile smart phones – with no registration, signup or personal data required.

It’s an idea that is in high demand. ShoppeSimple has clients that are seeing dramatic increases in site traffic, higher average orders and repeat order rates, resulting in millions of dollars and new client sales through ShoppeSimple.

“People want privacy and control over their online experience, and ShoppeSimple delivers on both of these. Consumer data is protected, never sold and the consumer remains anonymous on ShoppeSimple,” Giesener says. “We’re seeing high demand from online stores who want to give their customers the best shopping experience and the chance to connect with them on ShoppeSimple, multiple times a day, 365 days a year. Plus shoppers can easily find opportunities to get great deals and exclusive offers from the merchants they choose.”

About ShoppeSimple

ShoppeSimple.com, a service of RSSCheck, LLC, is a first-of-its-kind opt-in shopping portal that lets consumers explore and track hot deals and exclusive offers from great brands. Visit www.shoppesimple.com to start using ShoppeSimple now. To get your online store on ShoppeSimple.com, contact [email protected]. ShoppeSimple also runs the ShoppeSimple Media Network, which creates custom permission-based shopping portals for organizations serving audiences. See the first ShoppeSimple Media Network sites at startribune.shoppesimple.com and bestchamber.shoppesimple.com.

About RSSCheck, LLC

RSSCheck is a marketing technology company offering a suite of consumer and B2B retention and prospecting tools to help clients retain customers, gain new customers and grow business. RSSCheck’s ShoppeSimple™ system is built on the really simple idea that the best time to move people to action is when they’re paying attention. It uses software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology to open a highly targeted sales channel to people who want a brand’s offers and are looking to buy. ShoppeSimple’s web-based TransactionalRSS™ system makes it simple for customers to get what they want, the way they want it -- anonymously, with complete privacy, and wherever they are – on their personal homepages, browsers, through social media and on mobile devices.

For more information, visit www.rsscheck.com, or visit our blog at http://shoppesimple.wordpress.com. Contact RSSCheck at [email protected].

Contacts

Kadet Communications
Ken Kadet, 952-937-0482
[email protected]

Without them...With ShoppeSimple

Will it will take thinking out of the box to convince your mangement to try something that can increase your sales by millions with limited or no downside?

That is what ShoppeSimple technology is doing for other clients in your vertical. All you pay is a transaction fee per sales without any implementation fees.

Join the hundreds of merchants who are now live or going live in Q1 2010 on ShoppeSimple.com. We guarantee that you must be satisfied.

By Seth Godin
One of the most common things I hear is, "I'd like to do something remarkable like that, but my xyz won't let me." Where xyz = my boss, my publisher, my partner, my licensor, my franchisor, etc.Well, you can fail by going along with that and not doing it, or you can do it, cause a ruckus and work things out later.In my experience, once it's clear you're willing (not just willing, but itching, moving, and yes, implementing) without them, things start to happen. People are rarely willing to step up and stop you, and often just waiting to follow someone crazy enough to actually do something.I'm going. Come along if you like.

Dear Catalog CEOs: Six Catalog Trends

from Kevin Hilstrom minethedata.com

Hello there, my catalog friends!

These are interesting times, aren't they?

We are truly caught between two eras. The past 100 years were very good to catalog brands. And in five or ten years, there will be a road map for the catalog brand looking to enter the future.

Between the past and the future, that's where we are stuck. We're stuck in a period where, as one business leader recently told me, "nothing works".

We know that's not true. Plenty of things work. But nothing works at a scale necessary to cause optimism.

So let's discuss six important catalog trends that help the catalog brand bridge the past and the future.

Trend #1 = Micro-Targeting: This has been talked about for decades, but we're getting closer to seeing it happen. There simply isn't a need to send a 96 page catalog that has a lot of the merchandise you love to sell when there is this thing out there called the "internet" that also has a lot of the merchandise you love to sell. We're likely to see a 96 page catalog become three or four different 56 page catalogs, with the customer receiving just one of the 56 page offerings. People are using this strategy to generate 95% of the demand on about 60% of the pages --- mathematically, folks, it works! And instead of sending remails, you can send a different 56 page version to a customer a few weeks later. I cannot predict where micro-targeting is going to take us. I can predict that catalogs will get smaller and smaller and smaller, since the website is the store and we don't need to advertise everything anymore. E-mail will continue to progress down the micro-targeting path, with more an more versions that are sent on a triggered basis. Long-term, we'll see the slow death of the "campaign" ... sure, campaigns will be here twenty years from now, but we're headed down a path that cannot be reversed anymore.

Thegies: For the first time Merchants can digitally merchandise product offers and promotions to consumers by category and subcategory communities of interest when they work with the ShoppeSimple Loyalty and Customer Acquisition Tools.

Trend #2 = Filtering: We will see a dramatic change in how a catalog brand views customers. In many of my Multichannel Forensics projects, customers fall into four buckets.

1. Catalog shoppers who order via the telephone.
2. Catalog shoppers who order via the internet.
3. Online shoppers who order because of online marketing.
4. Brand buyers who like the merchandise.

It will take every ounce of energy possible to not mail catalogs to online shoppers and brand buyers. But this will be essential for the catalog brand to survive the transition that is coming/happening. Honestly, if I had to communicate one thing for a cataloger to do right now, it would be to start filtering, immediately. I've been able to generate a half-million to a million dollars of profit achieved for businesses between $30,000,000 and $100,000,000 in size just by doing a reasonable job of filtering. Quite honestly, filtering may be the difference between profit and loss for many catalogers. And psychologically, it isn't easy for a cataloger to transition the mindset from a customer buying because a catalog was sent to her and a customer buying because she loves the product. This transition has to happen, and filtering is a great place to start --- especially from a profit and loss standpoint.

Thegies: Imagine if you can take the above point from Kevin and deliver product messaging (whether it is new arrivals or promotional products) several times a day, 365 days a year without opt-out. At ShoppeSimple YOU Can!. Our client has seen substantial increases in site traffic, a 5X increase in conversion over email and an increase in Average Order Value. To estimate a mature TransactionalRSS (TRSS) program from ShoppeSimple an email program is estimated to be 10% of online revenue. A mature TRSS program is estimated to a 1/3 of email revenue. And if you take 25% of this number and only pay a Pay Per Transaction fee to get the sale, we haven’t had anyone say pass. Check out shoppesimple.com for more information.

Trend #3 = Dynamic Landing Pages: Folks are doing this as well (just hit refresh when you visit Amazon.com). Merchants will submit the items they want to feature, while the rules-based system that feeds e-mail campaigns to customers will fill in the holes with customer preferences. Catalogers will not pursue the algorithmic approaches of their online brethren, and that could be acceptable as long as there is a warm story being told to the customer. Again, this isn't a new idea, but it is one that catalogers will embrace, because catalogers will understand that the merchandising of landing pages is very similar to the merchandising of spreads. In fact, any online strategy that can be made to look, from a process standpoint like, old-time cataloging will be embraced by catalogers.

Thegies: Through the ShoppeSimple Loyalty and Customer Acquisition Tools we build dynamic landing pages for every TransactionalRSS Feed we publish.

Trend #4 = Co-Op Evolution: We're going to see between one and three companies emerge (could be existing catalog co-ops, could be online co-ops, could be the big data providers, could be one of the web analytics companies), companies that focus on evaluating real-time customer behavior. This is a very different strategy than what we see today. Today's catalog co-ops are very good at massaging past purchase history across brands. Tomorrow's co-op leaders will combine web analytics data with offline data and web surfing behavior. You won't pay $0.06 for one-time access to a name. Instead, you'll pay $0.03, and you'll get to pick the contact you wish to employ --- catalog, e-mail, personalized online landing page, etc., or you'll pay $0.15 to employ a multiple micro-channel campaign (catalog + e-mail + online display ads + search optimization + ads on social media platforms). Of course, catalogers will pay about anything for the multiple micro-channel campaign. This will be transformative, especially among catalog brands targeting lapsed buyers.

Trend #5 = Frenemies And Pods: As catalog productivity continues to decline (not yours, but industry-wide), you'll see new and unusual partnerships. Expect to see contact center and distribution center consolidation --- a company in one industry (automotive parts) and a company in another industry (gifts) will share contact center and distribution center resources, human resources, information technology departments, database marketing teams, circulation teams, all in an effort to conserve back-of-the-office expenses. Customer lists and resources will be freely shared across what I call "pods", a half-dozen or dozen frenemies who leverage what each other are good at. Catalogers already share all of their customer data with each other, and private equity firms already consolidate lists and back-of-the-office operations. It's only a matter of time before frenemies form pods.

Thegies: In ShoppeSimple Feeds there are opportunities for merchants to place your ads on the iGoogle/My Yahoo Home pages, on Facebook, Twitter and on Smartphones.

Trend #6 = Organizational Transformation: A generation of catalog marketers, age 50 - 65, are getting ready to retire. Quite simply, this generation will not be replaced by individuals who have the same passion for catalog marketing that the generation of catalogers raised in the 1970 - 1995 timeframe had. During the next ten years, we will see a considerable number of business failures, because a generation of individuals used to communicating with customers age 50+ will be replaced by a generation of leaders ready to market to customers in their 30s and 40s. The disconnect (strategies for young customers, marketed to older customers) will drive down productivity, and result in organizational transformation. Leading catalog companies will recognize this well ahead of time, and will cope by developing new brands that are targeted to a younger audience, led by a younger generation of leaders. Think of a business like, say, Cuddledown of Maine, building a new online brand for a younger demographic, training younger employees to manage this business, so that when a generation of leaders and customers move on to retirement there is an infrastructure ready to replace the core business.

Thegies: We ask our clients what is the strategic and tactical direction regarding Social Media and Mobile and it is surprising how few merchants can share the strategically vision in these areas. But today Shoppesimple can help you monetize both your Social Media and Mobile strategies. Simple checkout RSSCheck.com for answers and contact information. Email [email protected]

iDEAS to BUILD your brand in a continued downturn

Check out this video from http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24361.asp and then contact ShoppeSimple who can put your New Arrival and New Seasonal Offerings in front of your consumers every day 365 days.

Worried about being to promotional and as a result loosing contribution margin? Then ShoppeSimple can give you a cost affordable way to let your customers know about merchandise you want to show them.

Through ShoppeSimple's TransactionalRSS (TRSS) Content Management System (TCMS) you can now digital merchandise your product line to consumers who have requested to see you merchandise every day

To learn more check out RSSCheck.com and also ShoppeSimple.net for more information email [email protected] or phone 612.349.2740

Take a peek at our new online customer acquisition portal at shoppesimple.net