Everyone wants to try new an innovative ways to market and communicate with their customers but one of the most effective methods, if done correctly,  is a well crafted 'old school' email. The Mississauga News runs a very successful auction site (http://www.mississauganewsauction.com/) where they auction off products and services from their local advertisers. They wanted to create a simple way to let registered auction users know about new listings and unique items. They had never done any direct emails or correspondence to their end users. Last month, they started a weekly email campaign. It was an immediate success with direct and measurable results for both traffic and revenue. Some interesting stats include:

• Site Visits up 125% on the first day of email campaign
• Site visits up on average over 50% for the following 3 days after launch of email campaign
• 35% open rate

What are the reasons for the great response - trusted source - valuable information - well presented/timely offers and reasonable frequency.

Make it easy for your holiday shoppers by creating a key link from your home page (or on the home page itself) for “Holiday Season Gift Ideas".  Of course the products you place here can also be found in their traditional departments, but anticipating your customers’ requirements for the Season adds to their interest in your online store.   This is particularly helpful to the numerous shoppers who aren't clear on what they're after.  They'll want to come in and look at your ideas for inspiration.  As the retailer, you know what the best sellers are likely to be for the holidays, and placing them in this holiday section eases the effort for your buyers who may be running around with shopping lists 'til they drop!   You can also use this concept to take advantage of after-Holiday buyers with a "Holiday Gift Clearance" section.

The first reminder to a shopper that it's time to think of holiday buying is festive decorations.  As soon as Halloween has passed, the festive lights and sounds of the holidays pop up in store windows and mall hallways.   Perhaps now more than ever, it is important to help put your customers in a festive mood.  Decorate your masthead, and jazz up your logo to reflect your store's holiday spirit.  Entice customers to come in and shop with captivating images such as delighted children standing in the snow peering through toy store windows, or delivering presents.  

Steve Marbit auction guru at Truition recently noticed that we just launched our 100,000,000 auction listing!
 
http://auction.mlb.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ProductDisplay?prrfnbr=99653290&prmenbr=33072944&aunbr=100000000

This kind of event would usually slip under the radar - but I think it is important to note this occasion. From our early pioneers of the auction platform, Leon Kupperman, Edward and Saurabh Soman  to the folks who now mange our operations such as Jason Barr, Tualha Khan and Sally Szeto . They have quietly and successfully provided a stable and reliable platform for our clients to sell items dynamically for more than 10 years. With perhaps the exception of eBay and BIDZ I do not think there is another auction platform in North America that has surpassed that mark.  I might even bid on this item as it might have some historic value for the Trrution archives.

Truition has just launched a new auction site for the Professional Bowlers Association (http://auction.pba.com/). Since 2000, Truition has built and maintained auction sites for every single sports league or organization in North America. Many have prospered, which I hope will happen for the PBA, as their fans discover a safe and secure  place to bid on authentic items directly for the league. Some of these sites have failed (I can think of the CFL and the Arena Football League as examples) because they did not have the right support from the leagues/teams in terms promotion and online marketing. More importantly, they did not have access to a reliable stream of authenticated items so fans did not have good reasons to re-visit the site.  I have listed all our league sites below with a few RIP URL’s for you to look at!

Living and Thriving     

NFL - http://www.nflauction.nfl.com/
MLB - http://auction.mlb.com/
NBA - http://auctions.nba.com/
NHL - http://auction.nhl.com/
NASCAR - http://auctions.nascar.com/
WWE - http://auction.wwe.com/
MLS - http://auction.mlsnet.com/
US Open - http://www.tennisaceauctions.com/

RIP

Arena Football - http://aflauctions.at.edeal.com/
CFL - http://cfl.at.edeal.com/
NLL - http://auctions.nll.com/

Ecommerce marketers are a fickle bunch. We talk about our customers in terms of website visitors. Browsing through the store is page views, leaving without buying is abandonment. Never before has a mode of sales been as measurable as ecommerce. As most marketers well know, these metrics are incredibly valuable indicators of the effectiveness of their sites and online brands. The ability for an online marketer to tweak the look and feel of their storefront and directly measure the benefit of doing so is something offline marketers only dream of.  Companies like Omniture do an amazing job of providing ecommerce reporting data.

An equally important, yet often overlooked, class of metrics are the web site usability performance numbers provided by vendors like Gomez , Keynote and Coradiant. Often times, these tools fall into the domain of the IT department and are used to provide reliability and availability metrics concerning the uptime of the site or alerting IT of dead landing pages that result in 404 errors. But these can be equally powerful tools for marketers to study how well their site is suited to their buyers – particularly buyers that don’t happen to be sitting in the marketer’s very own office (as most, oddly enough, are not). Many marketers can’t hop on a plane and travel to London to see what the experience of a person from South Kensington using their site is like and then in a blink of an eye travel to Tokyo and see their same storefront from the isles of the Ginza. But tools like Gomez can.

Speed of an ecommerce site is typically not something a marketer worries about – and that’s usually because she’s physically in the same office as the servers running her site. She won’t notice if her company’s web site internet provider is slow as she’s got a direct connection to the storefront. She won’t notice a heavy ‘hero’ image on the home page is making the site slow for a dial-up user as she’s got a snappy fast 100 Mbps connection at her desk. Quality of service is just not something on top of mind for a marketer – how many times have you studied whether there are any JavaScript errors in your site, or broken image links or slow database connections? Tools like Keynote and Gomez will tell you this. And for sheer traffic analysis, tools like Coradiant are hard to beat.

You’ll be amazed what metrics are available to assess not just the sales performance of your site, but also the quality of service of your site. You’ll also be amazed how significant a lift on conversion is possible just by tuning your existing site for the many visitors you get from around the world.

It has been a little bit of a lull on the Truition Blog side of things but occasionally clients to some really interesting things online. The Toronto Star has been very active auctioning off advertisers products on their web site – Star Auctions (http://www.starauctions.ca/) with all starting Bids at 50% of retail price.

Currently they are in 'full auction mode' with a based Mazda dealership (Downtown Mazda). They have eight (8) cars from the full Mazda lineup including the MX-5 Miata and the RX 8. I do not think you will get a better deal on a new car and you will have a great time participating in the auction as well!