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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.  

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’s an age old expression, but somehow it’s the last thing on most marketer’s minds when they think about their ecommerce site and consider upgrading their solution.  I’m fortunate to meet and talk to many ecommerce marketers and merchandisers at trade shows, conferences and during our own sales meetings.  I’m often struck by how many of these marketers (including those working for some of the most respected brands in their industry) forget about walking first when it comes to their own ecommerce solutions. 

There’s no doubt that advanced personalization and recommendation solutions can increase the ROI of an ecommerce site – there’s countless statistics from countless analysts and vendors to support that fact.  But at the same time, when you think about your own ecommerce solution and your plans for it, are these advanced capabilities on your mind, or do you think about the basics – do the nuts and bolts of order processing and shopping work well on your site?  Is it easy for buyers to find the products and services their looking for? 

One company I met with recently is a major world leader in wireless cellular phones and PDA’s.  They’re looking to upgrade their ecommerce site and again, personalization was top of their mind as criteria for selecting a new platform.  But when we looked at their current site, the basics were just not there.  Site layout and design was awkward, product categories were hard to navigate to from their non-commerce information pages and doing simple searches often yielded irrelevant results.  “Battery”, for example, would turn up no results at all (and that’s the most wanted accessory product they sell on their site!).

Clearly this marketer would be better served focusing on the basics and walking first. I guarantee focusing on making sure their site performs well, that the onsite search returns relevant results and that they have good SEO compatibility and have high ranking for natural search on the leading search engines first will do more to increase conversion rate and increase sales than adding a multi-variant near-neighbor recommendation engine ever will.

So the next time you think about your ecommerce site and platform, ask yourself if you’re ready to start running, or should you revisit the basics.

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 his 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.

Online retailing is a complex and at times over- analyzed business.  Due to the nature of the medium, every last piece of data is tracked and picked apart by retailers and vendors alike.  Buzz-phrases like “path to purchase” “visual hierarchy” and “suggestive selling techniques” abound in our business.  Retailers are constantly on the lookout for the next magic bullet that will give them the edge over their competitors and provide the ever-elusive customer loyalty that eludes so many these days.

But as with many complex problems, the cure can be worse than the disease, and make us lose site of what’s really important. Case in point: I recently purchased a PDF of Marketing Sherpa’s Landing Page Handbook. It is a document designed to provide research data and first hand best practices on page design, e-mail marketing campaigns, etc.  At least that’s what I think it’s about, because they have made it EXTREMELY difficult for me to even read the thing!

The document itself, once purchased, comes password protected -- requiring a code for entry.  Ok, fine, understood – I will just grab the code.  But where is it?  Not on my buyer’s landing page, not in the confirmation e-mail…but in an obscure link within the online receipt.  I am forced to read through two pages of largely useless information from the vendor (I am singularly focused on getting that code now), where finally, almost as if by chance, I come across my code.  So, I save the document to my hard-drive and move on with my life.  Until of course, I want to access the document again – and AGAIN I am prompted for the code…you can probably guess how the rest of this goes…and why it has resulted in a frustrated consumer.

Despite much advancement over the past 5 years, the buying experience of many online stores has lots of room for improvement.

Moral of this little story?  Make it easy for your customers to BUY!  Having a good product, advanced customer acquisition campaigns and detailed data tracking tools is all fine and well, but the process begins and ends with allowing the consumer to buy and begin using, your products.  

What's the first thing you do when you go online to search for a product?  According  to most research, you are probably like me -- you either:

A:  type in the brand name of the manufacturer, followed by the product name into Google  or

B:  type in the corporate url into your browser ie apple.com, hp.com, nissan.com etc..

Also like me, your "intent to purchase" following the successful completion of A or B is probably pretty high.  I bought an Ipod Nano last week and used option B -- typed in apple.com and away I went.  The ease with which I could find my product and purchase it is big reason why Apple's direct to consumer (DTC) revenue is almost 18% of its total revenue -- (that adds up to about $3 billion).

So why aren't more manufacturers selling direct online?   Well, some are, and examples like Apple,  Philips, Coach and Nike prove that it can be done successfully. 

For some manufacturers though, the idea of a DTC eCommerce site is cause for "contemplation".

On one hand, they recognize that their brand equity creates a huge opportunity for direct sales via the web, for coveted direct customer interaction and for better overall margins.  On the other hand, channel conflict remains a delicate issue for many manufacturers, and a general lack of domain expertise can also be a concern.

That said, as more and more consumers like me look to the source for their products, the opportunity for manufacturers online continues to grow.  Not to mention the non- transactional benefits the web provides, including being an unparalleled source of customer data, a platform for key message delivery and a resource to help drive business to the distribution channel.

DTC is not right for all brand manufacturers, particularly if their channel is powerful or they are selling low priced commodities -- but for many, the road ahead includes an eCommerce strategy...

Thinking of spending big budget dollars on a hot new design for your eCommerce site?

You might want to reconsider.

At the end of the day, eCommerce is still not a "browsing experience"  per se-- most consumers do not go to a retailers site to do some "virtual window shopping".   For the most part, online shoppers know what they want, and god help you if your site makes it difficult for them to find it.

While an esthetically pleasing, well thought-out web design can increase customer loyalty, brand affinity and all that good stuff...if your customers can't find what they are looking for, all the lifestyle shots in the world won't make much of a difference.

A recent study conducted by MarketingSherpa (run, dont walk to get their annual ecommerce marketing benchmark guides -- they are fantastic), indicates that web shoppers pretty much already know what they want before they start looking.

According to Sherpa, the biggest two chunks of eCommerce site activity are using the site search box (43% ) and navigation, such as tabs, menus and sales hotlinks (39%).

Together, that's 82% of consumers surveyed who go directly to navigational elements rather than browsing to see what they like.

Still thinking  about that big "hero shot" for your new homepage?

So what's a retailer to do?  First, get your internal search and navigation in order.  Quick results, spelling correction, synonyms and pluralization should be tops on your list.   Guided navigation is also quickly becoming a standard...give your customers the chance to easily drill down by brand, price, style or any other facet that fits your product line.

Check out the chart below for some more interesting data on this subject, courtesy of MS:

Many clients have asked me what strategies can be deployed to drive their online business upward.  There are many ways to approach a web strategy and obviously each retailer needs to tread their own path to build a business amongst the thousands of competing sites.  However, some fundamentals are common to all.  I thought I would jot down some ideas on tackling the first steps of the challenge.

The most fundamental of all is to understand the end user shopping experience.  Have you put yourself in the shoes of the end user and went shopping on your site?  Did you analyze each step in the path from getting to the site to getting the item at your door? Use Snag It to capture the screens along the path, paste into PowerPoint and post on the wall.  Improving the end user experience is common sense – it just takes setting aside some time to review.  Check out www.zappos.com for a fabulous end user experience (I never thought I would buy shoes online…) and read the ancient text “E-Commerce User Experience’ guide by the Nielsen Norman Group for the never aging axioms of adding to cart.

Products, price and promotions are also critical to success.  I have seen clients fret over usability, traffic etc but a pricing review relative to competition was the key to sales growth.  This subject is a whole other blog…

Make sure that a web analytics solution is in place. Grab a coffee and check out the dashboard delivered to you in an email during the early hours.  Unique visitor sessions, conversion and order size are metrics that should be on your frontal lobe every morning.

Web strategies can take many fascinating paths once you have the fundamental pillars in place. Ask yourself the questions:

·         Can I convert with a usable shopping experience?

·         Is the combination of product, price, and promotion the best on the net?

·         Can I track the results of my efforts?

·         Do I have the natural search infrastructure in place?

Be careful about spending your marketing budget prior to building the pillars (we all wish for the PPC budget of eBay…). We can then all look forward to topics of affiliate programs, shopping feeds, additional marketplace distribution, keyword buys, rich media….

Cheers,

-- Rick