It’s not everyday Ottawa marketers have the opportunity to see and hear a MarketingSherpa thought leader and influencer in person. But thanks to OCRI (Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation) and its popular Zone5ive series, that’s about to change.

At tomorrow’s event which is still open for registrations, the guest speaker is Stefan Tornquist, Research Director at MarketingSherpa, and you can bet there will be plenty to learn. With a focus on B2B marketing, he’s promised to share 7 proven tactics for success in 2008. The usual suspects like email and search are a given – but business technology marketing is also listed as a point of discussion and this is open to lots of direction.

Of course, Sherpa does publish a “Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide” and from what I can see it offers “practical data on: search, email, PR, direct mail, lead generation, trade shows, podcasting, telemarketing and budgeting.”

Since B2B marketing is very web-centric, I’m really hoping there will be some mention of persuasion tactics like web personalization because this is the technology that is truly capable of heavily influencing online engagement and conversion. BTW Conversion for a B2B marketer might not mean an immediate “close” especially depending on the value of typical B2B deals. Meaningful conversion on a B2B site might be more of a relationship/credibility builder – maybe a whitepaper download or a demo request or a newsletter sign-up. Something to keep a prospect engaged at their liberty without feeling the pressure of a sales person. Something that can keep you front of mind with that prospect.

Sitebrand works with some B2B companies including CableOrganizer.com and they use our web personalization technology to do tons of cool things. To give you a sense of what I mean, here’s an excerpt from our case study:

“CableOrganizer.com has also had great success with key customer campaigns where Sitebrand is used to personalize the site based on the organization’s domain. “It surprises them [our customers] when they show up and see creative that is associated with their logo. I am sure they ask, ‘how did they know that?’” says Shields. Many of these campaigns improved CableOrganizer.com’s conversion rates by almost 10% against control groups that did not see Sitebrand enabled targeted content.”

It’s a great example of savvy B2B marketing so if you want a head start on business technology that’s changing the online landscape, you should read the full case study.

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Looking at online sales cycles is a Pandora’s box.  Once you decide to look into your analytics to truly understand what steps a visitor needs to go through in order to convert, you always end up with more questions than answers.  There are a number of ways you can look at what it takes for a visitor to become a customer. You can go the:  

Engagement route: Understanding how and why a visitor moves through your site in a given session towards conversion. 

Recency and frequency route:  Understanding separate sessions and time between sessions as steps towards conversion. 

Micro and macro conversions route:  Looking at how pre-transactional conversions like newsletters, wishlists and downloads move a visitor towards a conversion. 

I could go on for a while with other options, but the purpose of this post was to make things even more confusing by injecting a new term into the mix: Dayparting. (place maniacal cackle here). 

Dayparting is a fairly established term in the offline marketing space, used for managing media buys in radio and television.  An example of this is selling radio ads against the morning daypart so that you can have the largest audience (people in cars). 

Dayparting is now making it’s way into online media buys, and there are some great articles and whitepapers on the web about how to optimize your search spend based on time of day.  It makes pretty good sense.  Look at your conversion rate based on the hour of the day (one click in Google Analytics by the way), or even the day of the week.  Look at where conversion is higher.  Plan keyword spend accordingly. 

Using this concept for in-site marketing makes for a very compelling case.  We have a few customers at Sitebrand who run personalization campaigns based on the day of the week, but imagine if you tweaked your website so that: 

• in the mornings you ran your normal site messaging, as people are looking at you as they drink their morning coffee and aren’t buying
• during lunch hours and early afternoon your site pushes your wishlist instead of a sale, because people are looking for products on your site that they will buy later at home.
• From 5-10 pm you ran aggressive sales messages, knowing that people are on the home computer and much more likely to convert.
• From 10pm to 7am you run more discounts and promos, because you might get some ‘midnight special’ bumps to conversion.

Especially if run against a control group, this would make for a very interesting look at conversion from a dayparting perspective.  That is, until another way to look at online sales cycles catches my eye…. 

Cheers, 

Jim 

PS.  Note that I didn’t even TRY to bring time zones into this.  Neo, there is no spoon.

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I had an interview earlier this week for Contact Magazine and the topic was corporate reputation management…especially in an age where consumer voices can really SCREAM thanks to social media and Web 2.0 realities.

Create a bad customer experience for someone today and you can almost bet that person will end of blogging, emailing, online chatting or youtubing about it. Never mind the just talking about it! And just as quickly they post and forward those emails, you can bet there will be a trail of media waiting to pounce.

But if you play your cards right and keep your head above the sand, you can use the good and the bad comments to your benefit. After all - it’s not just what you know, it’s what you do with what you know. It’s kind of like web analytics. It’s not just what the data reports, it’s what you do in terms of actioning the data.

To help tackle the beast and better manage corporate reputation, ClickZ just reported that Neilsen Online is about to launch a new services group to help marketers manage their reputations online. Part of the management process includes how to appropriately engage with social media. They’re not the first to step up, but the fact they’re doing it speaks to the significance of paying attention to what’s being said about your brand online.

Taking a step backwards this means really managing customer expectations - with exceptional service, quality, etc. And this applies to both online and offline. Do a good job here and you’ll minimize the bad comments while maximizing the good comments.

After all is said and done, you need to think about taking that step forward. And by this I mean, it’s impossible to please everyone all the time. So be ready for the bad comments. Anticipate them and have a plan. Be proactive vs reactive. Turn negatives into positives.

One of my favourite stories is told in a post I did on the return-o-meter over at shoeline.com. It’s easy to think that lots of returns are a bad thing…but not in this case. Take a read and you’ll see the power of turning negatives into positives.

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Finding e-commerce trend reports for Canada isn’t easy and since Sitebrand happens to be based in Canada, I feel it’s my moral obligation to share some current trends I just discovered courtesy of Statistics Canada. You can read the full report, but allow me to pull some of the more interesting stuff into an at-a-glance post for immediate consumption along with some actionable ideas to wrap it up:

• Total Canadian Internet sales for 2007 grew 26% over 2006 hitting almost $63 billion
• Of the almost $63B in sales, about $58B are private sector and $5B are public sector
• Four verticals are responsible for the majority of online sales: wholesale trade (17%), transportation and warehousing (16%), manufacturing (15%), retail trade (10%). 

While impressive, here’s the reality. Internet sales in Canada still only represent about 2% of total sales revenue.  Considering this was reported to be at the 1% mark five years ago, we’re seeing a slow but steady climb. No need to fasten your seatbelt here.

To put this in perspective, let’s compare % of total sales revenue in Canada to the US.  According to a Q4 2007 e-commerce report from the US Census Bureau, Internet sales in the US accounted for 3.4% of total sales revenue in 2007. One year earlier, it was at 2.9% which means it went up a full half a percent in just one year…compared to Canada where it’s taken five years to go up one percent.

Rather than saying it over again, I’ll refer to a previous post I did on this topic of e-commerce in Canada. In a nutshell, I think the online experience for Canadians still has a way to go because expectations are not being fulfilled:

• Choices are still quite limited
• Information on web sites isn’t personalized/relevant
• Shipping is still a headache
• And so on…

To win in the race (lol - it’s hardly a “race”) for online market share from Canadian shoppers, the smart e-commerce marketer will address each of these very approachable issues from a Canadian perspective. Here are some little things that go a long way:

• Offer CDN pricing.
• For US sites, it’s smart to personalize the Canadian shoppers visit by showing the CDN flag and saying “we ship to Canada”.
• For CDN sites, don’t hide the fact you are Canadian - leverage it to the max and alleviate the “Do you ship to Canada?” question at the same time.
• Offer shipping options - land, air, foot etc.
• While 85% of the Canadian population speaks English, Canada is a bilingual country so offering English and French is a nice touch…offer every language that makes sense for your global market.
• Canadian spelling of the English language follows the British rules. Some commonly used words that are different include:
  •  
    • Comes in many flavors - in Canada it would be ”flavours”…
    • Payable by check - in Canada it would be “cheque” …
    • Visit our online resource center - in Canada it would be “centre” …

So there you have it, e-commerce trends are always evolving. What are you going to do to influence them? Hopefully this post offers some inspiration to the keeners.

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If you check out the home page of Internet Retailer today, you can’t help but notice all the attention on web personalization. In addition to one story featuring Danskin and how they boosted online conversion rates by 56% using Sitebrand’s Retail Marketing Suite, it also lists other awesome success stories. With headlines like these, it’s hard to wonder why only 17% of best-in-breed companies are doing personalization (And I’m not making that number up, request a copy of the Aberdeen Group Report on Personalization for tons of great stats regarding the impact of personalization).

Here are the headlines I’m talking about:   

Danskin.com makes sales jump with personalization tool 

Crutchfield gets personal with shoppers to lift sales and click-throughs

Personalization lifts average order value for Austat’s Golf

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Being Earth Day, we’re all extra sensitive to the environment and what we’re doing / not doing for it. So I did a little extra googling on the topic and came across a company called ShipGreen.net.

Apparently a few smarties have stepped up to “offer a web-based program that integrates with retailers’ online shopping carts, enabling consumers to easily – and accurately – offset the carbon produced from product life-cycle shipping emissions.” Sheer genius, I say. My curiosity had me pick up the phone and I was lucky enough to get a call back from the ShipGreen.net CEO, Jason Sperling. He told me the trial period was a huge success and that they are currently developing the full software release which should be out in some months. We’ll have to keep our eyes on these guys. I can see this market really taking off!

Reducing carbon footprints is already very important to many retailers including one of our very own Sitebrand clients, Roots. This past fall, as part of its commitment to the environment, Roots Canada installed a very cool interactive window display (touchscreen) at its flagship store in downtown Toronto.

Passerbys who used the touchscreen to browse the Roots website were also invited to sign up for the “Roots Insider” e-newsletter (avoiding paper is very green you know). For each and every new Roots Insider subscription, and as additional incentive to environmentally conscious consumers, Roots committed to purchasing carbon offset credit equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide released in a 50-kilometre car trip (the average distance shoppers drive to get to a Roots store).

This brilliantly green promotion is now over but Roots continues to offer greener shipping options as part of their commitment to the environment - not just today on Earth Day, but every day. And they do it with a company called Zerofootprint.

And last but not least, have you heard about eco-friendly clothes? Well guess what, Roots has a new line of apparel fittingly called ROOTS GREEN. Made with organic cotton and other sustainable fabrics such as bamboo, hemp and soy, these sound pretty green to me. But don’t worry, they come in colours other than just green! 

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 The blogosphere right now is abuzz with discussions about the current economic downturn and what impact it will have on eCommerce sales, and the associated budgets that eMarketers will be given. 

Forrester research sees eCommerce bucking the downturn trend, with online spending actually going up by a predicted 17% in 2008.  That said there will still be a tightening of belts as far as spending is concerned, with most of the spending freezes taking place against in-site technologies.  Search will continue to grow, as it is both vital to online sales and the most easily provable from a tactical ROI perspective. 

According to our friends at Marketing Sherpa, while “38% of marketers are spending more on online tactics, such as paid search, natural search, email marketing and online events” this growth is happening at the expense of in-site technologies as “B-to-B and B-to-C marketers are conserving budget dollars by renegotiating contracts with vendors and agencies” 

So let me get this straight.  Online stores are spending more money on getting people to walk in the front door of the store, and less money on making sure they walk out of the store with a product in hand.  Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, especially when you listen to an online brand that has a keen grasp of the big picture. 

I listened to a great speech at Shop.org by Patrick Byrne, COO of Overstock.com.  It would take a series of blog posts to detail all the interesting things that have been done/are being done by the Overstock.com team, but two major points stood out:

• While they came late to the party regarding natural search optimization for Google, they have made search a number one priority over the last few years.
• They are in the process of rebuilding their marketing programs, customer service programs and website experience around 5 pre-defined visitor segments.

They recognize that while increased eyeballs on website equals increased revenue, the only way to break the vicious cycle of search reliance is though optimization. 

I know that most of the people reading this don’t have Overstock.com budgets, but try a simple exercise. 

• Pull up an analytics report on the conversion rate for one of the product categories that has received budget for keyword buys and search optimization. 
• Look at the percentage of traffic and conversion rate for the traffic segment. 
• Compare the conversion rate of this type of traffic to your site average and if it is lower, calculate your potential revenue opportunity.

There is a lot of money that gets left on the table by making traffic generation of any type your primary marketing mechanism.  You should be budgeting time and money to optimize visits within your site as a logical component of your search marketing initiatives, especially if you want to take advantage of the 17% growth of the only growing retail market.

Cheers,

Jim

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I’m impressed by all the buzz about Earth Day - TV, radio, newspaper, Google. And it made me wonder how eTailers are responding…

Turns out the Home Depot is all over it. Smack dab on their home page is this:

Then when you click-through, they’ve got plenty of ways we can shop (online or in-store) and feel good about doing our part for the environment. Apparently Home Depot has over 3,300 products to help you save money and energy while reducing environmental stress at the same time. That’s damn impressive. And if you visit the Home Depot today, you can participate in the free tote giveaway, which will reduce 136,411,024 pounds of CO2 per year. That’s equal to taking 13,451 cars off the road permanently! Of course, to do this right, you need to walk or bike to the Home Depot nearest you. Otherwise - gasp - you are not respecting the environment.

It will be interesting to find out the revenue / traffic impact of this Earth Day blitz at Home Depot. I really see all this environmental awareness being such a positive thing for eTailers large and small. On top of fears around a recession and sky-rocketing gas prices, the appeal of shopping online continues to grow. It simply makes a ton of sense.  

BTW - thanks to a recent co-presentation I did with Simon Rodrigue at the eMetrics Summit in Toronto, I should be able to track down some numbers for you. Simon just happens to be Senior Manager of eCommerce, Interactive Marketing, at Home Depot (Canada). Stay tuned!

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All too often I hear experts saying that if you pay attention to analytics conversion reports…matching high conversion rates with high performing keywords…and then proceed to spend more on those sources of visitors (i.e. search), etc., you will magically increase conversion even more. This is the old school way of looking at the power of keywords as they relate to converison.

Yes, I totally agree that understanding keywords and teeing them up with search marketing will bring traffic to your site. And when that visitor is treated to the experience that meets their intent, things are good - i.e. conversion is a few clicks away. But is it always a slam dunk? Absolutely not. From the point of landing on your site to the point of conversion, there are soooooo many things that can derail conversion. Site distraction alone is a big one. Not getting the right information another. I could go on, but you’re busy.

Smart marketers are thinking differently. Allow me to brag about one Sitebrand customer, Limoges Jewelry, who got serious with their analytics by actioning the data with personalized web campaigns targeted to first-time visitors, keywords, affiliates and geo-locations. Never been to Limoges? Check it out and experience their first-time visitor campaign now. Note - it’s up top, right beside the logo…if you see nothing  but what space there then you’re part of the control group’s default content…better luck next time!

Anyhow by building personalization into the marketing mix, Limoges has generated over $1 million in combined and promoted product revenue. Did that get your attention? You should read the full case study, but for the purpose of this post, here’s the deal on how you can seriously impact the success of your keyword investments…

Getting back to keywords…

Through their analytics reports, Limoges could see that a lot of converting visitors were looking for engraved couples jewelry. They have a couple jewelry page which is what many sites would point to and do quite well with. But instead, Limoges went further. They added personalization that went beyond the initial landing  page…

So here goes in a nutshell - below is a standard screenshot demonstrating someone who has typed ”engaged couples jewelry”…

Below is the landing page these types of keyword visitors would see. Psst - personalization for these visitors is happening at the top right beside the Limoges logo…

As you can see, this special offer related to “free engraving” sits here. But it also stays with the visitor beyond the landing page reminding them of their initial intent…ultimating improving conversion, revenue and customer satisfaction.

But you know what? This wasn’t the top performing campaign in terms of overall lift. You’ll have to read the case study to find out. Is it first-time visitor campaigns? Affiliate campaigns? Geo-targeted campaigns?

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When it comes to customer experience, little things don’t mean a lot. They mean everything. When you think of the online experience, this is especially true.

MarketingProfs just sent an email out with a great article called ”I Trust You Because Your Floor Looks Clean and Shiny”. Naturally this type of thinking applies to brick and mortar locations. But you can easily morph this over to the web…

Off the cuff, this type of thinking would translate to: I trust you because your site is friendly and personalized.

1. Friendly:

On March 26, 2008, I posted about the fact that 9 out of 10 consumers abandon transactions. Rather shocking, but it mostly came down to lack of friendliness online. What does make a site friendly is basic etiquette like:

- easy navigation
- intuitive login procedures
- easy check-outs
- up-front pricing and shipping information
- helpful search functionality
- customer service options including LiveChat
- etc.

2. Personalized:

A personalized experience addresses the need for timely, relevant messages and offers. Web sites that build personalization into the mix minimize the headaches associated with information that’s insufficient, incorrect or confusing.

At the end of the day, it’s so important to remember the impact of trust. Trust is everything online especially when it comes to making transactions. Mylene Mangalindan of the Wall Street Journal wrote an excellent article called “Web Sites Want You to Stick Around” yesterday. In this article, she writes about “customer experience” tech tools…which is exactly how you can think of Sitebrand’s Retail Marketing Suite BTW. According to a survey for Forrester Research: “Interest in such “customer experience” tech tools is high.  In a recent survey of 287 companies, 91% of respondents at U.S. companies said customer experience will be very important or critical to their 2008 Internet efforts, up from 85% last year.”

It went on to read:

“Another study last week from trade group Shop.org and Forrester found that online retailers are allocating 21% of their total 2008 marketing budgets to online customer retention. Many companies realize that consumers making transactions on their Web sites are a mouse-click away from patronizing a rival. And consumers themselves are better informed and more experienced with the Internet — 32% of Web shoppers have been online for seven years — so their expectations are higher, says Forrester analyst Megan Burns.”

So the big question is - do you keep doing what you always do or do you think differently…and truly think about the customer?

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