The purpose of this weeks blog was going to be around the concept of the first time visitor segment and how it can be appropriately marketed to on a given web property.  Once I hit the 2000 word mark, I decided to keep going and make it a whitepaper.  More will follow on that in coming weeks. 

Instead I would like to take a moment to throw in my two cents on a real challenge that I think most eCommerce properties face in regards to site optimization: horsepower vs proper planning. 

The purpose of most of my blogs and of the upcoming whitepaper has to do with proper execution, building the right marketing plan to effectively achieve the right sales outcomes.  While Sitebrand’s technology will assist in achieving better outcomes, it will not in itself give you a good plan.   

This thought runs in parallel to the ’90-10’ rule regarding analytics software coined by Avinash Kaushik.  If you spend 90% of your analytics budget on the right people who can make the right plans, and 10 percent on the technology to allow them to do their jobs, you will get the best possible results. 

So what do I mean about horsepower vs proper planning?  While eMarketers are starting to take more control of the web site, overall ownership is still firmly in the domain of the IT department and the CFO.  This is for two reasons:

• Websites, despite all the talk of ‘commerce 2.0’, are still considered to be black boxes where traffic is plugged in one end, and revenue comes out the other.
• Most marketers have built their plans around this ‘drive traffic-manage customers’ model, and don’t have a sound strategy or plan for insite marketing.

If your site is viewed as a black box, or intelligent catalog, or online sales engine, the only way to optimize it is to bolt on ‘more horsepower’ in the forms of self learning software like merchandising management, site search tools, and multivariate testing engines. 

With this thought in mind, re-read the websites for some of the vendors who have cold called you in the last few weeks.  While the stated audience will be the marketer, the true stakeholders are finance and IT.  The value propositions tend to revolve around the concept that the primary job of the marketer is to get good traffic to the website, and the primary job of technology is to manage the experience of the visitor through self learning databases and patented algorithms. 

“More power!” 

I could sell a LOT of software to Tim the Toolman.  I can also guarantee you that while his website would get the basic value that any good software product will provide, the ‘sales engine’ would never be shifted out of second gear due to the lack of a solid plan.   

There is no point in buying a Ferrari to be a grocery getter, and there isn’t much point in putting more horsepower into your website before you have a cohesive plan around how you are going to use it. 

 Cheers,

Jim

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