Persuasive e-Marketing » 2008

Archive for May, 2008

May 15th, 2008 by Jim Cain

If you talk to ten different eCommerce sites that are using Analytics, the odds are good that at least five of them are using Google Analytics. If you talk to ten different Google Analytics (GA) users, probably only one of them is using their Goal tracking for anything other than cart conversions. Long story short, an awfully large percentage of retailers aren’t getting a lot of value out of Google analytics.

This is in part due to the fact that most companies using GA don’t tend to have a full time analyst asking specific questions of the website data, and also due to the fact that while GA is great free software, there is no vendor support in terms of best practices for tool usage. (If you want an analytics vendor with a top-notch customer support/analysis team, look no farther than our friends at Coremetrics)

Here are two alternate goals, and one new way to look at them using Google Analytics. They are easy to set up and monitor, they will give you a lot more visibility into website outcomes, and will help you start asking the right questions about what you can be doing to optimize your website for increased conversions.

For additional information about how to set up goals in Google Analytics, click here.

Goal 1: ‘About Us’ page visitor conversion

If a visitor cares enough to want to learn about your business, they are that much closer to converting. Set up a goal funnel with the first page being the About Us page URL, and the last page being the transaction completed page. You now have an report that shows you the conversion rates of people who visit your ‘about us’ page as part of a session. Once you have the results in, you can start applying changes to this page in an attempt to increase conversion outcomes.

Goal 2: Micro Conversion Points

A micro conversion point is a non shopping cart transaction. Examples include newsletter signup, catalog request or wish list signup. Better understanding of how many visitors choose these micro-conversions will give a better understanding of what a visitor really wants from your site. Also if any of these micro-conversion points has multiple steps, you can build a goal funnel and look at step abandonment, just like for your shopping cart.

Goal Tip: Use filters to segment your goal results

By filtering your Google results based on different traffic source segments, you can get a much better understanding of how visitors from different sources convert for different goals. For example, what does the cart abandonment funnel look like for direct type in visitors vs. paid search traffic? Setting up funnels is also fairly straightforward, and you can see a more detailed posting from the team at Lunametrics on how to accomplish this by clicking here.

A better understanding of site outcomes equals an ability to optimize them over time. Taking the steps above will add invaluable marketing insight to your analytics tool.

Cheers,

Jim

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Jim Cain, eCommerce, Web Analytics, Personalization | 1 Comment »

May Webinar: Expert Jason Burby Talks Personalization with Sitebrand

May 14th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

As part of Sitebrand’s monthly webinar series, I’m very excited to tell you about our upcoming webinar because the very insightful Jason Burby from ZAAZ is my co-presenter…

Our topic is ~ Web Personalization: Putting the “Cha-Ching” Before and After the Check-Out. Isn’t that intriguing? If you’re like amost people I’ve told, it’s the cha-ching after the check-out that has you screaming for more.

So do yourself a favour and register today.

As added incentive, be one of the first 25 people to register and you’ll win yourself a free copy of the book “Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smarter Business Decisions” by Jason Burby and Shane Atchinson.

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Carolyn Gardner, eCommerce, Web Analytics, Personalization | No Comments »

Put your money where your mouse is…

May 13th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

Online sales are continuing to outpace catalog sales. Consider the recent announcement by the marketers at Bloomingdales (parent company being Macy’s Inc) who have just called it quits for the catalog side of business and you can start predicting the future with relative ease. That is…if marketers dare to think differently. Tried and true may no longer apply…

I call it putting your money where the mouse is.

Not just where it starts (as in search and email) but where it travels (which is the entire click-stream process, not to mention visits that might happen over a period of time pre- and post-conversion). And this new emphasis on travel can really be related to improving the overall online experience which is exactly the plan for the Bloomingdales.com web site.

Bye-bye catalogs will also mean bye-bye direct mail to some degree. I’m sure not every retailer will completely abandon the catalog, but there will be fewer and fewer printed every year. So it’s not a matter of if they will abandon catalogs, it’s more a question of when and by how much? For the catalogs that don’t get fully axed, I believe the distribution won’t be automatic - rather, it will be very much an active request by the consumer.

But over time, with more emphasis being placed on positive online experiences, who will even request a catalog? I mean seriously, the catalog will be archaic. As today’s youth move into consumer-hood, they’re already in tune with online shopping. Hell, they’ve been buying in the onlines stores of webkinz world, club penguin and numerous others since they were 3!!! And trust me, these sites don’t offer print catalogs.

On top of consumer demand for positive online experiences, there’s also the green thing / the environment thing. This is like the cherry on top for any marketer looking to phase out the catalog. Save some trees. Gain some customers. It’s all good.

Two questions:

1. Have you noticed fewer and fewer retail catalogs?

2. Are you a retailer considering the fate of your catalog?

I’m curious for comments on this topic…so share your thoughts and let’s start a conversation.

Posted in Conversion, Optimization, Customer Experience, Carolyn Gardner, eCommerce, Search Marketing, Personalization, Email marketing | No Comments »

MarketingSherpa visiting Ottawa

May 7th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

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.

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Carolyn Gardner, Personalization, eCommerce, Search Marketing | No Comments »

Should Dayparting be a part of your day?

May 6th, 2008 by Jim Cain

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.

Posted in Jim Cain, Conversion, Social Media, Web Analytics, Personalization, eCommerce, Search Marketing | No Comments »

Customer experiences, social media and your corporate reputation

May 2nd, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

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.

Posted in Customer Experience, Carolyn Gardner, Social Media, Viral Marketing | No Comments »