Geotargeting is starting to generate some buzz. Just today Jack Aaronson, a ClickZ columnist, published a story called Geotargeting Comes of Age in E-commerce. It’s a great story that speaks to the incredible power of personalizing web content based on a visitor’s geo-location. In fact it references a Sitebrand customer, BedBathStore.com, for its leadership in this still fairly uncommon use of technology. To add to the ClickZ story, it’s also interesting to consider how BedBathStore.com goes a step further by pairing day of week strategies into the mix. In talking with Alok Ahuja, the Sitebrand account manager working with BedBathStore.com, he said they are seeing some amazing results that relate to the combination of geotargeting with day of week targeting.

Even though these day of week geo campaigns (floating divs like the screenshot above) are only being shown 4 times per month (since there’s typically 4 weeks in a month), they are proving to outperform other geo-target only type campaigns that run ALL month long. This retailer is especially blown away by the Sunday geo campaigns. Apparently these Sunday geo campaigns are a massive success. Who would have thought?! Obviously it’s a popular day to shop from home.  

So geotargeting is one great way to boost conversion, but pairing geotargeting with day of week immediacy and urgency is proving to really ramp things up!

We’ve talked about the power of integrated marketing campaigns because the combined message creates a sense of credibility and trust among the buying public. After all, if you do not trust the merchant then you will certainly not buy from them. Customer loyalty is another method of measuring and assessing how much trust your customers place in you. However, many Marketers drop the ball on creating this sense of trust. It’s easily done with some integrated marketing tactics.

Consider the use of customer testimonials. Clients leave them all of the time. At worse, you simply need to ask for them. It’s amazing how much people like to share and to talk. An integrated campaign will take that quote and create a case study. The case study then gets pitched to a major and trusted publication usually tied in to some human interest angle. That leads to a press release announcing the happy customer, or event, and referencing the case study and the industry coverage. Accordingly, you inform your opt-in email list of the great news and perhaps associate a short-term promotion tied to the event. Your email service provider utilizes the Forward-to-a-Friend feature to allow your email subscribers to share the news, and the positive branding, with their friends. Now suddenly your relevance in the search engines increases proportionately to the multiple references. Your higher rankings, and your supporting mentions, combine to nurture the consumer with a positive experience of your brand. Said another way - your integrated marketing leveraged one piece across multiple marketing channels. That’s what I’m talking about!

So where is the Word of Mouth we alluded to? Simple. It’s the by-product of your campaigns. People like to talk. Why do we want them to talk? Because online sales tools only nominally augment the likelihood to convert according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The study goes on to say that 64% found out about the product from friends, family, or co-workers.

So how do you encourage word of mouth because we know that will increase actual online conversions? Simple - you create a personalized, one-on-one experience for each consumer or visitor and then you complement the experience with integrated marketing. Combined, you create credibility and trust — and buzz!

So! How goes the integrated marketing?

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

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.

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.