Number 842. Remember that number. You’ll thank me later.

Visit Sitebrand at IRCE2009, booth 842

Again – 842 is the key here. You’ll need it soon… very soon. You may want to take a second to write it down or get it into your mobile phone. I’ll wait while you do that… … ready to keep reading?

Studies suggest it takes at least 3-5 times of seeing the same message before you start to memorize it. Hopefully the number 842 is beginning to solidify in your mind.

OK, let me take the time to explain the significance of 842. The number 842 is the booth number Sitebrand will occupy during the 2009 Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition next week in Boston, MA.

Was a build up like that necessary to announce an appearance at the IRCE? Absolutely. Sitebrand is the leader in web personalization and to not create a build up like this would only be a disservice to our experience, success and ongoing thought leadership.

But enough about us (but please feel free to ask us more in person next week, in booth 842)… here’s a few topics that directly impact you and Sitebrand solves on a regular basis.

Maximizing search efforts: Alright, you have landing pages for your keywords, but as we all know, those keywords aren’t the only things driving web traffic. What about organic search terms which make up a healthy dose of your steady traffic? How do you speak to visitors who land on your site with natural search? Sitebrand can target those visitors.

Shortening your sales cycles: Bigger ticket items can sometimes incur longer sales cycles before conversions. Chalk it up to researching, comparing, decision making – wouldn’t it be great to properly address those specific needs of your visitors? And if you could, it would probably shorten the average sales cycle. Sitebrand can and has done that.

See any patterns here? Yeah – Sitebrand targets all kinds of visitors. Where other eCommerce solutions may only apply to specific segments or features, web personalization and Sitebrand appeal to everyone.

Booth #842 – Monday June 15th through Wednesday June 17th. See you there!

Stay classy, IRCE 2009

It’s always interesting to read an eCommerce success story to understand the lessons learned, strategies involved and of course, the magical combination of technologies used for sales and conversion rate wins.

Sadly, there isn’t one single combination to guarantee results and certainly that’s no revolutionary thought.  Everyone’s trying to figure out what technologies are needed and what’s not.  My needs don’t match your needs, so the bad news is you still have to keep on top of new tools and technology that solve your challenges.  It’s almost a job in itself.  I guess that’s the true challenge for marketers and vendors in any space, especially in the online marketing world.

Think about it.  You probably have a number of the following tools/solutions running in conjunction with your site right now: in-site search, recommendations, live chat/customer support, customer/product reviews, multivariate or A/B testing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, CMS and of course, web personalization.  I know you all have web personalization integrated into your web strategies.

All these technologies plugged into your website no doubt have the ability to raise your conversion rates and enhance the visitor experience.  I’m sure they all do, but when you have 3 or 4 of the above solutions running at once, are they all working in unison or like 3 or 4 separate products?  You probably don’t have the time or bandwidth to properly setup, run, modify and analyze each solution on a weekly basis and I’m guessing the solutions don’t naturally play well together.  Software is great like that, right?

Is it fair to expect a 1-3% conversion lift from each of the solutions listed above; or at least most of them?  Sounds reasonable if used properly and to the maximum capability.  So, if you are running 3 or 4 of these solutions, why isn’t your conversion rate nearing double digits or higher?  Are these different solutions converting the same visitors?  And would your conversion rate suffer without these solutions?

I’m really asking what the impact of these solutions are.  Are they worth the money you pay when they contribute to a conversion rate that’s less than ideal?  You’ve outsourced a good chunk of your website for tools and solutions that do something better than you can, but do the results justify having the solutions?  Especially if they are converting the same visitors.

For example, a visitor goes through an in-site search to a product that’s been delivered via a recommendation engine.  Score one point for both the search and the recommendation tool, but it’s not like your conversion rates show’s it; nor does the ROI.  Would the conversion happen with only one of the solutions?  Or perhaps without either solution?  How do each of these tools show individual value over another?  My boss will probably say I’m arguing a war of attribution, but let’s see what you guys have to say!

I’m looking forward to all different thoughts, insight and opinions on this subject.

Stay classy, internet marketing tools.

Put your hands up if you’ve seen or heard a conversation about social media today.  Week after week I postulate if social media is at its peak.  And week after week I’m wrong.  I’m not sure when this streak will end either.  Reminds me of Tim Horton’s roll-up-the-rim… except I’m only kidding myself until May.  With this social media thing, it could be a while.

Note to our American friends: roll-up-the-rim is a Tim Horton’s annual promotion Canadians cannot get enough of.

And here we are – 2009, social media this, social media that.   Can you imagine the look a 15 year old kid might give you if you told him/her that Facebook didn’t exist 20 years ago?  Actually, can you imagine our own faces?  We’ve all become increasingly reliant on social media in one way or another.   Many of us are finding our personal and professional Facebooks, LinkedIns, Myspaces and Twitters intersecting.  I blame smartphones, but that’s another conversation altogether.

Here’s the thing with social media.  Number one, we’re all self-professed ‘experts’ with social media, yet don’t have the control we think we have.  And two, as good as we think we are with social media, today’s kids are quickly becoming better.

Think about it.  We’re all trying to find ways to integrate social media into branding, campaigns, sales, etc… but kids aren’t.  For many kids and youth, social media has forever been a part of life.  They’ll use it more naturally and probably in ways us, the good expert, will never think of.

Scary?  Us ‘experts’ should really figure out a Plan B.

My biggest gripe with social media?  Limited ability to personalize, customize and tailor appearances.  We as marketers have embraced social media, but social media hasn’t embraced us.  Everyone from Skittles to Coca-Cola is using social media for all sorts of reasons and experiments.  And despite this, we can’t even brand our Twitter and Facebook pages properly.  Social media is all about self promotion, expression and information sharing, but they aren’t sharing.  Instead it’s “you can put your logo in this 200×300 space on the left hand side and your choice of background is blue.”

Look no further than the Skittles phenomenon we’ve nearly forgotten about.   We know the Skittles colors (especially since we all bought a pack or two after their infamous experiment), but each social media site didn’t really reflect the company and product like it could and should have.  How cool would a red Skittles Facebook page look?  Certainly better than blue.

Every time a new social media application pops up, the first thing analysts, experts and everyone else says is “I don’t see potential for a revenue model.”  This is the perfect opportunity for Facebook, Myspace and Twitter (especially Twitter!) to do just that.  How much more valuable would your fan page be if you could have it reflect your company, brand and online marketing strategies?  Brand Managers have slaved to ensure the colors and messaging are perfect.  Social media is about sharing information and for businesses, is a great opportunity to act as an extension of your website, banner ads and wacky commercials.  If your colors are red and white (random example), what differentiates your page from a competitors?  Or Andy’s Local Fish & Cactus Store?  And seriously, would it be that hard to accommodate?  The only other question is would you, the marketer be willing to pay for that kind of personalization?

My name is Kevin and I have a social media problem.   Now if you’ll excuse me, I have several notifications to attend to and I need to create a viral marketing strategy based around Twitter.

Stay classy, social media.

It’s been some time good reader, so happy end of January. We’re one month closer to summer.

I realize times are tough right now – budgets are cut shorter than Barack Obama’s hair, company headcount is shrinking faster than Nortel’s stock and general uncertainty is causing big-time havoc on anyone looking at long term planning. See, I’ve caught up with my news and current events (see my last blog to fully understand…).

In e-Commerce, we talk a lot about first time visitors – the big unknown. There’s a huge focus on this segment and while no one has completely cracked the code, there are dozens of best practices out there with proven and repeatable results. Jim Cain, Sitebrand’s resident super analyst wrote a great whitepaper on this very subject last year.

So, cool. First time visitors are the elusive catch, the big seg (sounded cooler than segment). And so it should be – generally it makes up about 70 per cent of total traffic or more. But today, I wanted to look a little closer at return visitors. That’s approximately the other 30 per cent of your traffic and while significantly smaller than first time visitors, it’s still an important segment and could act as a more profitable one long term. All repeat visitors were once first time visitors, right? I know what you’re thinking: “How profound of you, Kevin”. Thanks for the feedback.

But think about it. You’ve already invested in driving these visitors to your site once. Maybe they bought something. Maybe they saved their cart. Maybe they looked around on your site for twice the regular average. Who knows, but for some reason, they are back. Which brings the question: what are you doing for these visitors and how do your marketing strategies look for returning visitors?

From a search marketing standpoint, you’ve done your job. They are back and on your site – again! Are you messaging targeted content to return visitors? Are you segmenting your return visitors based on if they purchased anything during their last visit? Are you A/Bing content to this segment? Do you want to create a unique customer experience? Are you able to create real-time campaigns based on click-path navigations and behaviors during that specific session?

You could be.

Enter plug: This Wednesday afternoon, I’ll be hosting a webinar geared towards this exact topic with 5 best practices to boot. Here’s the skinny: 29 minute webinar with me (rad Sitebrand Sales Engineer), on return visitors and how you could be improving conversions. And it’s free. Register now.

I can plug my own webinar on our official blog, right? Like, that’s not a faux pas, is it? I hope not. But more so, I hope to see you there – 2pm EST sharp.

Stay Classy, internet.

A colleague of mine – who we’ll refer to as “naD” for anonymity sake – recently told me my blogs are verbose. I’ve never considered myself to be loquacious before, but I suppose there’s a first for everything. Am I really of the garrulous kind?

Anyways, this all came full circle as some co-workers, naD and I were caught up in a rousing game of lunchtime Scrabble via Facebook. Without divulging any further information about my lunchtime habits, I got thinking, with so much emphasis on social media, what web 2.0 medium is most effective for e-commerce companies? I had an interesting conversation with another co-worker recently regarding social media and despite the emphasis placed here in the last few years, it’s very uncontrollable. I’ll get to that shortly…

Full disclosure: I realize it will differ for each company and that this blog is probably one of 2,000 blogs that will touch on social media today. And while there are numbers of books and blogs from experts like Dave Evans (Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day, and Dave, if you are reading this, I don’t own this book yet and December 25th is right around the corner), this is a take that directly affects Sitebrand users or those further looking into web 2.0 strategies with personalization, targeted content and other marketing strategies. It’s a look at segmentation, how to work with open environments (users are free to say what they want, when they want – regardless of validity or truth) and avoiding the “boil the ocean” mentality.

Hypothetical example here… let’s assume you are an online electronics retailer selling everything from alarm clocks to MP3 players.

You are up to date with all the Facebook’s, Linked In’s, Twitter’s (this itself can be daunting, I know) and a specific intent is established for your internet marketing plan. You know you want to use Facebook and Twitter for different promotions. Those could be two vastly different kinds of visitors, right? Going back to a comment I made earlier, you can’t control what’s being said about you and any preconceived notions that go along with it, so how do you deal with this, without having a face-to-face conversation with every visitor? Since my example has us selling the coolest widgets and gadgets, understanding your visitors based on where they are coming from is just as important as anything else on your site and the need to segment your audience and dynamically message them truly begins.

The traffic coming from your hourly/daily tweets trust your promotions or the source it came from (and let’s suppose your analytics tell you nearly 12% of your traffic is from mobile browsers). Your landing page could offer minimal images and focus on messaging/links that load quickly and since I’m in ultra-merchandising mode, focus on the latest in smart phones and Bluetooth headsets. Since that trust is there (or at least higher than most first time visitors), you can focus on what the visitor should buy, not why. And that’s just for first time visitors. When they come back, you can target these same visitors to help increase brand awareness and drive home non-financial conversions/goals. Ultimately, ensuring they’ve seen your great promotions, seen why you are a great company and changing any preconceived notions they may have had about you before. This is your chance to get into your visitors mind and represent your company the way you want. The power of targeted messaging, eh?

For traffic coming from Facebook, you know this is either from paid ads or a link from a user profile. Either way, they aren’t as connected to you and your company as the Twitter crowd. Seems like a good opportunity to segment, right? One way or another, you’ve paid for this customer to be on your site, so it needs to count and needs to capture the visitors attention/trust. At this point, having a banner run through the entire session for these visitors (clickable or not), telling them the site is secure, potential refund info, shipping info based on geography/location might be worthwhile. Maybe the message changes and talks to the visitor based on their click patterns or the fact they came from Facebook, who knows – the sky is the limit here. Since it’s a more general crowd, you could opt to show an array of your different products and special sales. Or perhaps you want to focus on company branding more than particular promotions and quick conversions. Personalization and visitor segmentation give marketers a window to brand like never before. You can drive home your message in a conversational way. Imagine having your customers line up to have a face-to-face conversation with you. I’m sure you can make them a believer in your company (at least you could for me… I know how convincing our Sitebrand blog readers are) and isn’t that the whole point of a webpage in the first place?

If all this sounds cooler than a $4 sweater on Christmas, then hold onto your hat: I’ll be running a product demonstration webinar this coming Wednesday, December 17th @ 2pm EST (BTW, they are only 29 minutes long!). In the new year, I’ll be running these webinars bi-weekly, so this Wednesday’s presentation will be the neonate demo. I’ll be talking about web 2.0 integration with Sitebrand,  showing its ease of use and effectiveness. If your conversion rate is lower than 4% and you want to get more out of your existing traffic, I’d love to meet you. Remember: the tools your company uses to tap into your visitors represent the kind of company you are and the kind of customers you are after.

To everyone who can’t make it, happy holidays and see on you on the other side (2009).

Stay classy, internet.

p.s – naD won the lunchtime game… but only because he found an anagram-scrabble cheat online. He’s since been banned from our lunchtime game.