I’m on month three here at Sitebrand, and man, how time flies when you’re having fun.  I find one of the most interesting things to take in, is the company pitch and core values when you’re new.  Rarely can you experience this in such an unbiased fashion after you’ve spent time with a firm.  So I wasn’t surprised to hear the buzz around web site personalization.  Coming from the audience measurement space, I was no stranger to the idea, but was anxious to hear what Sitebrand had to say about it.  Let me illustrate with a bricks and mortar example.

This past weekend, I was walking through our local big box hardware store; I needed furnace filters, excitement at its best.  I rounded the corner of the furnace aisle and was greeted by a salesman.  He very quickly realized my intention and prompted me with ‘What size filters are you looking for?”.  Nothing remarkable about that you say.  But ask yourself, how does that compare to the online experience?  The fact that I entered the store obviously meant I was a visitor and the fact that I walked down the furnace aisle meant I could be segmented.  But it was the combination of those facts along with a relevant message that made the experience truly personal, and that’s where I’m going.

Personalization isn’t just about segmenting users, and it isn’t about delivering a unique message to a visitor because you can.  It’s about optimizing the conversation you’re having with your visitor.  It’s about having a dialogue rather than a monologue. The ability to segment web traffic is no different in the online world than the ability to stand in the furnace aisle and whistle Dixie.  The key is combining a set of likely visitor expectations with the information you have, to deliver you guessed it: the right message to the right visitor, at the right time.  I wasn’t asked whether it was my first visit to the store, nor was I directed to the humidifiers section.

So what’s the takeaway here?  It’s simple, don’t get lost in the technology, or with the variety of methods and techniques to get in front of users.  Sure, we now have the ability to stand in that online furnace aisle, and that’s a great thing for Marketers, but that’s not the end of the story.  Success always comes down to relevant messaging, segmentation just places you in the aisle.

After I had the right furnace filter in my hand, the salesman kindly asked if he could help with anything else, “no” is what I said, so he pointed me in the direction of the checkout counter.

I was having lunch the other day with a web analytics friend of mine. He shared with me the fact that several of his clients who are in the online luxury space all have one thing in common – visitors who are subscribed to a newsletter have the highest conversion rate.

Hmm, ok. Well I suppose that’s interesting, but it’s not the sort of Avinash inspired metric that I’d want to tweet about.

The following day I asked our services team, “what is the main value that Sitebrand (personalization) brings to our online luxury customers today?”

It comes down to this: luxury companies typically have a multi-visit shopping cycle, and they look to us to help influence and shorten that cycle.

Depending on which stage of the cycle a visitor is at, we can target personalized messaging to persuade them to the next stage of the cycle. This shortens the process and reduces the chance that they fall out of the cycle.

Why do they have a multi-visit shopping cycle?

If I’m buying a ring, or any high-end product in any vertical, typically I want to research the product, I want to be an informed buyer – I’m not spending $50 here, we’re talking hundreds or thousands of $$$. In some cases it’s a once in a lifetime decision – like how many times in your life will you be buying a wedding ring (once hopefully)?

What can you measure?

So if you’re an online luxury e-tailor, and your visitor opts into your newsletter, it’s a measure of their commitment to you, you’re one of the contenders. So a newsletter is simply one more checkbox to fill along the multiple visit sales cycle. There are many other customer indicators that indicate commitment, willingness, and interest. Have a look, correlations between purchasers and other high-value tasks exist - your analytics will tell you these.

How does personalization help influence and shorten this cycle?

So now you know the business objective and you have the measurements in place.

“So what… so what do you do about it” (Sorry, another Avinash quote)

Some would argue that you can shorten the sales cycle by discounting the product or offering up deals earlier on in the process. I suppose, but isn’t this trying to fit a square peg in a round hole? For one thing, you’re leaving money on the table, and secondly, you’re trying to force something onto a customer that he or she is not ready for. This could result in lower margins on sales and potentially returned sales.

So I say - Focus on the customer!

Make them feel comfortable. Build confidence. Build a relationship. An opt-in newsletter is only one method to build that trust. Customer testimonials through text, imagery, voice and video; product reviews from both vendors and customers; customer support, email and live chat are but a few examples that do this.

If you’re ‘number of visits to purchase’ rate is 4.5, then spend the first 4 visits building that confidence and trust. This is the time to build brand, loyalty, trust, it is the time to focus on the customer and not on the sell. In visits 4, 5 and 6, offer them the incentive, persuade them towards the cart.

With Sitebrand, promoting that newsletter in a timely and effective manner is just one small example of how we can influence and shorten that sales cycle. Remember, not all of your visitors are at the same point in the purchasing cycle, so make sure you speak to each differently and gently help persuade each visitor segment to that next stage and subsequent purchase.

Rely on your analytics to determine your rates and correlations.

However, don’t rely on measurement alone. Rely on optimization and personalization to continuously improve the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

I can remember times where everyone believed we couldn’t have enough online stores.  Selling online was the next BIG thing.  Everyone started their own little shop and became online marketing experts.  It was easy and cheap.

What happened?  The reason growth in e-Commerce is threatened, slowed, or stopped altogether isn’t because the market is saturated, it’s because there’s been a failure of management.

Every major industry has once experienced significant growth.  The ones that made the right decisions grew, the others… well, here’s a simple example.

There once was a time when railroads were the hottest and trendiest way of transportation.  The railroad industry didn’t stop growing because the need for passengers and transportation declined.  Year after year, more people were traveling, just like there are more people buying online today.

Sitebrand says don't treat e-Commerce like railroads!

People didn’t move away from trains and towards cars, trucks, airplanes etc… the reality is people stopped using  trains.  Railroad companies let their customers leave because they saw being in the railroad business as their top priority, rather than being in the transportation business.  They were railroad oriented and not transportation oriented; they were product oriented and not customer oriented.

Do you see were I’m going with this?

Assuming growth is assured by an expanding population or by the adoption of technology might be as fatal as believing if visitors find your site; they will buy from you.

Over the last few years, most online companies haven’t needed to think, at least not a lot.  More and more people were buying more products and services online.  In times where everyone was spending, there wasn’t a growth problem.  If thinking is the intellectual response to a problem, then the absence of a problem leads to the absence of thinking.

Weird? Well I’m a technology guy, that’s how we rationalize.

So let me come back to my railroad example.  Online retailers finally have to understand that they can’t be railroad oriented.  Their business is not to perfect their SEO, find more ways of driving traffic or analyzing why someone didn’t buy.  They have to be transportation oriented.

It all starts with the customer.  Everything else are tools to help you take good care of what is important in your business: your customers.  Tools can be dangerous and can be misused if you don’t ensure your customers are happy.  Streets were built to bring people to trains and were later expanded so people could use cars and not trains (Don’t you feel that Google sounds a lot like those streets?).

You think we would have learned from our mistakes with railroads?

Think again.  Review how happy your visitors and customers are.

Look at your bounce rates or ratio between new versus returning visitors and tell me that you have not failed so far.  Now tell me that you didn’t think further than buying more keywords in the past.

So far you’ve built the trains, tracks and streets that bring people to your train stations.  You’ve looked at reports that tell you visitors come, look into your trains and leave to take the bus or go home or… who knows.  You don’t even know if they actually wanted to take the train, ah… I mean buy a product.

Put the customer in the center of your business.  Use review tools like Powerreviews to ask for opinions.  Use Sitebrand to personalize & optimize the session.  Help them find what they are looking for with tools like SLI-Systems.  Make them feel welcome and special.  Give them the feeling you have when you get on an airplane, first class from Hong Kong to New York.  You get pampered.  Give them the first class experience they deserve.

Don’t give visitors the lousy second class train ride experience with stops at every milk can.  Don’t make the same mistakes the railroads did…

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.

feelbest.com

For online stores like feelbest.com using Sitebrand’s Segment&Serve Web personalization technology, creating more relevant experiences is comparable to having a virtual sales assistant. The concept behind Web personalization is very much based on what consumers have come to expect from the traditional brick and mortar shopping experience. Consider the traditional brick and mortar store where a sales person
easily observes and responds to variousshopping behaviors and body language. If someone is a repeat customer, they get to know their buying habits. If someone is a new customer, they work to build a level
of trust by offering helpful suggestions, sharing information about a hassle-free return policy, showing the layout of the store and so on. If someone is looking at high end fashion apparel, they look to cross-sell high end accessories. If someone is looking at sale items, they show them all the sale areas and so on.

Understanding visitor intent

But move online and suddenly the visual cues are gone. However, thanks to Web analytics, there are other cues the online marketer can follow. From the moment a visitor arrives, there’s intent to do something – to research, to buy, to register etc. And every move is monitored through Web analytics. The bottom line is that every move a visitor makes tells a story – from how they arrive to what they click and how long they stay on any given page. If someone arrives using the keyword “sunscreen”, they’re looking for sunscreen. If a Web site responds appropriately by showing a selection sunscreen and the visitor clicks to learn more or buy, they are that much closer to buying. They are being guided through the sales funnel. But if they bounce out of the site before converting – either pre-checkout or during check-out – something went wrong. And it likely relates to lack of guidance and direction from the Web site.

Responding to classic e-commerce challenges

Feelbest.com is Canada’s largest online health and beauty aid store and it faces many of the classic ecommerce challenges, including low conversion rates. As such, it is always looking for innovative ways to convert a higher percentage of Web traffic into buyers. The company also wants to recognize and respond to visitors’ geolocations; especially in terms of seasonality trends associated with many of its product categories, such as sunscreen. And it wants to create a superior, personal online experience that makes feelbest.com the online retailer customers turn to when they can’t find what they need in a regular store. The company actively encourages customers to tell it what they are looking for, no matter how obscure it may seem. The retailer specializes in finding and offering hard to find health care and beauty aid products. “If there’s demand – even from just five or ten customers – and the product is available somewhere in the world, we’ll go directly to the manufacturer and make it available to our customers,” says Darrin Pickard, feelbest.com’s sales and marketing manager.

The need to convert more traffic into buyers

The retailer’s approach is quaintly reminiscent of the corner-store owner who would get to know his/her customers one person at a time and stock accordingly. Although this personal approach to serving customers is like those of days gone by, the scale of the operation is surely different. Products are shipped to clients around the world with roughly 65% heading to the US. That’s also the nub of the challenge: motivating feelbest.com to explore an alternative strategy for further customizing and personalizing the Web experience of all visitors. The explicit goal was to find a solution that would convert a higher percentage of new and repeat traffic into sales. “Back in the late 1990s, it was easier to stake your claim as a top online retailer. But today, it’s much more competitive and you can never be complacent,” says Pickard.

Changing each visitor’s experience in real-time

Feelbest.com chose Sitebrand with its promise of superior traffic conversion to literally change the experience of every visitor in real-time while on a Website. What the retailer particularly appreciated
about the Sitebrand solution was the extensive support provided to help get up and running with a customized solution quickly. “Sitebrand is like a natural extension to our marketing team,” says Pickard. “It’s not a one-strategy-fits-all approach. What Sitebrand does is analyze your traffic and provide you with customized solutions based on your business goals and what your customers are looking for.” In the case of feelbest.com, the Sitebrand solution resulted in recommendations for the type, placement and frequency of marketing campaigns to target specific customers and boost sales in specific product categories. In Pickard’s words, “I think any online retailer worth their salt knows you can’t mass market on the Web and expect to achieve success. As best you can, you must try to speak to each site visitor as an individual. When you show people you are interested in getting to know them, they’ll show interest back. It is “Customer Service 101” and we’ve seen this with the personalization campaigns we’ve built with Sitebrand.”

Leveraging best industry practices to create smart content

All Sitebrand’s recommendations are based on industry best practices, backed by hundreds of successful implementations in similar industry sectors. This enabled feelbest.com to quickly develop “smart content” for specific customers and product categories. With the Sitebrand solution, specific areas of a Web page are allocated for the strategic placement of ads or campaign messages. Campaigns are developed around various criteria, including geo location, keyword searches, seasonal promotions, product categories, and many others.

Salvaging underperforming segments and sales

Campaigns result in a highly customized and personalized Web experience for all visitors from the moment they land on the Web site. In doing so, online retailers like feelbest.com report immediate and measurable increases in sales lift, superior click through, and higher conversion of existing traffic. “We see an immediate increase in the number of existing visitors converting in the checkout process,” says Pickard. “Seeing success around existing customers in currently established product categories makes us want to leverage Sitebrand to build campaigns around new, underperforming product categories. These new product awareness campaigns will be designed for existing and new customers,” he adds. In this way, feelbest.com will be able to test different offers with respect to new product categories. This ability to raise the profile of lower performing product categories will be designed to help increase average cart spends and total sales.

Close-up of first-time visitor promo

Recognizing a first time visitor has its rewardsTapping into underperforming segments, like first time visitors, has also proved highly successful. The first time visitor needs a different experience than the repeat visitor. They want a feeling of trust. They want to feel reassured they’re on a credible site.

When this first time visitor segment is served personalized messaging that reinforces credibility and trust versus the control group segment that receives no reinforcement, the personalized messaging always sees higher revenue per impression.

In the case of feelbest.com, the revenue per impression lift for personalized first time visitor campaigns is 207% higher than the default control group campaigns with no personalization.

Increased ROI from the feelbest.com e-newsletter

Sitebrand also provided feelbest.com with specific recommendations for print ads and its e-newsletter to create a more holistic and integrated marketing program. The company sends monthly emails to roughly 25,000 opt-in subscribers to promote the e-newsletter. Sales generated from the newsletter had begun to drop. Once the Sitebrand solution was integrated with the email program, feelbest.com saw an increase of 34% in the number of orders received within five days of the newsletter being broadcast. “Whenever we send emails, there’s an instant spike in Website traffic,” says Pickard. “It’s going to get even more interesting when we start adding more automation into the mix.” For an online health and beauty aid store, it will be a highly beneficial to trigger purchase reminder emails, i.e. “Your 90-day supply of vitamins is almost gone. Don’t be disappointed. Buy more now…”

The power of personalization for unique market segments

“The way I see it, not having a personalized approach to online marketing is like calling every one of your customers ‘Bill’. Worse yet, it’s like expecting them all to take advantage of a deal on mint toothpaste. But in reality, your customer’s name might be ‘Susan’ and she wears dentures…” says Pickard. “Website personalization allows you to find these unique market segments so you can serve up relevant offers that will convert visitors to buyers.”

NOTE: This post is also a featured article I contributed to the October 2008 issue of ”Direct Marketing” - a Canadian publication about interactive marketing and sales. Since it’s print-only (odd for an interactive pub, and apparently a website is in the works…but hey!) All that said, I felt compelled to share it online. I hope you enjoyed the read and I welcome your comments!