Sitebrand recently published another customer case study and it’s featuring Wholesale Tool – a multichannel retailer headquartered in Michigan. Like the name implies, Wholesale Tool provides a full supply of name brands and quality import tools for consumers and industry.Before launching their website in 1999, they based their business on 7 retail stores strategically located across the US. As well, they generated sales via an impressive mail catalog with over 50,000 items.

In order to better optimize the web site potential, Wholesale Tool turned to Sitebrand. In addition to the goal of increasing conversion online, Wholesale Tool was also very interested in driving traffic to their seven physical store locations. In addition to finding success using personalization for first time visitor segments, lost shoppers and cart abandonment to name a few, Wholesale Tool takes advantage of geo-segmentation opportunities. Before I get into that, let me show you a screen shot of a Sitebrand powered first time visitor experience. The first time messaging is populating a pre-determined smart content area of the web site – just under the main top banner, under search and in bright yellow… 

Wholesale Tool First Time Visitor

Charlotte Geo

Prior to serving these campaigns, Wholesale Tool was getting lots of comments  (on the website) from people saying they didn’t know there was a store near them. After implementing these geo-campaigns, they immediately saw these types of comments drop…

For all the scoop, read the full Wholesale Tool case study which is part of Sitebrand’s ever-expanding library of case studies. DMNews picked this story up as well = check it out!

I had a good chat this morning with my colleague Larry (Manager, Corporate Training) about a term he has been bumping into in the last few weeks called ‘Social Conversion’. It all seems to stem from a nice blog-post that was written last month by Justin Talerico, CEO of ion Interactive, about the importance of monitoring, understanding and optimizing the micro-conversions associated to social media marketing.

Loved the blog, agreed with the concepts, but not sure we need to coin any new terms. Social Conversion is just another way of saying conversion. According to the WAA Standards Committee, Conversion is “The number of times a desired outcome was accomplished.” So let’s try and really nail down the basic definitions before we throw them out the window and come up with new ones. (Still, it’s a great piece, specifically the landing page and whitepaper examples)

Wondering what my intro has to do with the title yet? Here we go.

Just as the term ‘social conversion’ has been doing the rounds in the last few weeks regarding its relevance and veracity (or truthiness), the concept of engagement in digital marketing has done the rounds for almost two years, and has been the subject of heated debate and scrutiny.

The ongoing dialog (or should I say blogalog? Yet another new term) has revolved around two primary questions:

• Is engagement an important concept?
• If it is important, how can it be quantified.

To learn more about the topic, here are a number of great posts on the subject. I specifically recommend checking out the recent flamewar between Omniture and Eric Peterson, both industry heavyweights with very differing opinions.

I myself blogged on the issue back in February, and my take is that being able to understand and manage visitor engagement to/from/within a given web property is the first major step towards ‘analytics 2.0’. Standardizing what metrics are used however is much more difficult.

If you work with a company like ion Interactive, engagement will have a strong landing page/social media focus. If you are a multi-channel marketer, engagement might have strong online/offline ties.

Having helped some of Sitebrand’s customers directly identify engagement related KPI’s in their business for the purposes of Optimization, I know it works. As for the ‘philosopher’s stone’ of engagement equations that work for every site, the jury is out.

In a fairly new industry like internet marketing, new terms will be coined at the speed of….internet. But some terms stick and have a profound impact on our discipline.

Engagement is one of these important terms.

Do some homework and form an opinion. If you think it’s bunk so be it. But if you think engagement monitoring and management could be a core aspect of your job in the coming years, start applying some of the concepts now so you don’t miss the boat.

Cheers,

Jim

PS. Larry heard I was referencing him in the blog today and wanted to make sure all our customers knew that he is available for all training requests/questions at training AT Sitebrand.com. Go team go!

I absolutely love the title of this webinar!! And with Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Author & Evangelist from Google teaming up with Jason Billingsley, VP Innovation at Elastic Path Software teaming up…this is sure to be a good investment of your time. And you might even win 1 of 5 signed copies of Avinash’s top-rated book “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day”.

The “3 Things to Die For: Web Analytics Unleashed” webinar is happening this Thursday, July 17 at 12 pm EST / 9 am PST. Register here… 

It will be a great primer for the Danskin webinar Sitebrand’s is hosting the Wed after…Wed, July 30 to be precise! Don’t forget to register for “Danskin: Can It Repeat Its Cyber Monday Success?” so you can get inspired for Cyber Monday and beyond!

PS – be first to hear it all – follow “Sitebrand” on Twitter…

There is a  lack of tested business practice when it comes to website optimization.  This is because it is a brand new aspect of the (in itself young) discipline of eMarketing.  That said, one of the most compelling aspects of optimization is that there is no right way or wrong way to do it.  Given the cyclical nature of an optimization initiative, if you make a change to your website and get lousy results, you are that much more likely to do better on the next pass.

Given that Sitebrand is a personalization company, we spend all of our time assisting customers in getting their own conversion optimization efforts off the ground.  Because of that, I have a few points that I think should be considered by any marketer about to get started in this space.  If you follow the first point, and remain aware of the second, you should be off to the races in optimizing the desired outcomes of your web property.

POINT 1:  You can’t score if you don’t know where the goal is.

Don’t bother tinkering with the zeros and ones that make up your website unless you are aware of and educated on your traffic and the goals you have for them.  Let’s say you want to rebuild your home page to grow your conversion rate (for simplicity, let’s assume conversion equals making a shopping cart purchase:

• How many page views does the home page have?
• What is the bounce rate for this page?
• How many home page views were the entry pages for a session?
o What is the conversion rate of this visitor type?
o  How does it compare to the overall site average?
o If it was 10% higher, how much money is that worth?
o How does it trend for the last year?

These questions will allow you to see a rough revenue opportunity for your optimization, and provide some baselines to show if your changes have created a noticeable lift in goal outcomes over time.  The end-game of optimization is not a feeling, it’s a number.  Make sure you have clarity about what the number is and where it comes from before you start trying to play with it.

(If you want to get really into it, start drilling down a little and looking at the conversion rates of homepage visitors by source, geographic location and new or returning visitor status.  Give each one an opportunity cost, and alter your page to speak to the one worth the most money.  When you are done drop me an email, I would love to hear about the results)

POINT 2:  There is a difference between optimizing the medium and the message. (sorry Mr. McLuhan)

An important consideration when considering online optimization is that it is delivered in two key pieces, what you say and where you say it.

Sounds Obvious huh?  However most of the current discipline around site optimization focuses on where things are said.  Look at some of the case studies online, where you see that moving the ‘buy now’ button two inches on the screen has an impact on conversion, or making a green menu blue decreased bounce rates by 52%….

I’m not at all saying the numbers are wrong, but I am saying that changing the shopping isles and front door of your store is only part of the equation.  Moreover, it the most easily automated.  Someday soon a software tool will be announced and:

• it will have a really cool sounding algorithm
• it will take every element of your site and shuffle them in real time to optimize your store layout.

Proper site optimization takes what is being said in equal (or perhaps more) consideration with where it is being said.  The better your dialog with a visitor, the better your goal outcomes. The better your dialog with a visitor, the better your goal outcomes.  Look at the messaging, the incentives, the calls to action and the relevance to the visitors you are targeting.  You need as much Eisenberg as you do Taguchi.

Map out your goals properly, remember that the message is important too, and have fun growing your business.

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal” – Henry Ford

Cheers,

Jim

Per my Shop.org blog post a few weeks ago, I see an eCommerce market that is still getting ready to fully embrace personalization, but still focusing more on the plans behind inputs (traffic) and outputs (customer retention/upsells). 

Based on the recent analyst reports, thought leaders in the blogosphere, and topics covered at trade events however, web site optimization (of which personalization is a part) will be the number one focus of online business in the coming years.

With that in mind, I did a Google search this morning that was a total headscratcher.   Click here to see the results.

The fourth link down is a CNET article from 5 years ago explaining the failure of web personalization.

” Companies trying to get personal with their Web site visitors in hopes of increasing sales are wasting more money than they’re earning.”

The third link down is a blog post from over 4 years ago discussing the steps required to build an actionable plan around web personalization.  This blog was well written, insightful, and would work just as well today as it would have in 2004 (advances in technology notwithstanding).  That said, it discussed the concept of personalization in terms that imply everyone is doing it, something almost all current practitioners will disagree on.

This is my favorite quote from the piece:

“It’s a tired old yarn, but if you hope to implement a web personalization strategy, the first and most important step is to develop and mature your business goals and requirements”

Wasting Money? Tired old yarn?  How can the ‘next big thing’ in eCommerce have this kind of historical background?

I blame Google. (in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way)

If you look at the writing trends in 2004 about eMarketing, you see a fairly equal split between traffic generation and website optimization.  With the increased competition that emerged online in recent years, traffic generation became so important that it completely dominated.  The chart below is a Google Trends report for “PPC” vs “Personalization” to illustrate this point.

PPC is in blue, Personalization is in red

So…after a brief lapse, the hottest concept of 2003 is gearing up to be the hottest concept of 2009.  Everything old is new again. 

Now don’t get me wrong.  There have been some major changes in the personalization space in the last 5 years.  There are some great vendors out there to power different aspects of personalization (I know a great company called Sitebrand), and the analytics space has matured to the point where it is possible to reap great rewards from a properly executed personalization initiative.

This couldn’t be made any more evident by the following point:  The CNET article referenced above cites a Jupiter Research article from 2003 called “Beyond the Personalization Myth”.  Recent reports from Forrester and Aberdeen are of the opinion that this myth has become a profitable reality.

As a personalization analyst, I would like to welcome you back to the discussion about optimizing your website and growing your business.  We missed you.

Cheers,

Jim