So here we are. It’s “Cyber Monday”, a fairly recent term that was coined by the National Retail Federation trade group back in 2005. It’s the Monday after the US Thanksgiving holiday and also thought of as the unofficial kickoff for what’s always hoped to be a busy online retail season. Just check out cybermonday.com and you’ll see the stuff I’m talking about!

Now I realize the term was coined in the US and kudos for that, but to keep it a US only “thing” seems limiting especially since we’re talking online retail. Last time I looked, “online retail” lives on the “World Wide Web” and as the name implies, there’s world-wide reach. Just looking at North America, the one continent where the US sits, US eTailers seem to be forgetting a whole country called Canada and the whole segment of Canadian consumers that go with it.

On the flip side and to be fair, Canadian eTailers are forgetting they need to be competitive with US websites who always seem to be leap years ahead in terms of innovation. After all, everyone surfs the web looking for the perfect buy, and since we’re bouncing in and out of both CDN and US sites, why isn’t there more Cyber Monday hype here in the north? Why not take advantage of an increasingly well known shopping blitz?

So just why does it make sense to think about Canadians (not to mention other geo-areas) as an additional market segment for Cyber Monday penetration? Let’s consider the following:
 
1. Are Canadians online? Yes, big time.
2. Are Canadians browsing websites for online deals and special offers? Yes, .com’s and .ca’s.
3. Are Canadians feeling angst and urgency around holiday shopping lists right now? Yes. Even though our Thanksgiving was in October, a lot of us are gearing up for the big red guy on Dec. 25.

Given the above, what I’m seeing is a half-baked online marketing strategy that completely ignores the full power of the web and all its glorious technological wonders…with technologies like Segment&Serve – Sitebrand’s web personalization platform – it’s really crazy that Cyber Monday is being so limited to the US.

All this said, I’m seeing US retailers coming up with all kinds of great Cyber Monday deals, rebates and discounts. Just look at these 2 examples: 

Cyber Monday Promo

The deals are endless, but considering holiday sales (both in-store and online) are expected to be crappy this year, is further discounting to US consumers really going to save the day? Considering it gouges an already thin margin that’s typical in the eTail space, it’s a tough one. BTW, this is why Sitebrand encourages our online marketing customers to promote the service side of their business too. 

And this brings me right back to a Cyber Monday strategy that taps into geo-targeting. It’s a strategy that should apply to both US and CDN eTailers…at a minimum. Baby steps I’m suggesting…

As for popular Canadian sites or anyone selling online, why aren’t they piggy-backing Cyber Monday urgency? Not one of the following major .ca Canadian eTail sites say anything about Cyber Monday: Zellers, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Sears. Considering the rate we pop in and out of sites comparing prices etc, it’s another missed opportunity. 

Online stores are global regardless of where they’re based, so why not market accordingly – geo-targeting being a good start, emphasis on service versus discounts being a second smart move – “we ship to Canada” being an effective message.

I guess this leaves us open to debate the big question – why can’t Cyber Monday become a global kick-off to online shopping? Thinking outside the border. It’s quite a thought.

PS – a big thanks to my fellow Sitebranders for all their forwarded websites and emails = they helped a lot!

eCommerce Black Friday

We are officially 2 week from Thanksgiving. Football, Turkey, and the official launch of the holiday shopping season…… Black Friday is almost upon us!

For online retailers, Cyber Monday is now right around the corner too. Batten down the hatches and tighten up your eCom helmets, it is about to get a little nutty.

For those of you who had optimization on your 2008 roadmap, congrats. Your hard work is about to be rewarded – easy math shows the incremental improvements are measurable all year round, but are magnified with seasonal swells.

For those of you who don’t. Some 3rd party validation from our friends at ClickZ/Zaaz, who have posted a handy calculator to help you make your case for optimization in your 2009 agenda/budget.

If the ‘Incremental Value’ and ROI numbers look compelling here, give me a call and I will help you generate some analytics reports about your business, that will ’show you the money.’

Optimization is your friend folks, don’t settle for seasonal trends to lift the business alone. You can move the needle also.

It’s called Rue La La and it’s creating a shopping revolution that has to be one of the most brilliant online retail ideas I’ve seen in a while! It’s got designer brands, exclusivity, urgency, community and incentive…and that’s just the beginning. Here’s the gist of Rue La La…

First of all, you have to be a member. And to be a member, it’s invitation only via email so you have to be connected to someone hip and in the know. In my case, that would be fellow Sitebrander Dan Auns = thanks Dan! In your case, it’s now me, lol – I’m serious, if you’re interested I can send you an invite. It’s totally worth the discovery. Hmm, can you see the huge viral potential here too!?! Especially since when you send an invite to someone, Rue La La will give you a $10 shopping credit when any of your invitees make their first purchase. So bottom line – no membership, no access.

But once you’re a member (which is free), Rue La La is a destination that’s always changing. Any time you visit, you’ll have different and exciting offerings. No more of that same old, same old. And they love feedback because they want to be responsive to what members want most.

Now for the really cool part. Each private sale boutique is only open for 2-3 days!! Talk about creating a sense of urgency! When they say don’t delay, they mean it! And when you check out the featured boutique, there’s a days, hours and minute countdown ticking away. Now of course, they’re not foolish. In addition to seeing “Today’s Boutique”, you’re also teased with a mini list of the “Next Boutiques”. In this listing, you’ll see the upcoming days and hours of operation.

I love it because this concept is totally maximizing so many of the things you need to do to be successful online. On top of it all, the entire concept is awesomely framed around building that sense of community through social marketing.  With this post alone, I’m clearly feeding right into it!

Who are the brains behind Rue La La you ask? I wish it was me but it’s actually part of an exciting new division of Retail Convergence, Inc., featuring ”a portfolio of e-commerce companies leveraging a common technology platform, customer database, and management team to revolutionize online shopping”. In addition to owning the Rue La La brand, Retail Convervence also owns SmartBargains.com which just happens to be #100 on the IR500 list.

They are a self-proclaimed group of people who love shopping. They’ve built the connections required to negotiate private sale prices on some of the most sought after brands in fashion and home. And they have the exacting standards required to present only the best-edited collections. I should mention that Rue La La is not about trashy stuff that’s going to rip, tear and break. I’m talking about high-end designer brands that just happen to be selling at fabulous prices. Right now they are featuring Joseph Abboud. But only till 11 am EST. As of 11 am today and for only 2 days, they’re opening a boutique for vineyard vines.  Then 2 days later it’s PUMA, and so on…

So there you have it! If you want to get a taste of the ooh la la shopping experience at Rue La La, let me know and I’ll send you an invite. Just send an email to cgardner(at)sitebrand(dot)com 

Happy Shopping!

Since our June 26 webinar is an advanced session on email marketing with Loren McDonald from Silverpop co-presenting, I thought I would take a minute to share an awesome ”before and after” email case study featuring Sitebrand client, Legendary Whitetails. The study isn’t hot of the press; in fact it was picked up by MarketingSherpa back in March.  But you know what, the findings are highly relevant and there’s still a lot of learnings to be learned! According to the Email Experience Council’s recently published “Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study”, a shocking 53% of marketing execs say they are NOT factoring the realities of “images off” into their email designs. Call me crazy, but there’s a lot of money being left on the table! Let me explain why…

Very simply, this case study zeroes in on the impact of an email design’s ratio of HTML to text…especially as it relates to deliverability and response rates…which of course lead to revenue.

For this study, we did an A/B split test: the retailer’s image-based campaign vs. a nearly identical ‘email-optimized’ version which factors in best practices for preview pane/image blocking software.

KISS (Keep it simple, silly!) was the driving factor behind the creative strategy for this campaign. The message was simple and compelling “Free shipping for a limited time”; therefore the creative was simple and straightforward, using common look and feel elements from the web and previous campaigns. The only difference between the two versions was that text from the optimized version was coded in HTML (not images) in order to render properly even when images were disabled. In the screenshots below, you can see how both versions appear with images on…and then off…

While the concept, message and creative may be summed up as ’simple’, the results are nothing short of amazing. To get meaningful, accurate results, the database was randomly split into two with each containing almost 33,000 recipients.  

The optimized version received higher results across the board. Deliverability went up from 78% to 98%, opens climbed from just under 10% to over 13%, clicks went up from 3% to nearly 5%. While, aside from deliverability, the improvement may not seem too dramatic, the most important metric, conversions, were unbelievable. The ‘before email’ brought in 139 purchases at a 0.4% conversion rate. The ‘after’ version brought in a whopping 495 purchases, or 1.5% conversion rate.  This represented a revenue lift in excess of 379%.

With results like these, Legendary Whitetails could clearly see the lifts associated with optimizing emails for the inbox. And the “after” is the “always” when it comes to their email designs.

While this campaign may not be glamorous, complex or even have any bells and whistles, it does have the power of best practices and respect for the email medium backing it up. The numbers don’t lie and they show a compelling argument for what email expertise can do for a retailer’s bottom line. Unfortunately, as exposed by the EEC, many retailers are ‘behind the times’ in this area.

That said, I believe this case study and its results are another ”wake-up call” to those who’ve been ignoring or skeptical of industry expertise.

In closing, I have two questions and I encourage you to comment with your thoughts:

1. As a recipient of retail emails, are you seeing a trend towards emails that render well even with with images off or are you still receiving lots of image-heavy, direct mail style emails?
2. If your email client defaults to images off, how often do you turn images on? Never? Sometimes? Often?

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