I’m reading Seth Godin’s new book, Meatball Sundae, and I am seeing some similar themes as outlined in Oren Harrari’s book, Break from the Pack. Both illustrate that in the new marketplace, you must not only differentiate your offering, you must also differentiate the delivery of your message.
As the customer becomes bombarded with messages through email, social media and a multitude of websites, you need to generate creative marketing messages in order to stand out. Godin explains that “innovations have not only created new ways to spread ideas, but have also made some of the old ways far less effective.”
As we try to adjust our message to be relevant in this changing medium, Harari warns that we run the risk of simply being a “me too” and fail to truly differentiate ourselves in not only how we promote our message, but also in the substance of what we have to offer. He believes that delivering both good service and good products is not enough.
The business environment today is one of websites and drop-ship (3rd party logistics) networks. The guy down the street, who runs a business out of his basement, is competing with the big players. From the customer’s point of view, they can’t tell a difference. If the guy down the street has a sister-in-law or cousin who is a website designer, your company (as it lumbers through its monthly “go-to-market” process) could actually be at a distinct disadvantage.
Who doesn’t offer Free Shipping?
Who doesn’t deliver in 2-3 working days (if not next day)?
Who doesn’t claim to have a 100% Guarantee?
Web 2.0
Every time I read someone’s blog or listen to a webinar, I hear of the importance of driving the web 2.0 experience. As web merchants, not only do we struggle to keep the product data accurate and meaningful, create promotions that resonate with our customers and ensure the day-to-day activities of our websites are under control, now we must provide a fuller, richer customer experience.
Streaming media, customer reviews and blogs are quickly changing from being differentiators to simply being the cost of doing business. In the last five years, we have stopped being “broad-line retailers” and started being “long-tail e-tailers”. Now we must take the same steps with our marketing message. In order to compete, we must embrace the emerging social and rich media in order to ensure our message is heard.
The well known quality guru, W. Edwards Deming, once said "Learning is not compulsory . . . neither is survival." What survival techniques are you learning in order to compete in today's Web 2.0 environment?
Read any good emails lately? It is a loaded question that companies ask in the hopes that you will answer “yes – I read your emails all the time!” Unfortunately, we don't always get the answer we want. In fact, it is not uncommon for a vast majority of emails to remain un-opened.
People like Jeanniey Mullen will tell you that “the average person spends three seconds looking at her inbox to decide what to open and only four seconds reading your e-mail”. That is why your subject line must be interesting, enticing and relevant. “If your subject line isn’t working right”, adds Ivan Levison, “your e-mail will never get opened and your campaign will be a failure.”
So why don’t companies spend more time focusing on this important aspect of web marketing? Certainly it’s not from a lack of awareness. No matter what marketing blogs you’re reading, eventually the importance of “Subject Line Testing” will come up. ( Not wanting to be left out, I offer this as my contribution to the discussion. )
Apparently we are not spending enough time focusing on the opening sales pitch to our customers. Even if we write a pithy intro, trying to entice customers to spend that four seconds with us, seldom have taken the time to lay the groundwork for success. How can we be certain that we are offering the best marketing copy? Ryan Buchanan believes that most of us can’t answer that question. “Only 25 percent of marketers are testing subject lines on a regular basis? If you’re not constantly testing, you’re missing opportunities to find our which ones maximize opens and conversions.” Buchanan’s encourages us to “test it and tune it”.
“Subject lines”, offers Loren McDonald, “are the easiest component of email marketing to test. Split your list in half, thirds or even quarters and test a different type of subject line in each split.” But that’s just the start. Once you have found a successful recipe for creating great subject lines, you have only enticed customers to open your email. Getting the order will require additional focus on your email’s content, your site’s landing page, your browse path, and your cart conversion. . . but we’ll save those for another blog post.
You may not have realized it, but your ranking on Google just changed. Actually, Aaron Wall told us about this back in February. (By the way, if you are not reading Aaron’s blog, SEOBook, you are missing out.)
It seems that back in February, Google changed the algorithm it uses to determine their Natural Search rankings. In the process, it began providing additional weight to the “brand value” of a company, which in turn, helped the established players and hindered the smaller pure-players.
If you feel a little “in the dark” about how Google’s algorithm works, you’re not alone. “The algorithms have got so complex on some fronts that Google engineers do not even know about some of the filters/penelties/bugs”, writes Wall.
In fact, it has been my experience that because Google has kept their method of determining search page results under wraps, an entire industry has been born. Every SEO / SEM vendor owes their livelihood to Google’ secret sauce. As I hear vendor after vendor speak about their tight connection with the Google Executive Team, I am in awe of who must be on Google’s corporate speed dial. It seems that every Search Vendor must play golf with Larry and Sergey. However, if you are looking to play a quick 18 holes but can’t get on their schedule, try giving Matt Cutts a call.
If you’re a small player competing among the established brands, now is the time to invest in your SEO rankings. As the economy continues to struggle, it is imperative to optimize your marketing spend. Simple steps such as creating new content, developing a site map and managing your title tags are great ways to improve your results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
I had an interesting discussion this week about universal search. As companies work to increase their Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS), it becomes apparent that acquiring new customers on the web is not only about buying terms on the main search engines. In fact, Google is working hard to pull multiple types of content into their search results, which means, as e-marketers we need to be concerned with results from podcasts, social networks, blogs and video.
As you know, I have incorporated a number of videos in my blog posts. I’ve even created a few of them myself under the header of “60 Second” video. While I have received a fair number of views on them, I certainly haven’t leveraged them across the web. Quite simply, it’s a pain to push them to multiple outlets like YouTube, Howcast, Myspace, and Metacalf. Creating a compelling video is difficult enough, but “getting the word out” is sometimes even harder.
If it’s true that necessity is the mother of invention, UC Berkeley has done its’ fair share of parenting on the web. One offspring of the university’s graduate school Business Plan Competition is TubeMogul. “TubeMogul allows anyone with a video who wants to post it online to upload to TubeMogul which will then upload your video for you to twelve [and growing] sites at the same time including Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Revver, Crackle, YouTube, AOL Video, StupidVideos, MetaCafe, Blip.tv and Viddler” reports Paige Donner. “It also offers tracking services, marketing and advanced services to those who want to streamline the process of broadcasting their online videos.”
The company has a great start and is well funded by a $1.5 million investment from Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners. In fact, Howard Lindzon, creator of the Wallstrip video, is the lead investor.
As the role of video continues to expand, it becomes imperative to not only develop and distribute compelling content, but it becomes necessary to have the metrics and associated analytics to understand what’s working . . . and what’s not.
“Our goal at TubeMogul is to solve problems for content creators. First, we make it easy for content creators to deploy video to multiple sites in one shot. This saves content creators time and often increases the size of their audience” states TubeMogul’s CEO Brett Wilson in an interview with Colin Devroe. “Next, we bring all of the available analytics back into TubeMogul and give the content creator an aggregated view of their video’s consumption along with easy to use reporting and data export tools.”
As the holidays come to a close and we begin to take stock in the calories and credit card bills we have encountered over the past month, it is only natural to make a vow to improve. Unfortunately, the ritual of making New Year’s resolutions is only surpassed by the tradition of breaking them.
You could resolve to improve your diet, or stop smoking, or to start an exercise program . . . but past history tells us that these would be short lived. A resolution that may not be as popular (but would be more realistic) would be to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking. I know that at first glance, this idea may not seem very exciting but what did you expect from a blog focused on eCommerce.
It’s true that making the resolution to improve your SEO results will require a fair amount of effort. But today, I’m going to focus on something easy – a simple way to track your progress.
Finding the right tool to help you track your SEO ranking is imperative, and fortunately, the folks at SEO Book have provided one. Using their Firefox based Rank Checker, you can easily track the natural search rankings for any term on the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines.
In order to leverage this tool, you need to focus on a select number of terms. A great way to do this is to review your internal search results and identify which terms your customers find relevant and helpful.
As you set up the Scheduled Task function of Rank Checker, be sure to run the selected terms for not only your own website, but also your competition’s sites. That way, you will be able to accurately benchmark the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
As the holidays come to a close and we begin to take stock in the calories and credit card bills we have encountered over the past month, it is only natural to make a vow to improve. Unfortunately, the ritual of making New Year’s resolutions is only surpassed by the tradition of breaking them.
You could resolve to improve your diet, or stop smoking, or to start an exercise program . . . but past history tells us that these would be short lived. A resolution that may not be as popular (but would be more realistic) would be to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking. I know that at first glance, this idea may not seem very exciting but what did you expect from a blog focused on eCommerce.
It’s true that making the resolution to improve your SEO results will require a fair amount of effort. But today, I’m going to focus on something easy – a simple way to track your progress.
Finding the right tool to help you track your SEO ranking is imperative, and fortunately, the folks at SEO Book have provided one. Using their Firefox based Rank Checker, you can easily track the natural search rankings for any term on the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines.
In order to leverage this tool, you need to focus on a select number of terms. A great way to do this is to review your internal search results and identify which terms your customers find relevant and helpful.
As you set up the Scheduled Task function of Rank Checker, be sure to run the selected terms for not only your own website, but also your competition’s sites. That way, you will be able to accurately benchmark the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
It appears that everyone had a great Cyber Monday. ComScore reports that online sales jumped 21% over prior year. It sounds like the soft economy is not hampering the online sales this Holiday season. However, the question we should be asking ourselves is “how well did our competitors do?”.
A great way to keep track of your competition is to use Alexa. This web site allows you to view the traffic generated by any website. By using this site, you can track your competitors over time. Here I’m taking a look at the leaders of the Office Supply category and it appears that Staples is continuing to win.
Everyone is putting their best marketing efforts out there. I’ve seen two different offers from Amazon recently. The first was to promote their next day shipping capabilities by offering a $5 Instant Savings when you selected Free Next Day Shipping. While this seems it would be a very expensive promotion, this is the second time I have seen them offer this. Therefore, you would have to assume that this is effective for them.
The second offer from Amazon was to leverage the excitement over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday Offers and to stretch them over the following week. They sent out an email allowing prospective customers to vote on a series of offers and then followed up with the customers as these items went on sale.
As we move through December, we can track our competitors by following their emails and home page promotions and then measuring their success through Alexa.com. But the truth is, the 4th quarter has been planned and put into place months ago. The next step is to take these learnings and weave them into our Spring and Summer planning. We all know that Amazon continues to set the pace in both traffic and sales. By taking a look at their promotional offers and cadence, we can benchmark these against our own plans and measure the corresponding success in the coming quarters.
Running a successful marketing campaign is similar to building a house. If your promotional offers were the rooms of the house, you need to ask yourself, “do I have enough doors leading to these rooms?” Without a sufficient amount of traffic coming through these doorways, even the best promotions are doomed for failure.
One way to create traffic is to optimize your natural search results. There are a number of blogs offering tips on how to improve your site’s SEO results and one you should read is the Search Marketing Blog from Engine Works. In this blog, Kent Schnepp suggests that “by adding internal links to your content you can potentially improve your rankings and get new content quickly indexed.”
“Linking, both internal and inbound”, says Kieran Hawe of Webtribution, “are core to SEO success. Hawe suggests developing a “comprehensive linking strategy that focuses on cross-linking within a website, within a network of websites and from external relevant websites.”
This way, as the main search engines crawl your site, they are more likely to index your key pages. “If you think about it from a robots perspective, the more links on your site that point to a given page, the more important it must be”, says Ray “Catfish” Comstock, a search expert with Business Online. After all, if your not going to promote your site’s content, who will?
While there are a number of different areas to cross link within your site (within blog posts, on product pages, in the footer, on the sitemap, etc.), “the most important principle”, advises Dave Chaffey, “is to include key phrases used by searchers within the anchor text of a hyperlink to point to relevant content.” Chaffey goes on to recommend reviewing your sitemap to ensure the anchor text in the links is customer centric rather than product centric.
Building this “house” of relevant content is an ongoing process. Not only must you create additional compelling material for your current and prospective customers, you need to continually improve the sites’ SEO capabilities. This is definitely the case after you upgrade your site. “After a redesign”, suggest SEO authors Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin, “be sure to run a link validator on your website to be sure that those internal links have all been updated properly.”
When it’s all said and done, your success will rely upon the ability for potential customers to find your products or services. Therefore, you have to ask yourself “have I build enough doors?”
One of the sessions at the IRCE focused on email strategies. The three speakers, Stefan Pollard, David Dwek and Lynnette Montgomery, had some great advice on how to manage the deliverability of your emails and increase your conversion rates.
It seems that we are all receiving way too much email these days. Email has become the communication channel of choice and unfortunately, not all the communication can be considered value added. Not only are we receiving unwanted advertisements in our personal email in-boxes, but even at work, co-workers seem confused about the difference between “reply” and “reply-all”. When did email take the place of instant messaging? Although I’m not that old, I do remember the days before email . . . when you either picked up the phone and called someone or walked over to their desk and spoke to them in person.
“An average person gets 274 emails a week in personal email,” states Pollard. In order to deal with the flood of information, people are using “triage” methods to identify important pieces of mail. By eliminating emails based solely on the senders name and/or the subject line, a vast number are never being read. Pollard reports that 64% of people never look in their bulk folder and that 79% hit the “report as spam” button when they don’t recognize the sender.
This creates two problems. First, ISPs will use spam complaints to determine if a sender is reputable or not. With a general goal of having less than 1 spam complaint per 1,000 messages sent, ISPs are keeping track of what recipients feel are unrecognized, unexpected and unwanted communication. “It is really about what the consumer wants,” states Charles Stiles, former Postmaster for America Online. “Even if they asked to receive the email, if they don’t find value in it, then it is not a good email.”
The second problem is managing customer’s expectations. Dwek believes that you not only need to allow customers to have the ability to easily unsubscribe from your email campaigns, but that you can learn valuable lessons when they do. By building an effective email administrative center, you can allow customers to choose which emails they want to receive and which ones they want to opt out. Through an effective opt out process, you can request free form text answers to better understand what is causing the customer’s decision. With this knowledge, you can develop stronger email campaigns and adjust the frequency of the communication in order to drive higher open rates and stronger sales.
That is the question our customers are asking us. Are we talking to them? Are we relevant? Too often we answer that question from yesterday’s perspective. As we communicate with our customers we follow the traditional path.
But the path has changed. Using yesterday’s marketing techniques is becoming less and less effective. Certainly there are still a large number of customers who respond to this type of communication. However, each new customer who enters the market place is a digital native. They do not respond to the established marketing messages the same way. They require a dialog. Sometimes it is a dialog with us and other times it is a dialog with their peer group. “They don’t care about your ad,” writes Sarah Perez, “they care about what their friends think.”
With the dramatic growth in social media, change is required to remain relevant. Not only are the Generation Y customers utilizing blogs, message boards and RSS feeds, it is becoming more and more common for Boomers to join the online community.
So the question remains, are you shifting toward the new media in a meaningful way? Or are you simply repackaging your message and running the risk of becoming obsolete?
After my last blog post ( How High Can You Bounce? ), I had a couple of people comment on the difference between a Landing Page Bounce and an Email Bounce.
An email bounce is when your outbound marketing message is returned undeliverable. The Email Experience Council (EEC) explains that “emails can bounce for more than 30 reasons: the email address is incorrect or has been closed; the recipient’s mailbox is full, the mail server is down, or the system detects spam or offensive content.”
All of these “30 reasons” fall into two categories – a hard bounce and a soft bounce. “A hard bounce” explains Brian Anderson, Director of Web Marketing for Staples’ Quill.com business division, “can be defined as anything to the right of the [at] sign and a soft bounce is to the left of the [at] sign.”
In other words, a hard bounce is undeliverable due to an incorrect address or a mail box that no longer exists. A soft bounce is a temporary problem usually due to either the mail server being down or the mail box being full. Either way, you can resend a soft bounce but should not resend a hard bounce.
Reagan Taylor, email marketing consultant, gives some guidance on how to address bounces and other email issues as a regular contributor to Sundeep Kapur’s blog, Email Yogi. She has some good advice – you should check it out.
“The Internet”, says Kerry Miller, “has made it easier for even the smallest companies to go global by reaching new markets all over the world. But many companies continue to overlook the opportunities that the Web creates right in their own backyards.”
Last week, my blog post (¿Cómo se escribe “more sales”?) dealt with the opportunities available to web sites that choose to market to the Hispanic community. A recent report from The Media Audit, a Houston based media survey firm, stated that the number of Hispanics shopping online has moved from only 27% five years ago, to over 41% today. In fact, their data shows that over 23% of these shoppers make five or more purchases in a year and over 12% of them make an average of one purchase per month.
Knowing that Hispanics are the fastest growing group in the U.S. and that their online penetration is quickly increasing, you would think more companies would refine their messaging to target this group. However, a study done last year by Common Sense Advisory, a Massachusetts based research firm, found that of 102 top U.S. retail web sites, only 18 of them contained Spanish-language content. When contacted in Spanish regarding customer service issues, only half of these 18 sites responded in the same language.
If you’re concerned about your companies ability to handle translating your entire site into Spanish, don’t worry. As long as you set appropriate expectations with these customers, you can translate your customer service pages and select emails first. As your Spanish speaking customer base grows, you can increase the investment.
You should take advantage of the fact that this segment of potential customers is extremely brand loyal and you have the opportunity to distinguish yourself from your competition by marketing to them in a culturally relevant way. With a small investment in translation services and a select group of bi-lingual customer service representatives, you can establish yourself as the company of choice.
In a troubled economy, we are all searching for additional sales opportunities. As it turns out, there may be a new market closer to you than you realize. The Hispanic population is the fastest growing segment in the country. For those companies who are prepared to market to these customers, new sales opportunities abound.
In a recent blog post, Oren Harari covered the topic of how the global economy is effecting us here in the States. While there is certainly a lot of opportunity for us outside our borders, a majority of companies have yet to realize the sales potential of focusing on this market segment here at home.
A number of companies are eager to help you translate your web site into Spanish. One such Company is Language Line Services. Language Line recently merged with Lingo Systems. The company offers phone and video based services, document translation and face-to-face interpretation.
For your own personal growth, you may want to learn the language yourself. I took a year of Spanish in High School and “kick” myself for never having really studied the language. Now I am going back to school to take a few classes from my local community college (who knew that after 15 years after completing my Master’s I would again find myself taking night classes). If you are thinking about brushing up on your Spanish you may want to try Coffee Break Spanish. It’s available as a free podcast on iTunes. You should check it out.
The old adage about knowing your audience is especially true when dealing with your current customers. After you have taken the steps (and investment) to develop a relationship with your customers, you need to ensure that you are maximizing it – both from your perspective and from your customer’s perspective.
It’s true that identifying the correct metrics is crucial to measuring your success, but identifying what motivates your customers is crucial to your ongoing success. Over the years I’ve heard almost everyone talk about one-to-one marketing, but I’ve rarely seen it. While true one-to-one is difficult to achieve in the consumer (B2C) marketplace, the opportunity to deliver a tighter, more relevant experience is very possible.
By evaluating your customer’s order history, you can begin to distinguish patterns that separate them into various buyer types. We are all familiar with measuring RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value) from a print perspective, but how can we group web customers in such a way that we can strengthen our relationship with them? Two different ways to do this is to (1) focus on where the customer is in their lifecycle, and (2) focus on the customer’s product preferences.
By focusing on the customer’s lifecycle, you can modify your communication with them as they move from Try-er to Buyer . You will also change your message as you see them begin to drop off your active customer base. The earlier you can identify their decrease in activity and re-activate them the more successful you will be.
You will also need to adjust your messaging by your customer’s preferences. Most websites offer a variety of products: sometimes it is content and therefore, focused on selling clicks or page views, while other times it is merchandise and therefore focused on ecommerce sales. Ultimately, we are all trying to extend the customer’s experience by making our content more relevant. By understanding what motivates our customers and grouping them accordingly, we can identify product or content opportunities that the customer will be more likely to find relevant and compelling.
The idea of “same like you”, where you identify products or content that other similar customers found interesting, is a successful way to expand the customer’s share of wallet with your website.
Unless you are selling muumuus, one size does not fit all. Knowing that, how can you expect your marketing message to be relevant to your entire customer base. Understanding when and why your customers are interacting with your website is the first step in developing this relevant marketing message. How are you categorizing your customers and how are you adjusting your messaging?
Take a look at 3 or 4 of your favorite sites. When you look at their home page or emails, do they appear busy, noisy or too crowded? I recently had the opportunity to give my two cents on this phenomena at the September Shop.org event in Las Vegas. Lauren Freedman invited me to be a speaker on her Merchandising for Conversion panel (check out Lauren's web site at www.e-tailing.com).
During my presentation, I spoke about how at Quill.com we have found that a tighter promotional message (fewer ad cells on our home page and in our emails) have lead to higher sales results - both overall as well as within the categories that did not receive exposure.
I know I'm not alone. After my presentation I had several other Web Merchants and e-Marketers come up to me and express similar concerns about trying to "push" too much content onto these key pieces of marketing real estate.
The Flip Side
It's strange that we can struggle with some areas of the site being over-crowded while we lack enough substance on the interior pages. Too often the creative energy on these interior pages fail to match the same level as found on the home page. Unfortunately, as we all know, the home page is not the only landing page on the site. All too often customers come to our sites and never see the home page due to a less than compelling experience on the landing page (one page view and then they leave). The lack of promotional excitement on these interior pages is compounded by the fact that the actual "sales experience" happens on the SKU page.
The Solution
Try testing a tighter promotional message against the standard bombardment of offers found in your normal email. From my experience, I have found that the key metrics will almost always point to the more focused messaging format - Less can be better.
To solve the problem of not enough content and/or promotional excitement on your interior pages, you may simply have to apply the right medicine. A friend recently forwarded a link that may (or may not) hold the answer. Check out www.WhoNeedsDesigners.com - it may take the sales pitch a few minutes to load but I think you will find it informative.
Driving Traffic
