PRESIDENT'S CORNER As you are aware, multichannel businesses have a wide variety of marketing touch points with their customers. Without a comprehensive plan, many multichannel marketers appear more like separate businesses than one company. By taking an integrated approach, LENSER is insuring that we communicate effectively across all channels, giving you timely, educational and effective information to help you with your business practices. We hope you find this beneficial. FEATURE ARTICLE CASE STUDY CIRCULATION TIP CREATIVE TIP multichannel TIP NEWS BRIEF
FEATURE ARTICLE Ten Simple Keys to Internet Marketing Success for Catalogers By Bill Nicolai, Senior Partner & Michelle Farabaugh, Partner With over 50 retained catalog clients, LENSER is often asked to assist our clients in managing the burgeoning Internet fraction of their businesses. In the course of doing so, we are often asked about many complex and baffling aspects of Internet marketing. When assisting our clients in highly sophisticated marketing programs, we inevitably find that they are neglecting to do some very simple things that will have a significant effect on the success of their web business. In this article we will give you the incontestable dos and don’ts that have emerged as keys to Internet success. In our experience, not one company has yet been seen that does all these simple things. Please be the first and you will be rewarded by expanding sales and satisfied customers.
If you are unsatisfied by your Internet results (and who isn’t!), do not succumb to the impulse to redo your whole website as a new site will have other problems and still may not meet your expectations. Before making wholesale changes, first implement simple changes based on reviewing your log analysis and customer service feedback. Conduct user studies with people from your company or go to a coffee shop and buy some gift certificates to use to bribe people to spend 20 minutes with you as a user of your site. Observe how they interact with the site and what they find challenging. Make the changes to fix these challenges and measure the results. You will find that experimenting with incremental changes can have a great impact on your overall results.
Visitors to your website may have recently received a catalog and are just researching their purchase. Many may be far more comfortable placing an order over the phone or need further information than listed. By placing your phone number where it will be available when they are ready to order, you will effectively move them along the shopping path. Many website owners mistakenly think they are saving money by not offering the number; then they fret over the high abandonment rate. Since less than 10% of site visitors buy, but over 50% of callers do, there is every reason to keep the order line available. Since visitors may simply be researching and are not yet ready to buy, 20% of those who request a catalog will become customers within a few months of making the request. They may want a catalog to get a higher resolution photo or to keep as a reference. Catalog requestors have a far higher propensity to buy than simple web browsers. Do not miss this chance to move them up the value chain. Always make it easy for a customer to get to their shopping cart. Leave products in the abandoned cart for at least one week. Customers get interrupted. This way, shoppers can come back to the site, go to their cart and continue shopping without having to start again. This is a great way to save a sale you might otherwise lose. Half of your web visitors will use the product search function. These same customers are twice as likely to then purchase as those that do not use the search. Make the product search prominent and the functionality of it as robust as possible. Even with the best site and the best products, a customer will not purchase from you if they cannot find the product they are looking for.
Increasing your email database by even 10% this year can have a dramatic impact on the bottom line. Collect email addresses with every contact and every opportunity you have. By segmenting your email file into distinct groups and creating targeted emails for each, you can increase click-through, response rates, and average order values. Consider segmenting by incoming channel— Internet, catalog and store. You can also segment by high AOV and low AOV or active customers vs. lapsed customers. Changing the results even slightly can have a significant impact on the overall profitability of your company. Always ask for the email address as the first item in the checkout process. If the person abandons the cart, you will at least be able to market back to them. A very high percentage of people will abandon their cart. This happens for various reasons, from getting interrupted, to not being ready to commit to the purchase. Some simply use the cart to hold and compare products they are interested in. By maintaining the cart contents for at least a week, you can email these visitors and remind them they have product in their cart. Give them a special offer to complete their purchase in the next 10 days. This is a great way to increase your conversion and drive incremental sales.
By including cross-sell items on all product pages as well as on the cart page, you can potentially double your page views per session. These cross-sell items lead to increased average order values, especially when they are complementary to the product the customer is reviewing. The cart page items should be dynamically presented based on the last item added to the cart. In addition, by showing previously viewed items, you allow the visitor to cross-sell themselves.
When customers are ready to check out they want the process to be as quick, easy and straight forward as possible. Make sure your checkout includes as few clicks and pages as possible. The checkout process is the last place you want to lose a visitor. The catalog quick shop is the highest conversion location on a cataloger’s website. Maximize the value of a catalog visitor by including a catalog quick shop on the home page. You make it easy for catalog shoppers to simply enter the item number from their catalog and go straight to the checkout if they so choose.
These service providers, some of which are very good, rarely pay out over long haul. Their methods usually involve temporarily gaming the search engines but they soon evolve beyond the temporary advantage offered.
This effort will reach 90% of the searches on the web. The best positions to bid are usually # 3 and # 5 as these are usually on the first search page and will normally get a much better ROI than higher ranked terms. By using the most popular searches on the web, you can create higher performing emails. In addition, this information can be useful if you have stores. In many cases, you may experience different results regionally that can then be leveraged in your stores. By taking the hottest searched items and creating an aisle end cap or feature table, stores can sell a week’s worth of products in the course of one day. How many simple store marketing programs can do that?
These are the big three of Internet shopping channels that have proven effective for catalogers. Froogle is free and only works well if you provide a “trusted feed”; this can be done by a modestly skilled web manager. Shop.com features your products in a highly sophisticated shopping format and then passes completed orders on to their members. Shop.com has over 1000 merchants signed up in their network and their sales are expanding explosively. Shopping.com is a self-serve shopping comparison site with over half a billion dollars in sales of consumer merchandise. Joining these sites not only will sell more of your product, but will give you secondary and tertiary SEO and SL presence. Because both Shop.com and Shopping.com have very extensive programs to drive traffic, they are, in effect, paid search optimizers that yield very good results with a predictable ROI.
You may not have heard of this yet. For the first time since email, there is a program that will allow you to conduct direct marketing on the Internet. NextAction has partnered with DRIVE Performance Media, a division of aQuantive, to be able to deliver behaviorally targeted media for multichannel marketers. The program provides targeted web media for both retention and prospecting efforts. Consumer's web activity on the home page, checkout and key web pages across participating network merchant sites will be captured. Relevant ads will be served up to either visitors from your own site or from models of all participating site cookies. There is a lot of potential in this program and you should test it.
Most customers will simply Google your keywords if you do not give them your exact URL. Often this results in your traffic going to a competitor. Loss of brand affinity is a defining characteristic of the Internet and you never want to encourage it by not giving the consumer the most effective way to communicate directly with you. If you are following every one of these suggestions, congratulations, you are probably getting 80% of the total potential sales the Internet can bring your business. We expect that some of these suggestions will be contrary to your current practice and possibly cause controversy; yet our experience has borne them out. We are happy to discuss them with you and explain these thoughts further. CASE STUDY Until recently, many catalogers were segmenting their buyer files by order channel, not by channel of origin. For some, especially those companies whose regular catalog customers quickly adopted the Internet as their channel of choice for placing orders, segmenting by order channel never proved to be a significant variable in predicting future response. The logical step toward segmenting buyers by channel of origin, interestingly enough, was popularized not by traditional catalog retailers but by companies that began as Internet pure-plays.
For the most part, the lifetime value of customers acquired via the Internet (through natural search, paid search, links from other sites, banner advertisements) is lower than that of customers acquired through more traditional sources (See Figure 1). New customers who discover your product offer online more often than not have a specific purchase in mind. With rare exceptions, most shoppers use the Internet for research, price comparisons, and expediting the ordering process, not for browsing and familiarizing oneself with a company's full product offer. Just check those web analytics reports, specifically the average time elapsed and the average number of page views per session, and you will know what I am talking about. Many online customers, too, are enticed to buy from the barrage of promotional e-mails they receive on a daily -- no, hourly -- basis. The combination of lower average orders and lower margins garnered from Internet customers' orders is certainly not ideal -- it is not uncommon for the profits gained from one traditionally acquired customer to equal that of two acquired via the web! Prospects that interact with your entire product offer via a print catalog, on the other hand, are far more likely to consider future purchases as they are placing their initial orders. More important, they are likely receiving your catalog because they have already shown a propensity to buy through the mail. Some Internet shoppers may already be avid mail order buyers, but certainly not all. The front-loaded costs of traditional catalog customer acquisition are almost always higher, but the return on investment in the form of lifetime value is greater. The last activity/last purchase date is a more significant variable for customers originating on the web than for those who come to you via traditional sources. A couple of years ago a speaker at an online marketing conference said, "In catalog marketing, 'hotline' means 30 days. However, with Internet marketing, 'hotline' means 30 seconds!" Although our own observations have not been that extreme, it has been noted that when all other variables are equal, older Internet-generated buyers do not perform as well as older traditionally generated buyers. Typically the comparative fall-off becomes pronounced at 12 months, and from there, the disparity accelerates (Figure 2).
Ironically and unfortunately, it seems the observations made pertaining to a customer's growing age also applies to a customer's burgeoning youth. Hotline Internet-generated buyers, we have found, are occasionally less likely to respond to immediate follow-up catalog offers than regular hotline buyers. I would like to emphasize the word "occasionally" here because our data are somewhat inconsistent. Nonetheless, it is worth testing with your own e-mail, web, and catalog offers. It may seem counterintuitive to hold out an Nth select of your most recent buyers in subsequent catalog campaigns, but you may be surprised to find that the incremental sales gained by mailing to hotline Internet-generated buyers is marginal. Could it be that e-mail campaigns are the most effective hotline Internet buyer follow-up? Conduct your own trial and let the jury decide. CIRCULATION TIP CREATIVE TIP multichannel TIP
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