For most digital marketers when we think about a term like “conversion optimization” it brings up ideas like one page checkouts, testing new trust marks, button colors and confidence text. While these are important, downright vital, steps every site should go through they’re details and can stop us from forgetting the much more vital question – does the process offer the best experience for the customer?

As businesses outside of the traditional retail space enter ecommerce be it pizza chains, floral shops, or service entities like salons and gyms, these business have brought with them much different purchase process. While most simple adapt the same product -> cart -> checkout funnel, some have stepped outside to build something completely new to match their model. There’s a learning there for product sites.

Take for example the Domonio’s pizza website. While it ends with a fairly typical ecommerce process, the start is a very friendly, simple and yet practical GUI [shown above] that asks a few key questions which come off as practically beneficial to insuring your order gets to you as quick as possible. In truth this is data that Dominos needs to get to make their process work but with a fun presentation, it doesn’t seem so cumbersome to provide it.

By offering a better first step, confidence is established and the customer [speaking from a few conversations here] feels like this is a better step than trying to spell out an address over the phone or the hassle of driving in their car. That seals the deal.

On a very different page you have sites like Nike ID, Ford and even Alienware computers. While they all end in a fairly typical ecommerce checkouts, the product page and selection process are designed around custom creating a solution. Not merely about color or size, these options determine how the product looks and even works. To insure people make it through, each site uses a combination of pictures, dropdowns and simple options through the product page and following up-sell pages offering flexibility. Ultimately much of what’s really happening is upselling to buy another bag, a better case color, or advanced sound system but by presenting the options as part of personalization, it feels a lot less pushy.

These are a few examples of sites that in all reality are fairly logical evolutions on-top of the existing ecommerce process concept, much more innovative solutions are starting to roll out for b2b and niche b2c concepts especially around fashion and housewares…. I suspect more are on their way.

I’d argue that this type of evolution is necessary to just about any business. In the consumer electronics space it’s well known [by the industry] that core products like TVs, laptops, even mp3 players don’t include compontents necessary to get the full product experience. The manufacturer of an mp3 player is not selling headphones, so what they bundle is a cheap solution to let them remain price competitive.  In a TV it’s even more pronounced where a standard LCD comes with composite cables that are about as good as a VHS recording while an HDMI quality signal is needed for true HD picture.

Rather than presenting an up-sell which, to the customer, comes off as accessory peddling, wouldn’t it be better for the shopping process to add the tv and then walk the user through the nearly mandatory options that will make their experience better while offering a range and education at each point?

It’s not just about increasing revenue. It’s the holidays, you order a TV, it arrives and you plan to put it together for the Thanksgiving Day football game but when you plug it in you notice the picture is terrible compared to your current, and 5 yearold, set. You’ll be heading to their competitor to buy cables on Black Friday. Contrast that against your neighbor who had a little more risk of bailing during checkout but finds that the accessory he got is exactly what is needed. Who is going to come back and shop their same website again?

It’s not that what we’re doing now is wrong, it’s questioning if it’s as right as it could be. Ecommerce has evolved because the customer has evolved. It’s not a matter of creating something new for the sake of being slicker, it’s about looking at your business offering, the process people take and asking if the presentation you have meets the expectations.

At the end of the day, good experiences, complete experiences lead to reduced returns, customer service inquiries, and better reviews and viral sharing along to their friends. You can sell more and build an advocate by selling it better.

By keeping the issue quite companies have tried to suppress it, avoid having their consumers know there’s anything amiss, anything wrong out there and as a result, we’ve left our customers unaware and easily fooled. We have made it easier for the counterfeiters to get ahead. It’s time to talk about what we can do as marketers. We can stop the demand and make this an unprofitable business to be in. 

During my time at Monster we were aggressive against counterfeits taking down thousands of auctions and sites daily but we also weren’t afraid to talk about the problem to insure our customers were protected. If your brand is ready to step up and fight to stop the confusion, reduce the demand, and hit the counterfeiters square in the wallet here’s the tips from what we learned to get serious. 

Monster Cable puts a warning message on every page alerting consumers about fakes, showing them the top offenders and offering alternative dealers to shop safely with.

Step 1: Remove the veil, admit the issue. 

If you do nothing you will continue to lose up to 10% (and in some fields much more) of your sales. Period. 

If you do nothing, 10% of your customers will not know they bought a fake product so when the poor quality replica fails they will take to social to trash your premium brand. You will see more bad reviews. 

If you do nothing the counterfeiters will evolve and improve leveraging their nimble, profitable model until they have a better SEO, SEM, Social and Media strategy that you do. Counterfeiters are even buying social ads these days… anything you we do they can try faster. 

If you do nothing you are continuing to build an uneducated customer and partner base. Every day you say nothing the counterfeiters profit allowing them to fine tune, expand, and make it that much harder to stop them. 

Telling our customers something is wrong is exactly how we fix the problem. Doing nothing to inform does nothing to stop that demand and that loses sales, hurts brand credibility and gives the counterfeiters a chance to equal up to you in product quality before you even see the issue – there goes profitability and share prices. 

Every day thousands of consumers search around trying to find out how to buy authentic products, if your brand isn't providing education, it's anyone's guess what they will learn.

Step 2: Warning customers = protecting customers. 

Once your organization is willing to tell the world about its problem it’s time to do just that. Think about the issue like you would any other marketing campaign and you can find an ROI to justify the time and resources (true fact, educating consumers will not only reduce fake sales but it also makes for great brand marketing and is extremely viral bringing new customers in). 

It may not be pretty but Rolex is one of only a few watch companies to reinforce the problem with knockoffs front & center on their website.

You’ll want to educate in ways that help solve the problem, that is to say, you don’t want to just say there are fakes, you want to tell people how to avoid them and why. 

I suggest you look at this as a multi-channel initiative. Online is certainly the place to be seen and heard, especially since so many sales take place through the web, but the same rules apply to a press release, retail storefront, or even an event: 

Have your facts lined up. You don’t have to share every detail or trick; just enough to get people to understand that buying fake is no good. 

1. What is being faked, how it hurts (safety, quality, performance implications)
2. How customers can avoid fakes (spotting tips, serial number registration)
3. The really bad guys that you can’t get rid of (your bad dealer / site blacklist)
4. The good guys people they should buy from (your site, retailers, partners)

With your facts in hand it’s just another marketing campaign to slot in. 

Step 3: Put your message where people are looking  

In writing this post I did dozens of posts about top brands who are known for having huge counterfeit issues and in just about every case when I searched for “brand + avoid fake” or “brand + buy online” what I got was user guides, forums and comments about fakes. How can you stop people from buying something they don’t even know exists? 

1. Buy up search terms from people looking to avoid fakes or to buy authorized.
2. Try swapping in counterfeit messages to general brand terms to see if that attracts attention over more general marketing terms.
3. Push the same messages back to your site with the same urgency that there is business impact. If the issue is big, the warnings should be big, if it’s smaller, they can be relegated to a navigation item or footer.
4. Spread the issue out to marketing partners, authorized dealers, microsites or anywhere else that has your product and brand.

eBay Sellers and Third Party sites are providing their own opinion on authorized products. With SEM they can easily be replaced with official education.

Wherever you place the message remember to keep it simple and interesting… I’ve see a lot of sites with warnings that are so long & boring a contract lawyer would give up. Give customers the facts and give it to them in a way that represents your brand as well as any other educational effort you put out there. That’s all they need. 

Step 4: Leverage the customer to become the educator. 

Your loyal customers are the most potent source of education you can possibly have in addressing counterfeits. Their action as advocates can turn the issue from boring, corporate education and make it real and important. Through social it’s easy to spread the message, identify bad sites, and even create a culture of customers who call out the bad guys and people buying from them. 

In the end quality only goes so far, especially when the savings are 50, 60 or 70% but if it’s not socially acceptable to have the knockoff, you’ve got a big advantage. Just look at the purse industry: while everyone knows where they can buy a similar-but-different knockoff, no one wants to be caught dead with an imitation version. In luxury goods that is essential to surviving. 

In the consumer audio space, Beats by Dr. Dre has become a household name to youth and the counterfeits have followed. From photo galleries and posts about fakes to made-for-web videos [contains profanity], Beats has used social media channels from twitter to facebook to youtube to engage with loyal customers and build a negative stigma around “#FakeBeats”. This authentic conversation has in turn created a class of brand advocates so passionate that when someone buys or even asks about a fake site on a blog, forum or social network, they jump in and respond fiercely to warn them away, often before a community manager or brand employee has to get involved. Their advocates bring credibility to the problem and make it uncool.   

This single post on fake headphones from the Beats by Dr. Dre facebook page has over 1,800 engagements from fans.

Leveraging the power of the fans to spread the word and defend the brand trumps any other strategy. People will dispute a brand’s message on quality, warranty or other advantages but just like a user review is trusted, a post back about a bad experience goes miles. Enough posts and you’ve got a trend that influences purchases online and off. 

1. Leverage social channels to educate your followers about the issue.
2. Empower them with examples, bad sites, and one-to-one responses on the inevitable questions so they know what’s bad and what’s good.
3. Allow them to dialogue with other fans, calling out sightings of fakes and making it something advocates are looking to attack. Put reporting right into social channels.
4. Encourage customers who buy a fake and come to support or legal for help to share their experience back to your social channels as well as other blogs and channels they use to build the network effect. your own educational center so it’s not just your brand speaking, it’s real customers with real stories and faces explaining why it’s just not ok to make the purchase.

Educated customers will spread the message. This user went to Craigslist and posted against fake products because they saw and wanted to help others avoid a problem.

Putting it all together 

As marketers we can’t individually stop an issue that spans the globe and brings in billions but when you look at the issues facing enforcement for both government and our brands, it’s clear that there won’t be a short term end but there can be short term wins by curtailing demand. 

In the long term, educated customers avoid buying fakes, turn into advocates and, if that spreads enough it will disrupt the flow putting your brand on the list of companies not to bother with. Offense up front is a whole lot more effective than relying on your last line of defense when this much is at stake.

Reality is that there’s a counterfeit issue online. But this is a reality many brands, including those being copied, are not willing to admit to in public. Without a push from business there’s only a handful of media coverage on the subject about the problem like the one Wired Magazine ran early this year. Without exposure the problem has been allowed to fester, hidden in a back corner, with most consumers remaining completely unaware of the issue.

The truth, a truth which until two years ago I was completely ignorant of myself, is that counterfeit products are everywhere online. The same concepts that make the internet great, that have allowed huge names to spring up from humble starts in garages, have also made it extremely easy and profitable for people to get in the business of selling fakes knowingly and unknowingly. No longer is this an issue limited to the “Canal Streets” of the world, no longer is it about containers of product being sent from far off countries that could be inspected for and stopped, this is now about one package, one order and one ripped off consumer with some of the world’s largest ecommerce sites sitting squarely in the middle.

In the past two years I’ve learned lots about this issue from the legal & brand protection experts at Monster Cable (Dave Tognotti, Camilla Herron) as well as from seminars with law enforcement and other brand owners and the biggest “takeaway” that every expert seems to agree on is that us business people are afraid to talk about the realities of counterfeiting. While many of these realities that exist outside of the control of marketer’s world [like the fact that 80% of counterfeit products are coming from China and that nearly any mass-produced, profitable product we make in our modern economy can, and likely will, be faked] most of the problem pertains to exactly what we marketers do. From SEO optimization of copycat websites to a plethora of auction and classified listings, and even social media campaigns to share “great deals”, counterfeiters are out in the open using our marketing tactics against us and as Frederick Felman of MarkMonitor points out to ClickZ, they’re doing online marketing better than we are [helpful tip: see Google's improved counterfeit takedown program for AdWords].

Ecommerce has made it easy for anyone to open a shop and sell, well anything. Throw in trusted names with open marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Buy.com, Craigslist and many, many others and you have the perfect storm for creating confusion. There’s a reason eBay has created an entire educational center on counterfeits — the issue is growing and all marketplace sites all face the same two realities:  they don’t see goods or sellers to know what’s real or fake and, like it or not, counterfeits sell — selling is what makes them money.

Without getting too far down the rabbit-hole it’s very apparent from the numbers that counterfeiting is impacting business and consumers. Online counterfeit sales will cost businesses $135 billion in 2011 according to brand protection service MarkMonitor.

Of course these are not all benign knockoffs either: a fake heart medication won’t help prevent a heart attack, a copycat surge protector may explode when tripped in a storm and even a fake video game that falls apart has a very real implication as consumers lose real money. Regardless of the issue, all of these fakes are costing brands customers. When a product fails today we flock online to review it and the fake products get reviewed just the same as the real ones.

We as marketers, ecommerce experts, social strategists, or whatever your specific function may be, get the openness of the internet but the hundreds of millions of people don’t. They don’t get that no one is reviewing every site; that the Visa/MasterCard/PayPal logos can be downloaded by anyone; that the web is essentially the Wild West and that while it’s great to be free, freedom in this case comes with the ability to deceive. People aren’t going out seeking fakes, they’re looking for deals and getting sucked in by a problem they don’t even know exists. A simple Google search shows the thousands of forum posts, yahoo answer questions and pleas for help that have sprung up when our customers find this out the hard way.

The bottom line reality is that fakes have moved away from the shadowed world they were sold in for hundreds of years and become so prevalent, so easy to find that the odds you, the reader of this post, have purchased a fake item are extremely high and I doubt you know about it. We’ve got a counterfeit problem.

So now that the stage is set on what the issue is, it’s time to talk about the marketing and consumer approach that needs to be taken to solve it. And for that I’ll transition you over to part 2 of this post.

Questions? Totally Disagree? Or have a real world stories you’re willing to share? Please post them here or email me. Everything will remain as anonymous as you want.

When daily deals first launched,  hitting the minimum participants to “activate” the deal wasn’t a given and that made them social as people would have to bring friends in to get things going. Years later Groupon, LivingSocial and other leaders have too many users to have to worry about “qualifying” thus the social aspect is gone & deals have become glorified coupons that you just buy into.

Now don’t get me wrong. I may have critiqued the relevancy of daily deals in the past and am now joining others in questioning their business viability but I don’t doubt the potential of deals as a gateway for discovery, and value service to consumers – they just need a little network power to get to exciting. So as we watch Facebook prepare to roll out its deal offering, Google move into social & deals and Groupon and LivingSocial battle for control of the current market, I thought I’d take a crack at what the future could look like.

Deals are better when they’re done together [rhyming not intended]

Late one evening, a few weeks back I got a text from a friend (let’s call her “Sally”) asking if I wanted to jump in on a LivingSocial deal for White Water Rafting. Sally, knowing I raft frequently, wanted to put together a group trip and saw the deal as as great opportunity. To me that’s exactly what daily deals are for: great offers on services that people were considering, and now have a tipping point to take action on — together.

Problem is, it was 10pm, the deal expired in 2 hours and we all had to commit to make it work – no one wanted to take the first plunge and the deal was missed.

Risk stops purchases; but what if you could remove it?

What if, rather than a mass text, followed by a lot of hoping and messaging back, my friend, had been able to set the whole thing up as a group deal contingent on her network participating:

- Sally decides this deal is for her, looks at the calendar, picks an available date, creates an event and invites 20 people who she’d like to have show up… It hits their email, sms, facebook wall or twitter handle, their call.

-The threshold on the deal is also set based on the offer type. For white water rafting its one full boat – 6 heads. More can join but without 6 the deal is not on. Other services could have a threshold as low as 2 for a spa day or 4 for dinner out, but always a group.

-Sally’s friends get an alert that there’s a deal expiring in a few hours with the right details – the time, the place and the cost. Since they already have accounts they can confirm it right from their iphones but there’s no risk, the deal only goes if the threshold is hit.

-5 people are excited to try out rafting and convince #6 to join via a Facebook group message. The deal is on. Go Sally!

Whether it’s white water rafting, learning to rock climb, or a spa day, deals are overwhelmingly for services people do together but the current systems drive individual purchase and does nothing to address the fear of being the only one to go in.

By flipping the model back to its roots and enforcing a commitment minimum, not from all participants, but from a network of friends the risk is gone and there’s a whole new motivation for people to buy.

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Update: as of 8/26/2011 Facebook has announced they are closing down their deal service. In my opinion they had the best shot at truly creating a discovery tool by leveraging what no other deal site really has: relationships. But ultimately it’s a peripheral service and without enough attention, likely never got the legs to have a fair shot.

Example Offers as Seen on Groupon's San Jose Page

From the analytics I saw floating around last year it would appear that daily deal sites are hovering somewhere in the 10-15% activation rate (10-15% of sign ups have actually bought a deal) and if this is hugely understated and 35% of sign ups have activated (30MM deals sold, 29MM users, 3x deals each =35% of users ), it’s still a huge opportunity (and probably why Groupon is hiring a Director of Customer Activation with double digit growth goals – sweet job too).

Looking at data from the other side, in a recent blog post, Jeff Bussgang, cites a rumored 3-4% CVR for Groupon. As a leader in the field Groupon should have one of the higher conversion rates as they certainly have many of the top offers and a huge core of interested customers (66% read deals daily!). But unlike a traditional eTailer where a 4% conversion rate is accepted because the vast majority of the 96% remaining users are considered potential future customers (they came to your site for a reason), with daily deal sites, there’s a huge issue – relevancy – which is to say that the traffic is all coming for diverse reasons and, without relevant offers, there’s little reason for conversions to take place.

So cutting to the chase, the issue I see, and keep seeing is the range of those offers. Groupon, Living Social, Yelp Deals, Daily Steals, they can all rake in users with the same deal types (follow a few of the sites and you’ll see businesses recycling old offers as they try different audiences, fee structures) but if what they offer back doesn’t relate to the customer, they leave huge dollars on the table every single day.

Living Social Offer I'd Be Signed up for Twice -- No Wonder Why it's Featured on their Site

Take Living Social’s Amazon $20 for $10 offer that generated over a million sales. The next day my offer was for some sort of premium spa service. I just went from something I really wanted to something I had little affinity for (not knocking spa’s, I just don’t buy their services frequently). To me this is like my sister logging into Amazon and having the entire homepage be filled with table saws – not very useful in her completely managed and very new NYC apartment even if she could use one now and then.

If you look at the demographics of either of the leaders what you see is opportunity. Deals tend to be for health & beauty services, fine dining, and the monthly car wash with an occasional outlier which ranges from exotic dance lessons (demotargeted female of course) to flying lessons. Problem is it’s not just one user type: on LivingSocial (probably thanks to the Amazon deal), 40% of the users are male and on Groupon it’s still 26%. Add to the age – users are young (68% of Groupon is under 34, 36% of LivingSocial) and single (49% of Groupon, N/A by LivingSocial).

Combine these all together and what you get is a dilemma – relevancy vs frequency.

Daily Deal sites have made a promise to deliver something every single day which means rain or shine, good or bad, that offer comes and while anyone can go to the spa or eat a nice meal, the overwhelming focus of the deals are to the same demographic – female, couples, older and for the same types of services (I dare a newly dating, 24 yearold guy to pull out a Groupon code when the check comes and then suggest the same restaurant again for next week). The deal sites know this, Mashable even wrote about it last year: Groupon Eyes Further Growth with Personalized Deals; < http://mashable.com/2010/07/29/groupon-personalized-deals/> but knowing and truly solving are very different as my inbox so aptly shows this morning.

So where do we lie – with opportunity of course.

The daily deal site that gets this first stands to win a lot. Sure the offers they have now may appeal to the majority of their core audience but the majority of their core is already being marketed too left and right by competing services; the generic offer is commoditized. So the site that broads up, ropes in more sales from its younger women (Groupon is doing more and more of this as told to me by several female friends in SF), parents, guys, and even their core demographic who is still seeing many off target offers, the more they stand to capitalize on their existing investment – that giant email database each company has.

If I was sitting in a corner office of one of the independent deal sites right now I’d be pretty concerned about how to up relevancy, and not just to a few major demographic groups but real niche relevancy with offers based on interests (some of us like to read, some of us like to get shot at with paintballs) and the ability to rate ads (oil changes are only for people with cars) and some friendly user reviews (better businesses sell more) to create something like the Facebook feed, but in deal form.

After all, there are a couple competitive businesses – namely Google and Facebook who have expressed great interest in the deal category and have business rolodexes so deep it resembles the size of most company’s consumer database… If they figure it out first you can bet it won’t be hard to get a lot, an awful lot, of businesses churning out relevant offers giving consumers a lot more reason to check with them first.

To sum it all up, daily deals are clearly a huge hit and have brought in revenue at a rate that seems to be unmatched, well, ever. But in a field of competition this fierce there’s a lot of value to users in jumping ship, playing the field, and any other ‘cheating’ metaphor you can come up with. While growing the core, picking up more users and delivering to more locations are all clearly going to help these businesses propel, lifetime value is a win that trumps all other and as Amazon has shown so well, LTV comes best from having something everyone wants, and helping them get right to it time again and again and again.

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As a side note, there there’s a flip side to this for businesses outside the core of the daily deal sites – easy opportunity. While I’ve become less and less diligent about reading my daily deal emails (they all get sorted and put in a folder), an offer outside the box is going to catch the attention of a lot of people who haven’t bought recently, if at all. Perhaps that’s why my local rock climbing gym and the nearest paintball fields are such fans.

While average order values are a commonly used tool for getting around measuring cost of goods they’re no substitute. Assume for example that your average order for the last year was $100 with a profit 40% margin leaving you $40 to cover marketing and other variable costs. On the surface a mid-year for a new product campaign with a $10 cost per acquisition and a $9 free shipping discount would seem quite profitable but not when we add a few more data points. Most retailers see a strong spike in both conversions and average order size around the holidays and events so mid-year average orders are probably lower than that $100 goal. Furthermore your new product may break margin rules and sell for an introductory price further lowering your ROI. Combine the two and that $40 buffer quickly turns into $30, $20, $10 and well you get the idea.

And of course it’s not just about seasonal events and margins. Offers change your order size and mix in many ways… free shipping with a $99 threshold may seem like a great way to get more orders but let’s build off the first example some more to see what really happens when you measure a promo gross. Assuming you already have a campaign that costs $0.50 per click, a 4.5% conversion rate and charge $8 for shipping for orders would have to move to over 5.5% or a full percentage point to cover the impact of the discount. On the other hand rolling out free shipping with a lower qualifier like $49 may drive your conversion rates through the roof but tank your average order size pushing your margins into the floor as you spend every free dime delivering a small order. In both cases your topline income would likely increase with more orders but again, more does not always mean more profit.

Of course most etailers have all this data at their disposal, it just requires going over to the product database here and there. But you already know what I’m going to say – and no that really doesn’t cut it. When you have to use multiple data sources things get overlooked or put off; a campaign that seems good on the surface doesn’t get delved into for a few days after which money’s been lost and decisions have been made. Only when the data is available in a central place does it truly become actionable and reliable and reliable is exactly what you need to make the next step decision.

So how do you do this? It’s actually fairly simple. Most enterprise reporting suites except secondary commerce metrics like product cost, shipping amount, tax and discounts all through their base tag structure with no need to build fancy import routines. More basic analytics may not tolerate secondary cost data but by computing the net result on your end before the data is put into a tag you can achieve the same result. Either way the analytic provider integration is pretty simple. What’s more complex is trying to bring raw product costs into your ecommerce system. In an ideal world this data should flow right out of your ERP/ Inventory system and to your site but that’s just not the reality for many businesses. A second solution is a simple update process to bulk modify records with raw prices at a regular interval (i.e. weekly). When even that isn’t available it gets down to manual updates and keeping up on them. No matter which integration phase you fit into it’s worth the effort and time to make it happen – and don’t stop half way, it’s better to use gross numbers than to have the wrong net figures anyways.

Once you have everything packaged together and can get that true top to bottom result set you’re ready to really rock and roll. Now instead of looking at campaigns against a big margin percentage you can start looking at both net and gross, pre-campaign cost and post and make decisions about what’s good for growth and what’s good for revenue and do so without waiting weeks to reanalyze every order in another tool.
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Normally I find myself complaining about single question polls with limited answer sets but today’s CNN poll shows a huge opportunity for retail and etail even as we draw closer to the end of the year. As the poll shows 41% of people (that’s almost 100,000 in this poll group) have not yet even completed half their shopping and 24% haven’t completed any yet. Now I’m sure there’s some miscategorization but it’s still a very strong number and given that sales have been more than expected this far, it’s a good sign for the rest of the season but enough about that, here’s 6 ways to keep driving sales using shipping, gift certificates, information and discounts for etail and multi-channel customers.

1 – Double check your ground shipping cut off dates. Of the 30 or so emails I received this morning almost half cut shipping off today or at noon tomorrow (17th) for guaranteed delivery while Amazon and a few others have them running through to the 18th. That’s one more day of “easy” win sales that they get and others lose out on. One company reevaluated and emailed me this morning with a new cut -off date… check things out yourself and if you have more time available then spread the word.

2- Incentivize expedited shipping. This year Christmas falls near the end of the week which is a huge opportunity to extend the expedited shipping window almost a week past ground shipping cut offs. But expedited shipping tends to be a cost barrier so give it away with a qualifier, for free, or at your ground shipping rate and you’ll get several more days of strong orders. With the discounts you may already have it’s going to be a margin hit but getting a little creative, setting the right threshold caps and taking an open approach to making a little less to make more is what it’s all about this year.

3 – Make your shipping schedule the center of attention. No matter what the cost or deal, if people can’t immediately tell that you’ll get them the product by Christmas they’re gone. Off to the next website or into a retail shop. Seconds matter and while I’m seeing a lot of great homepages with this information front and center remember, much of your traffic enters deep in your site so get your navigation bar updated site wide and make every page sell the shipping story.

4 – Don’t forget the cart. I’ve bought about half my gifts online this year (lack of online ordering stopped a few, bad shipping deals stopped the rest) and almost no one has a good job of reinforcing delivery in the cart. Customers are going to be skittish and even with your amazingly visible shipping dates in the navigation during their browsing, people will bail if they see 3-6 business days listed for shipping time so get in and change your cart to reassure people while they’re ordering. Amazon does a great job of putting their guarantee right into the confirmation screen; you can do the same or even put it in a side bar as the person checks out. Information is key, keep it flowing.

5 -Don’t forget the egift certificates. Lots of websites will all but stop communicating early next week when they cut off their shipping windows but I think that’s a huge mistake. People are horrible at shopping in advance or remembering everyone on their list so keep pushing your egift certificates all week long. Instead of having them at the end of emails put them right after a shipping offer, put them in the navigation area or highlight them if they’re already there and push the words “instant”, “immediate”, and “available” to get people understanding that if they want your brand but can’t ship things at this point it’s not too late… the certificate is still there, still looks great and is a great gift.

6 – Start queuing up the “after Christmas” emails and ads for delivery. With the current economic outlook I’d bet we see a whole lot more post holiday shopping when things get really cheap and there’s no reason online can’t do this as well. You don’t have to discount the whole store either – consider after Christmas (or really the 23rd on) as an opportunity to clear some inventory, finish up some write-offs and to liquidate anything that looks seasonal that you won’t be storing for next year. It’s a lot easier to sell that funny Santa product when people are still thinking about the season than it is in April when they’re about to hit the beach.

For multi-channel retailers there’s of course a lot more time to get people into stores but that doesn’t mean your digital should be dead. Update your site and push people offline more than you have before. Keep pushing out relevant, targeted offers to your email list that remind people of your value, your location (putting an address right into an email is great), your hours and your deals (this is after all the year of deals). Even if your p&l is all about online this is a great time to start changing the corporate culture by showing your offline contribution. Focus on a few markets and show lift, get into coupon mode if your POS system supports it and track sales, back into customer data through loyalty programs, special product discounts, whatever else works. Online has so much power in offline and while people may be heading to the store, they check their email first.

Today I’m taking the train from the Bay Area to LA for thanksgiving and thanks to the 12 hour transit time I finally have a chance to work on a few of the sites I’ve promised to update, like the one for my parent’s rental property in Hawaii. As I’m reworking with this site I thought I’d quickly share the idea which inspired this redesign which is something almost every business can be benefiting from especially in these tougher times…
For years now successful companies have been positioning themselves as experts in their category with some help from the internet. Whether its expert reviews of different options or simply good content guides to a category companies are setting themselves up as sources of information and not just service providers. This is more evident in some categories like travel where I’m seeing more and more sites include local guides of things to do and places to go. And I’m not just talking about listing that a hotel is located minutes from a historical park but about explaining the park, talking about the hiking options, showing photos from customers or the staff and basically taking a concierge and putting them online. There are also great examples of becoming an expert with products; home depot tells you how to paint, build a fence and start on your kitchen which enables you to take on the project yourself… the business implications are pretty clear.
When you provide expert content that has true value you benefit big time. First you have the potential for people to share the content to share information right off your site through email or on their social networking tool of choice. Suddenly you don’t need a widget or cool contest to be viral, your information answers a question, suggests a usage or a trip and now it’s worth talking about, people share information that’s useful and there’s no reason it can’t come from a brand.
There’s also a benefit from search engines which will pick up on that content, index it and start showing it to people who have never considered you as a content expert or place to learn and are suddenly seeing you in a whole new light. Sure it’s just traffic today but when a company provides that much value online they’re always worth considering during purchase time. Brand reputation is always something you should be working on and when you position yourself as a source of information the relationship message you send out is huge whether it’s something someone shares or sees for themselves.
We’d all like to stay at the hotel that will really tell us what we can do and not just where they have tour packages to sell us and that’s exactly what I’m doing with this small vacation website and what you can do with yours. You have the experts already, they sell your product, purchase your new items and run the business so harness it and show the customer what you really have to offer.

There’s no doubt that the current economic climate requires certain cuts and pull backs especially as customers tighten their own wallets but does that mean you should be cutting your online budgets in marketing or optimization? While many out there have jumped up and say yes, stating that less consumer dollars necessitates less spending and less project development to save cash I’m not in agreement, and certainly not when it comes to taking big cuts and drastic steps.

Online marketing tends to be about direct response with branding as a secondary goal thus no matter how the market is doing, budgets can still be managed to profit and there’s no reason to change that. So instead of rushing to cut budgets for the sake of cutting budgets how about reviewing the efficiency of your campaigns? If you’re not already doing so, start tying your orders to each campaign, bring in discounts, shipping costs, gross AND net profits to your analytics and optimize your campaigns cutting what fails but investing in what makes a good return. And don’t be afraid to challenge your idea of a good return either; the 50% margin you made last year may seem mandatory but what does the business really need to cover overhead and turn a profit? Will 40% do? How about 35%? Be realistic, be data driven and watching things, there’s plenty of places to find results and probably a few to find more results than before.

Project work and “optimization” also seem like good areas to throttle back on at first glance. It saves money, reduces resources and allows the organization to become more profitable – but not only in the shortest of timeframes. With a concerned consumer comes a lot of shopping around and that necessitates having the very best experience; hiccups and UI issues will hurt more than ever. You don’t see major retail stores skimping on signage and displays for the holidays so why should your website? If anything now is the time to be putting money into making improvements. Now is the time when consultants are available at better rates, when developers and agencies likely have less on their plates and when you can improve things for less. Skimping out to save a few bucks may seem prudent in the short term but all you’re doing is lowering the odds that you capture what sales will take place. And let’s be honest here while there will be sharp declines in some verticals, most categories are seeing a few percent drop which means most of the orders from last year will happen again. You want those orders.

Of course this isn’t absolute. If you’re seeing the same spend but conversion rates are dropping on an optimized page while traffic remains the same it may be wise to throttle back just like you may want to hold off on building the very coolest dynamic checkout process in favor of something sleek, easy to use but a little more cost effective. Just don’t make the mistake of cutting back on profitable campaigns, analytics or optimization efforts. Research needs to take place, changes have to be made and campaigns that turn a profit should grow. It’s easy to blame the economy, scale back and call it “smart planning” but if you aren’t putting your best foot out there to pick up the sales that will come I don’t call it smart, I call it missing opportunity.

So what gives? Why are marketers having trouble optimizing their campaigns and adding features? Click in to keep reading…

So I’m browsing around some of my favorite blogs tonight I’m seeing a lot of the same suggestions from site to site… FutureNow is talking about common shopping cart mistakes, BeRelevant is linking to a post on using analytics to drive email, LunchPail is explaining the basics of using cookies, and Bazaar Blog is hyping up the perks of social media for increasing sales and decreasing returns thanks to relevancy. What’s interesting here isn’t what the suggestions are but that they keep coming up, month after money, year after year. One week I’ll see a topic covered by one blog, a few weeks later by another and I don’t think it’s a result of sites ripping content ideas.

So what gives? Why are marketers having trouble optimizing their campaigns and adding features?

Working with a lot of companies I use to discount a lack of change to a lack of IT resources but I don’t think that’s the challenge most of us face, even if we’d like to write it off as the big issue. The truth is most sites are adding features and tweaking tools. Most are expanding and while resources may be limited, the IT world isn’t saying no, the marketers are through their priorities.

Acquisition has always been the focus of the marketing world and generally that makes sense… but only to a degree. However online marketing isn’t just about driving people in. Traffic volume only means something if you sell ad views and even then it benefits from focus and relevancy. Brand awareness is a great metric but it doesn’t make profit and in this economy it’s the goal for only a few businesses out there.

What matters is sales and results but still most marketers seem to prioritize based on expanding their campaigns. What I see and hear is an old dilemma — push more money into SEM, build a few new landing pages and improve reporting to drive traffic or improve the checkout process. Spend time emailing customers with discounts or to encourage reviews. For whatever reason growing the top of the funnel seems to win time after time so the optimization experts continue to end up frustrated as marketers ignore the backend and ignore the customer’s experience.

Why not focus on acquisition first and foremost? I’m not suggesting that you don’t focus on it but I would strongly urge every online marketer to focus on optimization just as much. Sure your site may convert an acceptable rate, maybe even above the rate you think your competitors get so adding traffic makes more sales but does it make more profit? With a little optimization and knocking off some of those easy wins you’ll boost your conversation rates and maybe your average order size and repeat buy rates as well. That’s no laughing matter either — a simple 5 or 10% increase in conversions on a decent or large scale site can mean enough revenue to exceed company goals or to add in a better promotion campaign to drive some serious volume.

And face it, its difficult making things grow and work when your conversion rate isn’t going up. Adding more traffic to the pipe to get less revenue makes no sense yet it continues to happen over and over.

It’s not just about doing major initiatives too. Most of the posts I’ve referenced apply so sites that come off as state of the art. Often times best practices are applied — to the big picture. A new shopping cart is rolled out, better product pages or new image tools get added in but the basics are often looked as too simple to matter. The truth of course is that the basics are what make the experience and unlike with branding or interest marketing, when you’re trying to drive sales online, the customer experience is what matters, it’s all that matters.

With a tough holiday season already started I challenge every marketer to spend just a couple of hours reviewing their site for those common issues be it UI hiccups, bad error messages or missed easy wins like sending an email when someone bails in checkout and prioritize just a few resources to address them. If you haven’t don’t this already I assure you, the results can and will astound you and may just make you hit your net rev. numbers for the period.