Tapping into the holiday magic to drive reviews & social participation

Posted on November 9, 2011 by teds

It’s that time of year – you know, big meals, lights on the tree, and buying gifts — lots and lots of gifts. Ya, it’s an exciting time. The buying frenzy created by the holidays opens up an opportunity to tap into more customers than any other part of the year, and unlike with the other 9 months of the year, most of the purchases are wrapped around a want which offers the perfect platform for engagement long after the lights have come down.

While the holidays offer a great opportunity, they are also present a unique challenge as the buyer is often no longer the recipient of the product: write a review prompts, follow up offers, social campaigns all go out the window and to maximize the opportunity, a seasonal strategy is needed. Here are 3 programs to connect and grow even when you’re not certain who is getting the order in the end.

Write a Review / Story Inserts –

Knowing that products are often hoping around before reaching their actual recipient may take automated emails out of the equation but it increases the potency of any included insert which suddenly is the only “marketing” that’s anywhere around. Leverage that holiday style.

Rather than a typical old “share your thoughts” piece, take the opportunity to make your insert extend the gift and bring your brand into the picture [in an acceptable way]. I’ve seen luxury products go as far as to include a greeting card with a direct, back of the page, message but even a standard single-sided insert can wish the recipient a happy holiday and invite them to share their thoughts about the product, or story about getting it in a fitting way.

With the right spin, you can even bring the customer back to a social channel to follow you for more down the road now that they’re a “part of the family”. But leave the cross-sell piece out for now; we are talking about a gift after all.

Share the Experience of Giving –

While your direct customer may not be the person using the product at the end of the day, chances are they have a great deal of investment in how it turns out and building around that initial impression is a virtually untapped idea, but exciting in its own right.

While you can’t ask these users for a review [and you should disable your write a review email to anyone who checks gift wrap / present options], you can ask them to comment about why they picked the gift, how the gift holder reacted, even to share a photo or video as the person giving it out. The content that stems out isn’t intended to validate the utility of the item but rather to validate the decision for everyone who comes back considering that item, or your brand, for a future gift themselves. Just think how much visibility you could get from a video contest that led to a dozen kids ripping open the paper on their new favorite toy of the moment.

Did You Get It? Social Network Participation

For many brands Christmas Day can be the biggest engagement hours of the year with the surrounding weeks taking other top spots. Why? Because people either got it or got disappointed. For youth focused brands and high ticket items this is especially more true with kids rushing to tell each other that the latest iWhatever ended up under the tree after all.

So whether you celebrate the holiday with a big family gathering or head to the nearest theatre to catch a movie and escape it all [you won’t be the only one], it’s a day you simply cannot turn the computer off for. Instead embrace the rush with a few messages that pull out the excitement from those who got it and fuel them back to your channels to motivate those who did not. You’ll build up post-holiday purchases [hello targeted offer] and explode validating content to your networks, blog, and product pages with ease.

Of course being socially active on a major holiday via support and a few updates scores serious points with your customer base: it’s a double play or better.

Become a part of the gift experience today and give people a reason, and opportunity, to do the same

Gifts are special for everyone involved and yet so often go untapped as a source of discussion. By appealing to the excitement, and staying away from the sales push, there’s a lot of upside to be had in building buzz for 2012 and beyond. And remember, if you don’t gather the content today, you’ll be back in the same spot with big coupon offers and bright creative come 12 months from now.

Rethinking the ecommerce funnel: Are we failing to keep up with an evolving consumer expectation?

Posted on August 16, 2011 by teds

As ecommerce passes beyond 15 years in existence and passes 7% of total US retail spending it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come from say the early version of amazon.com, but also worrisome to see how much the same things still are [compare that with today’s Amazon.com cart].

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.

The Dark Side of Ecommerce: Welcome to the Counterfeit Boom

Posted on May 3, 2011 by teds

We all know about fake products: Watches, Purses, that kind of stuff. To most of us this are an infrequent and minimal issue; something one would have to seek out to be able to buy and only something affecting a few industries. Reality is anything but that.

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.

Web Analytics – Why you need to pull in net cost, promotions & all the other hidden “goodies”

Posted on March 9, 2009 by teds

Every day you’re measuring your ecommerce sales, optimizing campaigns and getting just the right offers in place to beat this economic gloom. Things seem good, the boss is and all is going well until the end of the quarter hits and John finance comes running into your office screaming about how you’ve sunk the company with horrible bottom line sales? Ok, that may be a bit of a stretch but the issue is no laughing matter – analytics are something almost every ecommerce site has learned to take seriously and for good reason yet many marketers still look at the top level only leaving a great many unknowns until the books are closed hours, days or even weeks later.
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