Which is a Better measurement for Success in Today’s Online World?

Mark Twain was famed for many things, but the one phrase of his I like the best always has been, “there are lies, damn lies and then statistics”.

A good statistician can probably make numbers say just about anything they want them to. In this modern Internet era, the concept of Return on Investment (ROI) metrics has taken on a life of its own. Moreover, as retailers, we’re faced with the esoteric goal of judging whether a particular investment is paying off in the manner we would hope. Expectations can be high and usually are made worse by the sometimes slick sales pitches we here from vendors. “Our solution will increase your sales conversions by 50% or more” or “Many of our customers experience a sales lift of 30% or more” and so on.

Enter the analytics engines and the ROI metrics and the “sales job” to convince you that things are not only better than what you think, but they’ll keep getting better and better as you go. The reality is whatever you’ve invested, whatever your hopes are for a particular solution, take the marketing literature and the quasi-assurances that you can’t lose with a particular solution and flush them. In the end, you have to FEEL the difference in a solution. Empirical data can only go so far, but if you look at your bank account and see not as many $$$$ as you once did then clearly you need to start exploring whether a solution is working or not.

The Cost of Increasing Your Profits

Some solutions are pure cost centers and always will be. If you have a complex sales tax problem  spread across multiple states, or have drop shippers and affiliates in some states that are saying they constitute a physical nexus for your operations now, then you need a more robust integrated solution so that you can ensure your business exposure, aka your tax liability doesn’t turn a good year-end profit into a tax audit payment to the state governments. We know the ROI metric for these types of solutions is simple…we do not want the Tax Man coming to our doors at the end of the year. Simple enough. We PAY to have some level of security in knowing that our tax liabilities are being taken care of.

Other solutions are profit centers, and are meant to draw visitors in, to bring them to our doors. These might include SEO work, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) publishing of your product catalog. Whatever you are doing in this arena, there are associated ROI goals. Marketing dollars are being used fruitfully if you are getting a big return on your investment. Most ROI gurus want you to get a 10-1 return. (Yea, right, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in too.)  Don’t get me wrong. A ten-bagger, as it’s called, is the type of investment that one can look back on and say, “yea, duh…of course I bought Google on the opening day.” But the reality is that markets and marketing dollar buys rarely return a 10-1.

So, what’s a good number? Of course, this is a by-product of what you are trying to accomplish with your marketing buys. Sometimes, you want a pure sales conversion, other times you’re simply trying to drum up site traffic, or possibly you’re looking to simply see if a market even exists for your particular offering. In the end, ROI metrics around PPC, CSE or other expenditures comes down to (in most cases) are we at least breaking even.

Generating site visits and even increasing your sales conversions are one aspect to a successful retail operation, but what about once they are there? Are we not only converting them now, but are we engaging with them post-sale? If they’re on the site, and leave are we attempting to rescue the sale with a special offer? What about post-visit, post-rescue attempt? Are we engaging with them with a shopping cart abandonment campaign? Are we cross-sell/up-selling them in our communications with targeted recommendations? Are we attempting to engage with visitors to get them to market on our behalf to their friends? The list of potential ROI metric answering questions goes on and on.

The point here is that each retailer needs to setup a set of ROI metric goals. Obviously, most retailers want to increase sales conversions and average order values, but the very next question I always hear after that is….how can I do that? First, you need to make sure you have a good idea of what people are doing on your site. Where are they dropping out of the buying process? When they do drop out, what do you (if anything) to stay engaged or re-engage? How do you take a first-time shopper/customer and turn them into a repeat customer who recommends your products to their friends? And finally, of all of your efforts in this area, what is and isn’t working?

I can spin yarns aplenty about what your ROI metrics show. I can give you all the ROI metrics that you need to see how your sales conversions are working, how your AOV is increasing if you use a personalization and targeted recommendations for visitors, but in the end, how does it feel to you?

Bad Economies and How “Flat is the New Up”

The last point to consider is that year-to-year comparisons are probably the single worse facet to focus on these days. Our economy is coming out of a Grand Recession as it teeters on the brink of a Phenomenal Depression or even a Cataclysmic Market Implosion….but I digress, this is the news these days, our US economy is battered and bruised, shopping seems better, but then we get a jobs report that has everyone ducking and covering like we’re in a Stop-Drop-and-Roll commercial from the 1950s. The US Government is weighing the options of what a first-ever in our history US default might do to the world economy…and here we retailers sit, trying to convince visitors to part with their money so we can make a buck.

If this is what the people have to hear about day in and day out, is it any wonder Flat is the New Up? Heck, what is the New UP going to be next year? Only a 10% loss? Seriously…the news is no particular friend to our shoppers unless you sell 2012 End-of-the-World Do-It-Yourself Kits…hey, there’s an idea…but seriously, if we got even a single quarter of It’s a Wonderful Life that alone would likely kickstart our collective hearts into another buying frenzy, but that’s not the point.

In a down economy, you simply cannot try and compare year-to-year numbers because McIntosh Apples and Valencia Oranges will simply not compare. So, what do you do? You have to go to the numbers again and see what is and isn’t working. Are your sales orders down? But AOVs are up? Then clearly while your year-to-year numbers might not make it easier to sleep at night, at least you’re doing something right to be increasing your AOVs. Site visits are up, but sales are not closing? Maybe shoppers are comparing prices and it’s time to sweeten the pot with a rescue attempt and the band plays on.

The bottom line is that ROI metrics can be and should be your greatest weapon in the decision-making process. If it feels bad, it very well may be, but without reviewing the actual numbers you may make a bad situation worse by leaping when you should be battening down the hatches and preparing for the long haul. In the end, how we feel ALWAYS impacts our business decisions, but ROI metrics can help us to know if what we are feeling is REAL or if it’s just a changing market position. How we feel should never be the end of the conversation, but simply the beginning. So, how do you feel?

Mobile E-Commerce

It’s the 21st century and all around us bandwidth increases are raging. If you haven’t been in a coma over the last five years you have seen, heard, been caught up, or tried to completely ignore the craze that has been Smart Phone and/or Tablet market. Oh, to have bought Apple stock 10 years ago, but I digress. Not convinced yet? Take a look at the consumer “craze” that envelops a new release of the latest smart phone. Even rumors about feature sets are met with national media coverage, even when the source is some guy sitting in his college dorm room half a world away.

We find new gadgets and their features too enticing to pass up, consumers apparently simply MUST tune in to find out what’s coming…yes, yes, I know YOU aren’t one of those early adopter, died-in-the-wood fans of all things new and flashy, sure…ok, let’s go with that, but consider this, the lines to buy these new gadgets have only gotten longer as new versions are released, and this is occurring during some of the worst economic conditions this nation has ever suffered in, so can you imagine what it would be like if the economy was booming?

Enter Social Interactions of the Mobile World

Users are spending more time online mostly because they can. They can at the coffee shop, they can in the car (albeit they should only be doing so at traffic lights), they can at school recitals, they can while waiting at the doctor’s office. In short, people are spending much more time online now than even 2-3 years ago because their devices and networks can support their desired level of connectivity, but the traffic is only going to continue increasing at this point, so where do we go next?

Bandwidth speeds from our cellular providers is ever increasing, albeit they still want to charge us through the nose for it, but that would be a different article. Our gadgets getting smaller, more mobile…and I’ll say it…cooler. We’re all exploring mobile worlds from our quaint little coffee houses as we look cool on our mobile devices, so what’s the point of all this? Where does the rubber hit the road and when can we, as retailers, start cashing in on this mobile craze?

Socially speaking, many online visitors are interacting with their friends and associates. Sharing bookmarks, sites they’ve visited, and ever more innocuous bits of information that make most of us wonder if we haven’t gone passed the safe point of TMI. But I digress, people ARE interacting and as such this presents the retailer with a unique opportunity to engage with them.

So, what should a retailer consider when thinking about moving onto the new mini-super information highway? Two things – site usability and function usage.

Enter Profitability of the Mobile World

Ok, I’m not going to share a mathematical equation with you that details how YOUR business will be able to make a mobile foray profitable, but I want you to consider some uses for your mobile site. People are spending more time online all the time all over the place. They’re socializing, they are shopping, they are reading, exploring, learning, sharing and generally reaching out in far more directions than ever before. So, finding ways to interact with your customers is going to be of paramount importance to creating a successful position for yourself in the M-Commerce World. Here are some ideas:

1. Order History/Status Updates – People like knowing their packages have shipped WHEREVER they are at the time they are notified. This is one area where being proactive with your customers pays off big time. Pushing messages to them to let them know where you are in the shipping process is a huge plus. Also, providing quick and easy re-order/order history capabilities is essential to continued growth. Showing the customer what they had previously purchased in a clear, concise manner will make it easier on them to make another order, and ANYTHING you can do to make it easier to navigate on a mobile device will be greatly appreciated.
2. Price Change / In Stock Notifications – When prices change, up or down or products that a shopper has expressed an interest in come back into stock, these are the times shoppers want you to be “pushy”. Getting in their faces and letting them know what’s going on will help drive traffic back to your site.
3. Mobile ONLY Special Offers – Mobile device detection is simple enough, but what to do with it? One idea that we’ve worked on with C2C, is making Mobile Only offers, whether it be additional reward points for taking the mobile offer, or for completing a mobile order itself. Special product pricing for mobile visitors or shipping discounts for mobile shoppers…whatever you can think of can be leveraged to make the mobile shopper feel welcome and special. This will help keep the customer coming back to the mobile store even more potentially than the regular e-commerce site.

Is there an APP for that?

Contrary to popular belief, you do NOT need to create a mobile application to take your site mobile. It’s nice and certainly powerful and popular, if you have a purpose behind it, but not a requirement. Going “native” and pushing your store’s content into a mobile application framework will be time-consuming and costly, but for the small business owner, the overall benefits of this may not translate to actual profitability anytime soon, if ever. Better to find a mobile framework that can leverage your existing site’s design and catalog data to create a mobile shopping experience that functions independently of any native mobile API integration. Some cart solutions are betting on this new mobile model and are creating integrated solutions, others are still “johnny come late” to the party and have no real mechanism for you. Click-2-Customer has developed a light-weight integration that leverages our existing infrastructure and integration with carts like Miva Merchant to allow the retailer to worry less about creating something from scratch and more about putting on polish and finishing touches to make a new mobile experience come to live.

Generically, if you don’t go native, you’ll miss out on platform solutions like push notifications to the device; however, this can be overcome by pushing emails that link the device to the website and auto-log the customer in to see whatever the notification is. Few shoppers who have mobile devices won’t have their email tied to their hips as well, so push notifications can easily be gotten around. One other “downside” to going native is that devices are extremely independent of one another, so you will be spending a LOT of time and effort moving from one device platform to the next…some cart solutions like this, because they can get you to pay again and again. Don’t play that game.

I’m not saying a native mobile application is wrong, not at all, just make sure if you’re going to the trouble of creating an application that you have a reason for it. Mobile shopping, in and of itself, isn’t enough justification for the expense.

My mobile site doesn’t look anything like my real site

For many devices this may end up being true, however, mobile users, users who are truly on a smaller device, both from a keyboard, display and operational (bandwidth) capability have come to expect this. To be sure, your site, mobile or otherwise can pretty much be used as-is on most tablet devices, IPads and the like, but on an IPhone or other Smartphone, you’re going to have to adopt a paradigm shift that allows your visitors to more readily interact in a mobile fashion.

Ways to do this are making your navigation simpler, providing a less graphical heavy display, taking more of a no nonsense approach to the information you provide. One key starting point is to recognize that a mobile device is being employed and to ask the user if they wish to view your mobile site or the regular site. This simple question can be a huge plus for visitors because if they are willing to view your mobile site they almost always come back to the live site later to see what they were missing.

Moreover, you’re still giving the user the option of how and what they can view. If you do provide this option, make sure you have a prominent link in your display/navigation that would allow them to switch to the other version.

Simplifying your navigation. Creating a navigation “deck” can seem like a daunting task, but the reality is you just need to think ease of use. Instead of having javascript menuing dropdowns that go three levels deep, provide only the top level categories and necessary system links, such as privacy and contact us pages in a single linked page. Additionally, show the user where they are as they navigate with breadcrumbs that can scroll left or right and are linked in so they can rapidly return to a previous location.

Simplify your checkout process. Single page checkouts are almost mandatory in a mobile e-commerce site, if for no other reason than you don’t want to waste the visitor’s time with multiple pages of data entry.

BIG FINALE

I wanted to have some incredible words of wisdom at the end of this 10-part series, but what I really feel is just relief that I’ve gotten so many of these thoughts out on the “paper”. Of course, the Top 10 “Holiday” Solutions really aren’t meant just for the end-of-year, mad rush we all pull our hair out over each year and to be sure, as retailers we need to constantly be evaluating and re-evaluating what is and isn’t working in our business processes, because as we all know…there are only 366 more shopping days until the NEXT Christmas Day!!!

In all seriousness, we hope this series has been informative and are very glad to have shared it with you. We also hope this holiday season has been good to your business. From recent reports, many retailers seem to have posted much larger increases than expected this season and that’s a good sign for the economy’s recovery, but of course, we won’t know how great this season was until January; we just hope this information has been helpful in showing you how you can increase your market share with some very simple solutions without breaking your bank along the way.

That said, we want to close out by simply saying all of us at DoublePlus hope you have a very joyful time this holiday season with family and friends and that your successes increase exponentially in 2011!

Season’s Greetings and Best Wishes!!

Comparison Shopping Engines

Online marketing initiatives can become very costly very quickly, so finding somewhere online that you can spend your ad/marketing dollars and quickly see a big return is something every online retailer seeks. The question, of course, becomes where are these mythical places where potential customers are just itching to buy from your site…one such place is the Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) site.

CSEs have been around almost since the beginning of the Internet. To be sure the 3rd site ever built was probably a listing of the first two, giving its own opinion about which of the two was better, but in fact, the usefulness and viability of marketing to CSE shoppers speaks for itself. CSE sites seem to pop up almost daily, so the real question is which ones are going to bring in visitors that are most likely to be converted to customers?

There are many CSE sites to choose from, hundreds in fact. That may sound like a whole lot of re-inventing the wheel, so as a retailer, one needs to ask the question, why? Why have so many different developers decided that they just could not live with a particular CSE’s offering and branched off to create their own? Obviously, not all CSEs are created equal, and some seem to be more equal than others (sorry, 9th grade English reading of Animal Farm pops up at the darnedest times), but the point remains, some CSE sites are going to bear fruit for your products and others won’t.

Which Comparison Shopping Engine Sites Work Best?

A question I get asked a lot from customers interested in CSE advertising is “which ones are the best”? The answer unfortunately is a loaded one, since products that sell well on CSE Site “A: may not do so well on CSE Site “B”. Unless you sell the same items, then you really cannot gauge good results or potential success based on someone else’s experience, because CSE Site “A” may sell a lot of TVs and not a lot of Kitchen appliances. So the success of your CSE advertising is going to be a byproduct of what you sell and where your customers are shopping for those items.

Market share is not always commensurate with the value a CSE site provides either. Shopping.com or PriceGrabber.com are some of the most widely used CSE sites in the space, but if your customers aren’t there, or you don’t have a budget that can adequately advertise on those sites then it doesn’t do you a lot of good to go there simply because you’ve heard good things about them. The bottom line on CSE sites, is sometimes you just have to try it to see if you like it. The key issue is do not advertise on a CSE site, unless you have the ability to collect analytics to show what is and (most importantly) isn’t working. A big reason why some retailers have a bad taste in their mouths over CSE sites is because they never adequately addressed the issue of tracking whether a site was performing well. There are three basic types of CSE sites – FREE, Cost per Click, and Cost per Acquisitions. Let’s discuss each in a little more detail.

Free Comparison Shopping Engines

First, Free CSEs…do I even need to go here? They’re free…why are you waiting, what would possess you NOT to be listing your products on a site where people search for products, maybe even yours, and the cost to you to list your products is FREE. Enough said there. Two popular free CSEs are Google Product Search (formerly Googlebase and before that, Froogle) and TheFind.com.

Cost-Per-Click CSEs

The second type of CSE works on a cost per click (CPC) model. Some examples of the CPC CSE sites are Shopping.com, PriceGrabber.com, Shopzilla, Become.com and there are many, many more. A note of caution here though, CPC sites are basically out for themselves, they plan on getting paid whether your visitor converts or not. If you’re interested in just increasing your traffic from a CSE in the hopes that once they are on your site, they may convert, then CPC sites are fine. To be sure, the lion’s share of CSE sites fall into the CPC category, because this is the fairly standard model of success for them. We’re not saying being a CPC site makes them “evil”, just that they are going to get paid regardless of whether that visit converts or not, so this is a case where it’s extra important to be diligent in tracking what happening with your click-throughs.

If you’re more cost-conscious then you may want to wade into the shallow end of the CPC pool, or even better avoid it altogether, at least initially.

Cost-Per-Acquisition CSEs

The final type of CSEs are cost per acquisition (CPA) sites. Amazon SellerCentral, NewEggMall, and Shop.com are a few examples of the CPA model. CPA sites are more interested in your success, because these sites get paid only when a sales is made. The percentages of the sale that goes to these sites varies, but can be 15% or higher. The choice becomes this: Do you pay for a click or give up a fairly sizable percentage of an actual sale? The answer is going to be based on many factors, your profit margins, the effectiveness of the CSE site to bring visitors in and of course whether you can afford to advertise on these sites. The silver bullet, if there is one, is to use a CSE Data Feed Management service. Much of the legwork associated with generating feeds, updating them to the CSE sites, accounting for visitors and sales can be accomplished with these services. Services like FeedExact, GoDataFeed, or FeedPerfect can give you the kind of support you need to make managing CSE advertising simple and cost-effective.

In our last installment in this series, we’re going to cover Mobile Commerce and how e-commerce is going to be adding a big ‘M’ in the coming year.

Which Shopping Cart? (Image Credit UrbanPrankster.com)

Making this post, #8 in a 10-post series may seem out of place, but the reality is the holiday season is upon us, so whatever you have in place now is pretty much what you’re going to be stuck with until after the 1st of the year, because no one makes shopping cart platform changes in the middle of the holiday season. That said, picking the “RIGHT” shopping cart solution is not only important, it’s probably tantamount to a presidential candidate selecting the right vice presidential candidate to run with, it can make or break your success.

Picking the wrong solution can become very costly very quickly, so finding the right shopping cart platform for your needs is probably the single most important decision you have to make as an online retailer. It doesn’t help that there are so many shopping cart solutions to choose from either, hundreds in fact, if not thousands. That’s a whole lot of re-inventing the wheel, so as a retailer, one needs to ask the question, why? Why have so many different developers decided that they just could not live with a particular cart’s offering and branched off to create their own? Obviously, not all shopping carts are created equal, and some seem to be more equal than others (sorry, 9th grade English reading of Animal Farm pops up at the darnest times).

Market share is not always commensurate with the value a shopping cart provides either. Magento Commerce is one of the most widely downloaded and used cart systems available today, but extensibility of the platform is, let’s just say, painful if you don’t really understand PHP and aren’t really a developer. The problem with Magento is not that the product isn’t extensible, but rather that it’s extensibility can be so unguided that a PHP person can get in and hack the core files making it all but impossible to upgrade even to a minor release in the future.

Common languages versus proprietary languages. Miva Merchant is a good example of this, Miva, in my opinion, is one of the most extensible and flexible platforms available today. Module developers can work on completely separate solutions and drop them into the same group of modules and they can work side-by-side without interfering with one another. One of the most thoughtful and robust implementations of extensibility in the marketspace today…that said, Mivascript — the language that development for Miva Merchant needs to be completed in — is it’s own “beast of burden”. Yet another programming language and paradigm for the developer to come up to speed with to support the customer’s needs.

So, in short, there is no cart solution that truly provides a “silver bullet”, one must pick one’s poison when selecting a cart system. Now, cut to the other side of the coin…the after-market one-off solutions that are highly specialized for email marketing, targeted recommendations, shopping cart abandonment support, Customer Relationship Management, Customer Reviews, Faceted Search tools, and on and on. Many of these solutions are top shelf, best-of-breed, “upper right-hand” quadrant type solutions. You’d want them all if you could, and in some cases you do use them, but the big question becomes INTEGRATION.

What’s a Retailer to do?

Our deep background with e-commerce systems, on both the consulting/building sites and the product development sides, fed our desire to make the C2C Essentials product suite a truly one-size fits all model. With C2C, you can create personalized content for each visitor based on their own site traversals, referrer location and a host of other options. You can rescue shopping carts that are about to be abandoned, or retain a perpetual cart for the customer to quickly complete an order upon returning after a long time away. Email marketing with C2C allows you to do all the same types of things that the major email players provide, as well as integrate your targeted recommendations based on the visitor’s past purchase history and their recent visits to your site. These are just a few of the integrated features of this product suite. It can work side-by-side with other solutions you may have in place, or replace them as you desire.

These are just a few areas that you might want to focus on, but the point is YOU decide how your store should interact with users. If this were a brick and mortar store you wouldn’t let a visitor walk in without acknowledging them, saying hello and offering your help, right? Why should your online store be any different?

Integrating Disparate Systems under a single Shopping Cart

So, you’ve picked your cart and your 3-4 top best-of-breed solutions and here comes your developer, who is now eyeing that new car he was thinking of buying and he’s ready to “help you” with your integration needs. I always made the argument to customers that depth of integration is simply a product of time and money. The more time and money you have to spend, the deeper your integration can be. The problem is that retailers typically have already blown a good portion of their budgets just getting these best-of-breed solutions themselves, the thought of integrating them with their existing infrastructure is typically an after-thought.

Some people will claim that it’s incredibly flexible as a platform to have so many modules readily available for such a low price, and yet, with each module purchase you are making a decision to tie your store’s flexibility and functionality to the module vendor’s druthers.

Stop buying modules…I’m not saying that because you don’t need their functionality, I’m saying it because your store shouldn’t have to have tens or hundreds of add-on modules to allow YOU to customize it to do what YOU want for your customers. A unique offering from the C2C Essentials solution is the Rules Engine, or the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) Engine. The ECA Engine allows you, the storeowner to decide how dynamic you truly want your store to be as your customers/visitors interact with it.

The module developers will scream, “BUT MY MODULES DO THAT ALREADY, YOU JUST NEED TO BUY 6 or 7 of them” … ok, but then you have a variety of management screens, competing setups, interactions and finally a headache the size of … { insert a really large item that scares you here } … With ECA and the C2C product suite, you can create rules based on any event and set of conditions to perform any action available in the system. Want to welcome a first time visitor and offer them a special coupon for buying on this visit? Want to acknowledge that a visitor is a return customer who is obviously valuable since their average order value for the past year is over $50? Or how about recognizing that a visitor has come from a Comparison Shopping Engine site and is likely price sensitive?

Tired of integrating multiple systems?

Retailers want the “best of breed” solutions that can provide the best reviews, email marketing, recommendations, onsite rescues and so on, but deeply integrated solutions tend to cost an arm and a leg and possibly a first born child, so assess the value proposition of each solution and how easily one’s dataset and/or API can be used by external solutions becomes a huge concern.

How do I get my recommendations in my emails? How do I use the reviews to influence my recommendations, how do I make them all work together?

This is an old problem, that many consultants have spent inordinate amounts of time trying to solve, but the decision a retailer has to make is do you find a “sweet spot” solution that has these pieces integrated under one umbrella or pay to have them integrated together. The depth of integration is typically a function of time and money, meaning the more deeply you want them integrated, the more it’s going to cost. Is there a way to make this decision without breaking your bank?

The C2C solution attempts to provide you with the “sweet spot” approach. Email marketing, integrated recommendations, shopping cart abandonment and onsite rescues and much more are readily available with the C2C Enterprise solution. The purpose of the one-path approach is to minimize your cost outlays as well as provide a more rapid path to implementation. Most C2C Enterprise integration are up and running in 10-15 hours and you can decide how much or little of the overall solution you want to use. Most customers eat use every bit of the solution set because you can’t always tell what’s going to be the most effective solution for your customer base, but the point is the decisions are yours, not a limitation of the platform or hidden in some extra integration cost.

Our next post is going to be on Comparison Shopping Engine Sites and maximizing your marketing capabilities by expanding your visibility on sites where your customers are already looking for your products.

Welcome Customers and Personalize Your Offers

In the same vein as previously introduced items, experience personalization is key to separating your store from your competition. Whether it’s content on your site, email communications targeted in a one-to-one manner, extending yourself via social media marketing and so on, the reasons abound for creating a personalized experience for each visitor.

One-to-One Targeting allows you to truly be all things to all people within a single store setting. For example, take a first time visitor coming from pay per click (PPC) ad campaigns running on Google Adwords. Before this person even clicks one link on your site, you already know where they came from, what they clicked on to get here, what browser they are using, how many times they have visited – and from that limited amount of information you can start personalizing the experience for them.

Visitors who arrive from social media sites are in a word…junkies. Social junkies to be more exact. I’m not knocking them: many experts are making the argument that social networks and social media will actually do away with email as we know it as a means of marketing and communication. We want to take taking advantage of the fact that many people who don’t actively utilize email (especially email marketing), are at least on Facebook.

As an example, our shopper clicks through from your Facebook page link, is a first time visitor and clearly has some interest in your store and products. Announcing your Rewards Program targeted for Facebook friends is a good way to get the ball rolling with them. Personal recommendations from one Facebook friend to another is pure marketing gold, so tell them right off that customers who share the site with their Facebook friends receive reward points. Or perhaps customers who write Facebook recommendations for products can become Preferred Customers or receive discounts on future purchases.

Another example: Price-conscious visitors coming from Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) site visitors may only care about the bottom line, so since we know the click came from Shopping.com, welcome them as a Shopping.com visitor, mention your (stellar!) track record on Shopping.com, and offer them a discount or free shipping that’s good only for this visit.

Knowing where visitors are coming from gives you a jumpstart understanding on what they might be interested in from a special offers standpoint. All things being equal between you and your competitors, using that little tidbit of knowledge may make all the difference between a lost visit and a converted sale.

The Click-2-Customer solution tracks all this information and allows you to create specific rules to show users specialized campaigns that are targeted based on these types of factors. The point is that as a retailer, you need to decide how you want to sell to your visitors. You can put up a website that has static content and never changes, or you can personalize the site experience to the user’s specific desires and needs and show them that you care about them first and foremost. Personalizing their experience, implementing perpetual carts that make it easier for them to return and checkout, showing them that you value their business…these are just a few of the subtle ways you can be all things to all people all the time.

In our next installment, we’re going to discuss selecting the best shopping cart platform for your business needs.

Do you entice your customers?

Reward Points, Loyalty Points, VIP Programs … call them whatever you want, but if you don’t have one implemented for your store, you’re leaving a lot of potential return visits and sales on the table. These ideas DO work. The questions are:

1. How can you reward your visitors?
2. What constitutes a rewardable action on their part?

In previous installments of this series, we have outlined a variety of key areas to picque your visitors interests and to most importantly help drive them to a sale, so the question becomes how can we entice them to an action that will ultimately benefit you the retailer.

Purchases themselves, to be sure, should always be able to earn reward points, but at what cost to the retailer? If a free ground shipping offer requires the visitor to redeem 100,000 reward points and they have to spend $10,000 to earn that many, you’re not likely to see a huge adoption rate from your visitors. So, the reward points given needs to match the target action and, most importantly, the visitor needs to perceive that there is value in participating in the pgoram.

If nominal ground shipping costs are in the $7-10 dollar range throughout the US, then you want the reward point plan to provide a discount (e.g. redeemable numbers of points) in a similarly priced range. If you give 100 points for every $10 spent on the site, then $70 dollars spent should give them the free shipping option. Most retailers provide some free shipping option at $70, 80 or 100 dollars so this is a fairly obvious choice for a redemption model.

Viral Marketing on Facebook

But is purchasing items the only way to get reward points? How about extending the social media bug to your visitors? Facebook has turned even the most reclusive technophobe into a facebooking fiend these days…I hear mothers all the time at my daughter’s soccer game talking about facebooking this, that and the other thing and I have to laugh, because the FB platform has apparently turned into the next great American solution for how friends can reach out to one another. So, let’s take advantage of this type of scenario. If we were willing to give 100 points for $10 purchased, what is a Facebook post, or a tweet of a product worth? 10 points? 50 points? With the Click2Customer system your visitors can link their FB posts or Twitter tweets back to the store, so that they can earn points if people come to the site and make a purchase. Think about it, if someone recommends your store online and you give them 50 reward points, but then promise them an additional 10 points for any of their friends that click through and make a purchase, you’re giving away free money, right? That’s crazy…until you realize what it would have normally cost you to try and secure those qualified visitors through other marketing channels. Then this is starting to look like a sweetheart deal. A similar example could be made through simply providing a ‘Tell a Friend’ option about the site, category or product. Of course, sending one-off emails from the site is one thing and a FB post lasts forever but you get the point.

Asking for product reviews and giving points for a review is another scenario to consider. Asking your customers in a post-sale scenario if they would provide you with a product review shows your customers that you care about whether the item you sold them is working out as they desired. It shows a level of support and customer care that many retailers frankly ignore and it engenders trust and a desire to continue your relationship. Bottom line, not a lot of downside to this type of inquiry…now, employing your rewards program, sweetens the deal a little bit. Say, for every review posted to the site, they’ll earn 10 reward points. There are many reasons why reviews are good for page content and from an SEO perspective that I won’t get into as part of this article, but even if there were no other tangible positive outcome other than rewarding your customers for participating in your reviews process, that should be enough for any retailer.

And let’s be honest. I’m not suggesting these types of inquiries of your customers are purely noble…there’s nothing to stop us from marketing some other products that they might be interested in at the same time as asking for those reviews. A good retailer is always looking for a way to get their name and products back in front of a customer and this is one of those opportunities that should not be missed.

Additionally, knowing which of your customers gravitate towards using rewards systems is also important, because some folks, no matter what, just won’t use them for anything…I never use coupons at the grocery store, even if we have them and the products are actually in the basket…I’m not against grocery store coupons, I just don’t take the time to use them. That’s me. Some people comb the Sunday papers and plan their meals for the week based on the coupon offers available. We have a spectrum of potential usage, but with C2C, that usage is tracked so that you can tell who is and isn’t using the system.

In the end, a rewards program for some retailers may seem like a nice-to-have versus a must-have, but the reality is that you won’t know until you try it. I have a plaque that sits on my workdesk. It says, "You will always miss 100% of the opportunities you don’t take." Can your store afford NOT to have a rewards system in place?

Thanks for reading, and be sure to join us for our next installment on On-Site Experience Personalization and how you can increase your conversion rates and average order value.

Why is my shopping cart empty?

Holiday solution #5 is about implementing a persistent cart or a perpetual cart on your website.

Many shoppers complain of finding a site, searching through their products, finding things they want to buy and even going as far as putting them in their baskets, then getting pulled away to take care of some other business only to return and find that their previous items are now gone from the basket. This leads to a level of frustration that sometimes translates to a shopper leaving your store never to return. Now, many cart systems use inventory management to track what you have in stock and to be sure, you dont want to simply leave these items in random baskets that may or may not ever be converted into actual sales, but there’s a fine line between wanting to continue moving inventory and making the shopping experience enjoyable for your shoppers.

This leads to the inevitable position that a cart should perpetuate its state, so that a customer can return at their convenience (not yours) to complete the sale. Perpetual Carts can be a huge sale converter especially as it allows the customer to return to the very state in which they left, but also that you now can quickly see that you have their attention upon their return.

Persistent versus Perpetual Carts – what’s the difference?

We get asked this question a lot, but conceptually it’s pretty simple. Think about a persistent cart as a cart that lasts throughout your current session and displays the item(s) in the basket, the overall cost, and perhaps any special offers, or shipping estimators, and so on. A mini-basket view is what this is commonly referred to in e-commerce circles. Normally, a persistent cart very simple to implement and keeps track of what the visitor has in their basket. You can use a true “mini” view and just show an item count and subtotal, or you can go a little further and include each item’s name, quantity in basket, with links back to the page, and so on. This is entirely a personal decision about how much space on your pages you want to use up for this feature. The limitation of the persistent cart is that it’s really only persistent while the customer is shopping and the basket items remain in their basket. Once those items “expire” and are returned to inventory, the basket is empty…and yes, you can likely hear the screams from your visitors who had lots of items in their basket, who got called into a meeting, only to return and find that they items are all gone now.

This leads to the definition of a perpetual cart. The Perpetual Cart saves state on the items that are placed in the basket. In other words, the only way to get rid of them is to delete them from the basket. The Perpetual Cart should not only be able to save all the items that were added to the cart on a given computer, but should be associated with the customer’s account, even if they are not currently logged in, so that the visitor can track their perpetual items across multiple machines as well.

The convenience that these types of features will provide to your visitors will bear obvious fruit as you review its usage with your customer base. Perpetual Cart views can look exactly like your basket page with the one addition of explaining to the customer that these were the items they were interested in during their last visit and you saved them. This level of customer service is generally not only appreciated, but it’s remembered. Returning visitors, or visitors with whom you have sent Shopping Cart Abandonment emails to can be routed directly to the Perpetual Cart page where they can quickly re-add the lost items to their basket and checkout, or continue shopping, which opens the obvious door to upsell and cross-sell opportunities. To be sure, the “type” of shopping experience that your visitors normally go through may also indicate the utility in the Perpetual Cart feature. Stores where shoppers tend to browse around, look at a number of various options and who may even price comparison shop are what we refer to as “Browse to Buy” stores. Stores where shoppers tend to know exactly what they are looking for, go directly there, get in and get out are what we call “Direct to Buy” stores. So, let’s explore the usefulness of the Perpetual Cart in a real world, practical setting.

Take for example, one of our Click-2-Customer Clients, Premium Aquatics. Aquariums, salt and fresh water livestock, and the number equipment options available for the practicing Aquarium Enthusiast tends to lend itself to more of a “Browse to Buy” setting. Before implementing Click-2-Customer on Premium Aquatics there was no Perpetual Cart, so customers who shopped and left who later returned were resigned to either re-adding all the items they had previously in their basket, re-adding only a subset, or leaving the site upset that shopping was such a hindrance.

Perpetual Cart

But, once the Perpetual Cart was implemented, shoppers could return and quickly re-add those items to their basket, as well as include many upsell or cross-sell products, which we will discuss a little later. The increase in sales was enormous and quickly felt at Premium Aquatics.

“I liked the Click-2-Customer concept right off, it made a lot of sense to engage with customers in a more meaningful and targeted way and the C2C solution had all the bells and whistles I was looking for”, according to the owner Jason Frey, “however, I was unprepared for just how much of an increase we’d get. The targeted recommendations are great, we’re moving products that used to sit on shelves, but the response to the Perpetual Cart has been incredible. Our average order values and sales conversions are increasing in no small part due to the Perpetual Cart capability. I highly recommend this type of solution to any storeowner looking to increase their revenue stream.”

We cannot overstress the results of Premium Aquatics, they are certainly showing what a set of targeted solutions can do to changing the overall success of the online shopping experience and while these results may not be typical across all market segments and industries, it shows that retailers who want to succeed in today’s market need to be pro-active about how they approach their online customers.

Upsell/Cross-sell and Re-marketing

There are some unique things you can try when you’ve got a customer in this situation, obviously they are interested in completing the sale, at this to this point we can make that inference simply because…they came back. Secondly, not only may they be interested in completing the sale, but this may be a good opportunity to upsell or cross sell them on other items you have available.

Re-marketing is a term we use to refer to the solidification of the relationship based on the items in their basket. If the price of this item has gone down or up since they last visited, you can display that information to them. You can also show them that despite the price increase, you are willing to honor the previous price, or offer them some additional discount on other items added in addition to the items already in the perpetual cart. Offering free ground shipping is a huge plus these days, especially as it puts you up against yourself in many cases as the competition. You’re reaching out to the customer to make the sale, and this can be a limited offer based on this visit or based on the number of items purchased or a particular dollar amount. These very well may have been offers you would have readily made available to them regardless, but pushing this content into the perpetual cart gives you the jump on closing the sale.

In the end, the Perpetual Cart concept can increase your conversions through nothing more than making it a convenience for your customers. One additional plus is the ability to associate perpetual carts with customer accounts, which gives the shopper an added benefit to becoming a bonafide customer by creating an account, regardless of whether they have completed their first sale. Ultimately, the success of your Perpetual Cart is going to be predicated on the shoppers who use it, but as feature sets go, there really isn’t a downside to the Perpetual Cart, it can only help increase sales conversions and average order values, so the question really isn’t should you implement a Perpetual Cart, but rather why haven’t you done so yet?

In our next installment, we’ll be addressing Rewards and Loyalty Programs and how it’s the little things that make the biggest impact on your repeat business. Until then, we hope your preparations for the holiday season are progressing well!

Abandoned Shopping Cart

Avoiding abandoned carts and rescuing sales is a hot button issue these days for many retailers. There are many vendors claiming to have “the solution” to this problem. As such, retailers are faced with the choice of continuing to do business “as-is” or to start working with these vendors to see what level of success can be achieved.

The two main places to try and rescue a shopper are on the site site as he attempts to leave, or via a follow-up email. So, the question is when should you use on-site vs. email rescue attempts? Should you do both?

On-Site Abandoned Shopping Carts

There are two discernible schools of thought on the idea of attempting to make an “onsite rescue attempt” of a sale:

1. A customer who is leaving the site may be enticed into staying and completing the sale if the proper incentives (such as free shipping or price discounts) are offered.
2. But the flip side is that if a customer wants to leave now and you’re forcing a pop-up in their face to make one last ditch effort to keep them, you risk annoying them beyond all hopes of a sale.

Personally, I don’t like sites that do this, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work for your site or that your typical visitors wouldn’t appreciate this sort of extra effort on your part. An additional consideration is that, as this becomes more common, shoppers start to actively look for such a discount. (If you don’t believe me, check out tip #2 in this article.)

Determining whether this approach makes sense for your store is where the “rubber meets the road”. The problem is that, from an analytics perspective, vendors can make big claims for the first case, and unfortunately provide no supporting information for the second, meaning a failed rescue attempt that translates into a visitor who never returns becomes a very difficult proposition to measure. So, claims of rescuing 10-20-30% or more do not fully expose the loss of value for visitors who leave forever, if you’re putting the offer in front of the wrong person. When testing this scenario, make sure you actively consider all variables.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails

Neiman Marcus Abandoned Cart Email

A more subtle less intrusive method to help rescue a previous visit would be the use of Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails. Clearly, you can only do this for customers who’ve interacted with your site long enough to provide you with an email address. If you are dealing with a true visitor, where you have no additional information about them…e.g. they have never logged in, don’t have an account with you yet and have minimal site traversals, then you probably have little to lose in pushing an offer to them. On the other hand, if this is a repeat visitor, or you can determine that they are an actual customer who simply hasn’t logged in yet and/or you’ve tried onsite rescues with this visitor before, then you have options to consider. Most retailers I have spoken with have a recurring concern, they don’t want people “gaming their store” to get discounts with each visit, so it’s important that a rescue system be able to determine if attempts have been made previously, and whether those attempts were taken advantage of. A retailer may not care if the system is “gamed” if their margins are sufficient to justify the discount, but that’s a case-by-case consideration and at least the solution needs to be able to support the capability of showing the offer or not showing it based on past performance and individual user usage.

A failed onsite rescue does not necessarily mean you’ve failed forever. The adage “if at first you don’t succeed try…try…again” is an important idea in e-commerce. With the online world, it’s impossible to know why a user wants to leave. Perhaps the price was too high, shipping options not affordable, but it could also have been an important phone call, a meeting to go to or any other reason that isn’t really something your system could ascertain. So what can you do then?

With our Click2Customer abandoned shopping cart rescue solution, you have several options. Abandoned baskets can be placed “on the clock” and after a certain number of days without a return visit, you can send an email reminder to the customer. A shopping cart abandonment email could be setup to email a certain number of days after a visit only if the visitor doesn’t come back and then it could make a soft argument for returning and completing the sale.

With the C2C analytics as a guide, you can use a customer’s past purchase history, past access and acceptance of onsite offers to determine if your visitors are “gaming the system” or if they genuinely might be responsive to this type of overture. Additionally, with C2C you can make the onsite offer and register the failure in order to make a better more unique offer in the email. The fine line, of course, is to not be a pest, but clearly you want to keep your brand in front of your visitors and acknowledging their visit, thanking them for their past purchases and keeping the lines of communication open in your relationship can only be mutually beneficial to you and your customer.

Next week, we’ll talk about persistent and perpetual carts and how a retailer can leverage these to help customers complete a sale.

In this post, we’re going to start taking those concepts and wrapping them in the idea that we need to communicate early and often with visitors to keep your brand fresh in their minds. With that in mind, let’s do a little Internet 101 on what communicating in today’s online world looks like.

Communicating in an Online World

Most retailers today understand and appreciate the value of email marketing solutions. Whether you’re using them simply for newsletter management and list sends, or for targeted one-to-one emails with valued recommendations, one thing is certain: Customers can be fickle. This isn’t as simple as they visit your site, and then always buy somewhere else. More likely, life gets in the way of their visit to your store and they simply don’t remember that they came to the site, what they searched on specifically that got them there, and eventually they end up on Amazon looking for the same item.

I don’t hate Amazon; far from it, they are a trend-setter and industry-maker when it comes to e-commerce. But the scenario I just mentioned is not only likely, it’s probable in many cases. So, one solution is to sell on Amazon, and if you can, and the margins make sense to do so, then by all means. But the old adage, “it’s easier to keep a current customer than gain a new one” fits here and you should be considering what you are doing to keep your current visitors and customers engaged with your store, before worrying so much about how to gain more customers.

Of course, new customer acquisition is a necessity, but remember someone who has already purchased from your store has already gone through the entire buying process, searching for things they want, finding valuable products, coming to trust your site and sharing their personal information to finalize their purchase. Since you already have a relationship with this person, continuing that relationship is not only smart, it’s easier than finding a brand new person and convincing them all over again that you’re a trustworthy retailer.

Types of Communications

Email Marketing

Email marketing is dead…long live Email Marketing. If I had a nickel for every time I heard some e-commerce pundit standing at a keynote podium talking about the demise of email marketing….well, let’s just say, I’d have a lot of nickels. The point is that email has been in the process of dying for years now and yet, it still remains a mainstay for customer communications. Twenty years ago, I can’t believe it’s been that long, you had to work in the technology field to have an email address, ten years ago, most folks had 1 or 2 email addresses, some business some personal…today, children are seemingly born with an email address picked out for them. Like most things that remain constants in technology, it moves from being a wow item, to being widely adopted to being ubiquitously available.

So, email marketing is NOT dead – but the question remains…how can a retailer effectively use email to market to their customers without becoming a SPAMMER in the eyes of the very people you seek to engender trust with. There are some primary DOs and DONTs that we will focus on here.

No means No, so take them seriously.

No one wants their email server to be black listed, the process of getting off a black list is next to impossible and frankly it’s not worth the hassle. So, always include an unsubscribe link in your emails, and IF the user selects it, remove them from your list for that type of email. The key point here is that type of email. If you have order follow-up and order status emails, as well as newsletters, you will want to give the customer the option of unsubscribing from either; however, a customer may want to be removed form your newsletter list, but still receive their order status emails, so it’s very important to explain on your unsubscribe linked pages what they are unsubscribing from. Additionally, and perhaps more obviously, as a retailer you will want to track the types of emails you send and ensure that you are only giving your customers what they want.

Explicitly Ask them.

A key aspect of the Click2Customer solution is something we call the Customer Care Center (CCC) page. The CCC page is a one-stop location for providing your customers with all the valuable and pertinent information you have about them. We use this concept to allow them to review order history, view and edit wishlists and saved baskets, edit account information and in this case, set up the items that they are interested in and the frequency with which they’d like you to remain in contact with them via email.

If a customer tells you they are ok getting monthly newsletters, send them monthly newsletters, not WEEKLY newsletters. If you ask them if they’d like to be informed of New Products that you are bringing to market, send them those emails, but be smart…don’t send me one email for every new product you bring to the store. Schedule these notifications to go out once or twice a month at most, and always include a note that says “You are receiving this email as requested”. Sometimes customers truly cannot remember signing up for something, and begin looking for the unsubscribe link before even trying to discern what’s in the email, so making the upfront comment that the customer is getting what they asked for is very important to making sure they understand you aren’t spamming them.

Clear Titles with Stated Purposes

Lots of Email Spammers these days use seemingly valid and pertinent titles to try and convince email readers to open their messages, so don’t take for granted that your visitors, who signed up for your emails will instantly remember your email address or a generic title as something they want to read. An email delivered and unread really doesn’t help at all, so the title needs to be something that will catch their attention.

Personal Recommendations in Order Follow-up/Status Emails

Customers do not want to be inundated with marketing emails, but they do want to get the status of orders they have made with you. With C2C, you can combine the two and use your order status emails as yet another opportunity to market to those customers who may be interested in follow-on sales with you.

Some examples might include providing a list of related products and accessories for some of the items in an order, or using your site analytics to make recommendations based on other shoppers’ purchases. You may also just want to introduce new product lines based on their past purchase history. C2C provides you the most flexible solution to date for creating unique emails for each and every customer based on their relationship with your store.

Targeted Emails versus Drip Emails

One-off marketing emails may seem unnecessary or difficult to manage, but the more personal a message is, email or otherwise, the more likely your visitor is going to feel they are a part of a one-to-one relationship. A retailer sending emails to customers should always realize that there is a goal. The goal may not necessarily be to generate a sale, although that is a likely plus for any message received by a customer. No, in fact, the most basic measure of success in any email campaign is to keep your brand fresh in the customer’s mind. The best mechanisms for this will obviously differ based on your industry, customer types and the type of information you may have to support an email campaign. With C2C, you can customize an email template to be sent out for a given reason, say Order Follow-ups and include some number of variable content items that would be applicable based only on whether the customer purchased certain items, or visited certain pages, had a certain dollar amount in the order, etc. This is all part of the Rules Engine capability and truly allows you, the retailer, to create one-off emails that are unique without having to sit down and create them one at a time.

Another area to focus on is the drip campaign. The term drip marketing campaigns (email or otherwise) refers to a marketing strategy in which you send, or “drip” some number of messages to customers over a predetermined period of time. These messages often take the form of E-mail marketing, although other media can also be used. The purpose of the drip campaign is to drive interest over a period of time, but the underlying desire is to, of course, keep your company’s name in front of the customer. A retailer using C2C can set up one or more drip campaigns, manage how they interact with one another and how often a message should be sent to the customer. Requests for Product Reviews, Follow-up emails to ensure that the items were received and to the customer’s liking, Re-Activation Emails after long period of inactivity or no visits to the site are just a few areas you can focus on. The point here is that email is STILL a great tool for keeping your brand fresh, don’t take it for granted and don’t expect people to remember you just because you think your store is memorable. It rarely works that way.

Social Media Marketing

So after we’ve beaten the “old email horse” to death, we come to the next newest thing in E-commerce: Social Media marketing for e-commerce purposes. This is a new area of focus for some e-commerce consultancies and as with most things, the shiniest, new toy in the online world typically ends up going through some process of rapid integration with the old ways of doing business to see what potential doors may be opened in helping retailers find new customers or keep in touch with current ones.

Social Commerce (S-Commerce) is going to take reputation management and product reviews into a completely new world in the coming months/years. (You heard it here first…unless you saw it on Facebook somewhere .) The point is that early on, companies like eBay saw that reputation was a big deal for many buyers in the online world. Social networks, therefore, have become a natural utility for leveraging reputation across a network of like-minded “friends”. The idea that people who like your social network page, or who follow you online to see what you have going on is not just a nice-to-have concept any longer, but the latest MUST! I cannot stress this enough, that your largest new set of visitors and customers may very well be sitting on Facebook right now talking about how their 2-year old just said the darnedest thing. In reality, your market and industry will ultimately dictate how successful a social media campaign will be, but this is not something that you want to wait on.

The type of unfettered and unmanaged access this type of marketing model provides to the end users might seem scary to a retailer. You cannot control the message of online social commentary about your store’s operations, the products you sell or the service you’ve provided in the past, but it’s this very element that makes the strongest argument for getting into social media and doing it right, because the trust it will ultimately engender will speak more loudly than any marketing campaign you could create elsewhere.

C2C Communications Solutions

With C2C, integrated email and social media marketing is a cornerstone, not an after-thought.

Much like email, or web templates, social media templates are available and can be used on the fly based on the rules being executed in the Rules Engine. So, for example, if your visitors are clicking on a lot of products in your Category X and you want to share a tweet or facebook post about the hot items on your site, it would be nice to know that these messages could be automated with links tracking back to the site to gauge their effectiveness. Additionally, as people like your site, you can make special offers available to them, or share with them new products even before your emails are sent out. Sharing a site is also available with C2C, the process of having someone post a Facebook message about a product they like, or something on the site that interests them is just free marketing. This type of recommendation is worth more than its weight in gold to your bottom line, especially if this individual has tons of FB friends.

As such, the TRUE power of social media marketing is not in the comments YOU make about your store and products, but rather what visitors say about them. With C2C social bookmark campaigns, you can readily select the social media sites you want to target and allow your visitors to post their own comments about interesting items that they have found on your site. Offering visitors the opportunity to earn reward points, or discounts if a certain number of their friends visit the site is an added incentive for them to spread the word and as I said earlier, the best part is that this is FREE marketing and it’s recommendations from visitors to THEIR friends which is much more likely to generate a unique visit than unsolicited comments from the store’s owner would.

In the end, C2C is a unique system that allows you to decide how you want YOUR store’s operations to work. It is not limited by the extend of the shopping cart itself, or the add-on modules themselves, but is purely based on what you want to accomplish as unique as that may be.

Next week we’ll take a look at Shopping Cart Abandonment and some mechanisms you can use to help rescue a sale both before and after they leave your site.

Better Recommendations by Knowing Your Customers

In our first installment of this series, we discussed knowing your visitors and spelled out a number of different scenarios in which you may want to target these customers. In this segment, we are focusing on making the products you sell more relevant to their needs.

Knowing your customers is one thing, especially where you can discern their buying patterns and habits, but whether you can tell directly what they care about, or whether you need indirect information to understand them, both are likely to affect the types of recommendations your store should make.

Making the Best Recommendations

There are two methods for determining this information – implicit and explicit means. Implicit information would be the pages they view, the time spent on those pages, the items they click on and place in their basket and finally the actual purchases they make. Explicit Information would be the orders they place, the types of products they tell you they are interested in, the questions you ask and that they answer on the website.

This is a key factor for Click2Customer: NEVER ask a question unless you are prepared to do something with the answer. If you ask a visitor to “tell us how we can make the store better” and they give you a laundry list that you ignore, that visitor is not likely to be happy about future inquiries from you. Switch it up and make the changes that that visitor mentioned, or explain to them afterward which ones you did implement and why you didn’t do others and watch that visitor become a customer quickly!

But this post is supposed to be about making targeted recommendations, so let’s get into that in much more detail. To be sure, both implicit and explicit types of data factor into making targeted recommendations, but there’s a third consideration and that’s finding like-minded people to better enhance the recommendation process. The C2C system uses all three of these paradigms in creating the very best targeted recommendations for your customers.

Not all scenarios are created equal. Creating recommendations is more than just saying, “Customers who bought X also bought Y”. This 1st level recommendation merely states that other people bought a couple of things like the thing you’re looking at…other than that, we’re not being any more intelligent about what you might want or need than that. This is hardly the best recommendation to make and usually equates to a failed conversion.

Generating Targeted and VALUABLE Recommendations

The C2C Recommendations Engine uses over 30 different facets such as time of day, number of pages visited, the types of pages (category or products), and the actual pages themselves, the number of visits and/or past purchases, the location of the buyer, where the buyer came from and many other factors, all of which contribute to making the most valuable recommendations possible. The problem, of course, is that no human being can or wants to go through all that data to figure out whether product A will sell to Customer Y better than product B, but thankfully recommendation algorithms can be constructed to make this easy for the retailer.

Targeted Recommendations

Ultimately, targeted merchandising comes down to making the very best “guess” possible with all of the available information as to what the customer wants and putting it in front of them early and often during their visit. Making this a reality for your store will depend in large part to your commitment to being all things to all people.

Most targeted recommendations vendors will claim to have “the solution” for targeted recommendations, but regardless of the algorithms that they purport to have that are highly specialized for your industry and store, the bottom line is that they all basically do the same thing. Personalized Recommendation Solutions, such as the C2C Essentials Recommendations Engine, collect on-site analytics based on the pages your visitors are traversing, your product catalog data and mix it with their “secret sauce” to create targeted recommendations.

The details, or efficacy is in the “secret sauce” — the shopping algorithms they employ to identify and create targeted recommendations. Most algorithms offer standard “Customers who bought X also bought Y” capabilities, but more detailed analysis and discovery of trends are what will truly raise your conversions. Profiling your customers/visitors is a key component to this type of solution, because it’s at least as important to understand what people are NOT buying as to discover what they are. There is never a test that does not yield some result that is valuable in one form or another.

With C2C Essentials, you have a number of options to do this. You can employ our flat rate Quickstart module that provides some “out-of-the-box” setups and ready-made integrations with your store, so that you can take advantage of just these recommendation features, or you can use more of the integrated feature sets we have in our Professional or Enterprise offerings which include email marketing, shopping cart abandonment and many other features, all of which provide avenues for adding targeted recommendations based on the buyer’s individual purchase history, as well as, what your other shoppers on your site are viewing and buying. In the end, adding targeted recommendations to your site and customer communications gives you yet another opportunity to drive sales, which is why we recommend them to any retailer who is looking to increase their sales conversions and/or the average order value of their sales.

Click2Customer Quickstart

Next week, we’ll focus on keeping the lines of communication open and how continuing to engage with your customers and visitors is the best way to keep your brand alive in their eyes.