Feb15

Retailers: What’s your Pinterest strategy?

By Artemis Berry, Senior Director of Content and Community, Shop.org | Published: February 15, 2012
Be the first to comment | Posted in Retail Companies, Social Media

We have a fresh niche social site to talk about, and its making a huge splash. Last week, we saw reports that Pinterest has hit 10 million unique monthly U.S. visits. Reports for the week of January 16, 2012 monitored the site traffic as high as 17 million unique monthly U.S. visits. It’s addicting, it’s social, and it’s driving tons of site traffic. So what is Pinterest?

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What is Pinterest?

The millions of people using and visiting Pinterest everyday are there to do one of two things: users can share their favorite things, people, thoughts, or ideas from all over the web on virtual “boards”; and a person can monitor their board’s activity or “repin” from the people or brands that they follow. Thanks to a beautiful, constantly refreshing interface, each visit to Pinterest can be equally memorable as it is unique.

What does this mean for retailers?

I was still figuring out the proper pronunciation while I started to create boards dedicated to my favorite things.  It’s drawing users in with its simple, yet stunning web design – all empowered with beautiful products and impactful imagery. And, most importantly, it’s the talk of the digital world. CNN and Mashable have given the online pinboard a ton of coverage and praise already. As new data continues to emerge showing who is using it and how, Pinterest has quickly developed into the latest-darling of our online world.

For retailers, it’s time to watch what users are doing - especially if you are a home improvement, bridal, or high fashion apparel retailer – and then create your first boards. How do Pinterest users want and expect brands to share with them? The power behind Pinterest is the ability to share merchandise with the simple power of visual imagery. I believe that a presence on Pinterest is not about having a particular strategy, but rather all about how we effectively listen and engage with all of our consumers across all kinds of social platforms – from Facebook to niche social bookmarking, suchas wish list or web discovery sites like Pinterest, Discoveredd, Svpply, and Nuji. To jump start your efforts, check out Mashable’s list of five ways brands can use Pinterest to boost consumer engagement.

Pinterest itself has identified a number of “best practices” that brands should follow, including pinning on their boards from various sources. Think of complimentary products or design inspiration, repinning from other boards and brand followers, and create multiple boards to cover different topics, interests, products, and inspirations.

Which retailers already have a presence on Pinterest?

Take a peek at how these 13 retailers are using the platform in unique ways for their brands:
American Eagle
Etsy
Gilt Groupe (Gilt Home)
Gap
ideeli
Lowe’s
Nordstrom
Rue La La
Threadless
Urban Outfitters
West Elm
Williams-Sonoma
World Market

How will sites like Pinterest impact e-commerce specifically?

According to Experian Hitwise data shown in an infographic from Shop.org member Monetate, this social “pinning” website is driving more traffic to U.S. e-commerce sites than Google+. And earlier this month, Mashable posted a study which said total referral traffic from Pinterest now beats YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace – combined. Pretty impressive for a website that launched and closed beta less than 11 months ago.

For niche markets of curators, bakers, brides, home decorators and designers and fashionistas, Pinterest is all the rage. I believe we will continue to see a blending of social sharing and e-commerce sites all over the world – which will push marketers to think beyond the walls of of their website to engage consumers and bring our brands to life. Retailers should be asking:

  • Are we selling products worth sharing? Do we make it easy to share products on sites like Pinterest?
  • Do we have complimentary content like design or decorating tips, fashion inspiration, and/or recipes if we sell products that compliment those products categories?
  • Do we know what our customers like to share online?
  • And most importantly, are we listening - and eventually responding – to customers who post about our products?

The nearly instant (and for now, consistent) growth of a site like Pinterest is another reason for retailers to have their social engagement and e-commerce brand messaging in sync. It’s only a matter of time before a retailer creates a dynamic and engaging online pinboard - and the next social sharing darling helps reinvent the way we think about engaging customers. And lastly, retailers should consider taking risks to be where your community is even if those new, niche communities don’t become the next Facebook or Twitter. Take risks and make the investment as a part of the cost of doing business in this social, crowdsourcing world we live in.

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Feb09

Online shoppers to tap smartphones, tablets for Valentine’s Day shopping

By Fiona Swerdlow, Head of Research, Shop.org | Published: February 9, 2012
Be the first to comment | Posted in Marketing, Mobile

Valentine’s Day presents a smart opportunity to boost Q1 sales, and the signs from consumers are encouraging. According to NRF’s 2012 Valentine’s Day survey by BIGinsight, almost two-thirds (62.2%) of U.S. online shoppers plan to celebrate the holiday, dishing out treats such as candy, cards and flowers to everyone from their spouse or significant other to family members, co-workers, friends – even pets. As for higher ticket items, one in five plans to buy jewelry, spending an average of $157.76, and over a third will splurge on an evening out, expecting to spend an average of $74.78.

Following the recent holiday rush, I’m counting on retailers to have taken the month of January to fine tune or even overhaul entirely their smartphone and tablet offerings and marketing strategies for this occasion. Luxury brands such as Swarovski and David Yurman are pulling out all the stops to entice us to indulge our loved ones next week. In the process, these brands are raising the bar for the smartphone and tablet experiences that all retailers provide their customers.

Among online shoppers who plan to celebrate Valentine’s Day this year, almost half (46%) own a smartphone, and almost one in five (17%) own a tablet device. Not surprisingly, quite a few of these online shoppers will be using these devices as part of their shopping process:

  • One quarter of smartphone owners expect to research products and compare products on their phone, and about one in ten figure they’ll purchase products and redeem coupons. Of course, the smartphone shines as the go-to reference for anyone, well, on the go, so one in five will be looking up retailer information such as location, store hours, and the like. Lacoste has found that close to half of their store locator visits originate with mobile devices, which, they add, is aided by integrating social media on every mobile page.
  • One-third of tablet device owners will research products and compare prices, and one in five anticipates actually purchasing their gifts on the device, as well as looking up information about the retailer.

If you think your mobile strategies - one for mobile and another for tablet devices, of course - could use some revamping, start planning now for upcoming retail holidays to test various elements and tactics. Easter this year is April 8 – only 8 weeks away – with Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and all-important Back to School in rapid succession thereafter. Agile retailers – whether they’re your direct competitors or not – are only continuing to invest for yet better customer experiences. Survey other retail mobile sites and apps and resolve to learn, test and fine tune. Analyze what each device is really good for – and thus what your goals are for each. While some goals may overlap, we were surprised last year when retailers we surveyed told us that, at the time, their objectives for these two very different devices were largely the same.

For some terrific ideas on optimizing your tablet format, you can learn some useful tips from Resource Interactive’s tablet design expert Stephen Burke, who recently spoke at the Shop.org First Look Track. His observations are critical to sharpen the tablet experience for your customers. Enjoy the mobile ride this year!

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Feb07

Talking with…Forrester Research VP and Principal Analyst Brian Walker

By Fiona Swerdlow, Head of Research, Shop.org | Published: February 7, 2012
Be the first to comment | Posted in IT/Operations

A retailer’s thinking these days can be dominated by smartphones, tablet devices, social media, social commerce, new payment systems and numerous other emerging technologies. However, much of that activity ultimately directly impacts the website itself, so retailers cannot afford to overlook fundamentals of running their online business, such as site maintenance, load testing, and replatforming. I talked with Brian Walker, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, to get his expert views on getting these fundamentals in top shape for 2012.

Our industry was reminded last year that site launches and re-launches in 2011 are no less immune to problems than in early e-commerce days ten, even fifteen, years ago. Anyone who has replatformed empathizes entirely with the huge amount of work involved before – and also after – relaunch. What can we learn as a community from these recent experiences?

Tuning a platform, and even more importantly the integrations with your other systems, is a challenge. Testing methodologies and technology have advanced – there is a lot of rigor there – yet we continue to see new challenges. We need to realize that the traffic is massive, relative to where we were just a few years ago. Customers can now react immediately to an email, a TV ad, or a viral campaign on Facebook on their phone, their tablet, etc. Target’s problems with their Missoni event caught them off guard because the test cases did not anticipate the very high number of items customers put in the cart, together with high conversion rates, and that on top of the spike in traffic from a very successful marketing campaign. By the way, their stores were also ill-prepared, which exacerbated the website’s problems as those customers who lined up at the stores hopped on their smartphones. Hindsight may be 20/20, but it is easy to see how smart people could have missed it. Bottom line – you need to limit the variables in a replatforming project launch, including testing and tuning with modest traffic before peak season. The timing of a launch is important here, but there will be unexpected problems. Plan on them happening and prepare your organization and management for it.

Of course, the $6 billion Cyber Week last December also proved trying for a number of retailers. Are site outages simply a function of too many good deals attracting too many customers – or is there something more fundamental going on?

I think it is difficult to generalize here, but I do think we are at the point where customers are interacting with companies in different ways and we have to adjust how the systems that support web, mobile, and digital interactions and transactions are built. Commerce technology must be hosted in an elastic and scalable environment. How we engineer and test these systems has to evolve, and how we plan and execute our marketing campaigns, has to get much smarter. Blasting your email file, texting all your SMS opt-ins, posting on Twitter, and using a press release to announce some amazing deal may bring down your site. What if Amazon did that with Lady Gaga’s latest album? Well, they did, and their site could not handle it. You need to test, measure, and adjust something like that to carefully monitor the sites ability to handle the traffic. That level of coordination is critical between marketing and the teams who are ensuring the technology is performing as designed.

So, if it isn’t just a matter of load testing, which are some of potential “weak links” that retailers need to find and tune to stabilize their sites?

It is certainly not a matter of just load testing. Everyone has their forecasts and have an idea of what they need to support. Sites get load tested at three to five times the peak forecasted traffic and order volumes. But like the Target Missoni example, it is difficult to account for all the variables in an annual test. Certainly smart business analysts and engineers can anticipate most of the test cases. But if it were just a matter of that, sites would not go down. Everyone needs to own site up-time and performance. Marketers, merchants, web developers, engineers all need to have an eye to what can happen based on their decisions and communicate and work with their hosting support and quality assurance folks.

What’s the best way to diagnose those weak spots in one’s e-commerce system?

Monitoring tools both within the data center and out on the edge are critical to understanding the performance of the commerce systems and integrations. API monitoring tools also have improved and will become increasingly more important. Companies should budget for the analysts and developers to actively debug and tune the system and environment for 2 months after a launch, and schedule regular monitoring times thereafter. Do not make the mistake of doing the big load test with test traffic and orders, launching your site and mobile applications, and then assume everything should be good. The integrations, processes, configurations, and customizations make for a lot of complexity which may not appear immediately or be tested with your test cases.

Overall, what’s your site platform advice to retailers for 2012? What must retailers do – and, perhaps, what should they leave alone – if anything?

From a stability and performance standpoint, retailers need to budget for site performance and stability optimization. Budget for disaster recovery services, infrastructure, implementation, and testing. And do not be so aggressive on project launches so close to your critical sales and marketing events. I have advised clients to wait to launch their new site until after the holidays and January clearance sales. This is hard to do when you want to drive the new car instead, but if you have not driven that car and know how well it can perform, you may be better off driving the old one instead until you have a better opportunity to test and tune the new one. Your metrics may actually be better since you are not throwing your customers a curve ball with a redesign during your biggest and most important sales period.

Since it is likely that every retailer at some point may encounter site downtime – for whatever reason – what’s your advice for managing that time period while the site is down? 

If you run the business, educate yourself on the issues, the what-ifs, and be prepared to be the commander-in-chief if something goes wrong. Have a plan for how you will communicate with your vendors, your internal stakeholders, and of course most importantly your customers. Your customer contact center may be the first to know there may be an issue, or maybe today it is your social media marketer who is monitoring Twitter. Heaven forbid it is the CEO who calls up and says “it looks like the site is down.” That really happened to me once – don’t let it happen to you. Be prepared with a plan for how you discover, validate, communicate, delegate, and resolve these problems.

Your colleague, Carrie Johnson, last year noted in her “Benchmark Your eBusiness Strategy and Results” report five key metrics with which e-businesses should guide and track their progress. Two of those – annual e-business budget, and number of staff dedicated to the online division – likely have a big impact on the operations and IT part of a retail business. Are you finding that retailers are devoting a large enough budget and enough dedicated people to developing, maintaining, testing and fine-tuning e-commerce systems to avoid problems?

E-commerce budgets are increasing, though e-business leaders feel they still fight the perception that the Web should be a lower-cost and lower-overhead operation. The real dollars are becoming meaningful and team size has grown, but budgets are still often below where they need to be to invest in the core technology capabilities and build their teams to support a growing multichannel business. And even if they have the money they find it hard to hire the talent, especially in technology and analytics roles. To mitigate these challenges and increase business agility, we see more e-business leaders relying on outside services teams and cloud-based technology solutions to augment their teams and fill in the gaps in capabilities they need to compete.

 

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Feb01

How digital will impact the next generation of in-store shopping

By Fiona Swerdlow, Head of Research, Shop.org | Published: February 1, 2012
2 Comments | Posted in Marketing, Mobile, Retail Companies

Retail’s BIG ShowBryan Eisenberg always provides fresh insight, and his bold opening during the “Future Shopper” session at Shop.org’s First Look Track proved no different as he started, “The future is here – it’s just not widely distributed yet.” While most of us have an inkling that the next generation of consumers is growing up with high expectations, it was still a bit startling to hear a raft of them (via a video) tell us what they’ll expect from us as retailers and brands going forward.

For perspective, Eisenberg gave the audience a “super duper condensed history of marketing, commerce and connectivity”, first juxtaposing images of a Roman coin with a credit card and payment by phone (my, how far we’ve come). The logistics and communications evolution has been rapidly evolving, too, of course – think of the path from the Gutenberg press to catalog retail to Amazon’s first home page, through online ads and social media, for example.

With this condensed history in mind, Eisenberg examined how marketing has been redefined. With increasingly demanding consumers, marketing is now much more about pull than old-style marketing push. Some companies such as Amazon and Zappos are foregoing classic marketing altogether, instead making an optimal customer experience their marketing strategy and plan instead (talk about culture convergence).

So, if this means “the end of business as usual”, what’s ahead for retailers? Eisenberg cited a number of evolutions that retailers need to keep an eye on, but the overarching theme is “Interactive Communications + Data = Increase in Relevance”. Eisenberg detailed what the future shopping experience might look like:

  • Smartphones will synch up with a set top box in your house. The point here is expressly about utility – it is not about having hundreds of channels to choose from. Rather, the set top box knows what we like, as well as what we actually use and need.
  • Webcams that give consumers “touch and shop” functionality, especially as webcams themselves become more sophisticated.
  • “How will you MS Kinect?” Eisenberg asked the audience, then demonstrated the “connect and share” scenario of two friends simultaneously in front of their screens at home, trying on and discussing various dresses for an upcoming evening out.
  • Paper ads going interactive. Eisenberg demonstrated how “all media is digitizing” with a video of an I-Ad in magazines, whereby the reader places his smart phone on top of a specific spot on the magazine ad (in this case for insurance company Axa), at which point part of the ad comes to life via a rather entertaining video. (“Think [also] about kids who try to use touch screen motion on a paper magazine,” Eisenberg added, underscoring the idea that future consumers will likely ignore entire a static ad, altogether.)
  • Mobile. Already impacting the online retail world, Eisenberg emphasized that mobile is all about relevance to the individual user. “It doesn’t matter if mobile isn’t driving revenue directly,” he noted, adding “Up to 50% of all purchases in a store are influenced by a mobile phone. [And] 65% of mobile consumers say they want to see more personalized ads.” As for those in-store searches consumers conduct, Eisenberg asked retailers if they’re leveraging the search data that people are using when they’re in one’s store? Think of the nuggets and insights waiting to be discovered so that you can learn and adapt store offerings and information to meet customer needs that they’re voicing via search. “The truth is inevitable,” he stated emphatically, “You can’t block information or access in-store without people just leaving your store and going elsewhere.”

So what should retailers do next? Eisenberg lamented that, “the future is almost here” – and yet so many companies are in “wait and see” mode, wondering whether they should test or not, should they start a mobile strategy or not, dive into analytics or not?  Instead, take a hint from Google, which is already operating in “future state” mode: “We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: we know where you are, we know what you like.” (Eric Schmidt’s IFA Keynote, September 2010)

Per Eisenberg, here’s what retailers need to be doing right now:

  • Think cross-channel. Consumers don’t care about channels, so forget channel vs. channel. For example, Best Buy includes customer ratings on price tags in stores. Ratings and reviews are popping up in store displays and on packaging everywhere.
  • Start testing and adapting. Two examples that Eisenberg cited to inspire the audience to think “future state” now included CScout in Japan and Tesco in South Korea.  Example 1:  Within the CScout in Japan, the consumer picks up a hangar with a specific pair of jeans, which starts a video relevant to that particular product (so, a customized in-store experience relevant to you and the product in which you’re interested).  Example 2:  On the theme of “Will you take risks?”, Tesco (renamed “Home Plus” locally) in South Korea decided to let the store come to the people, rather than opening more physical locations. How so? The company developed virtual stores in everyday life, like in subway stations, by using QR code technology on billboards designed to look like a grocery shelf stocked with many household staples. People waiting for the subway could shop the billboard with their smartphone, pay for their purchase, then have the groceries delivered to their home. Online sales increased 130%, and the number of registered users grew significantly also.

Are you motivated by these fascinating examples of the future shopper? If so, what will you be testing and trying next?

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Jan26

Shop.org Exec Director shares thoughts on digital retail’s ‘critical juncture’

By Margaret Case Little, Director, NRF | Published: January 26, 2012
1 Comment | Posted in @Shop.org, Events

Retail’s BIG ShowLast week’s Shop.org presence at Retail’s BIG Show – which featured a full track devoted to trendspotting and predictions in the digital retailing space – found the perfect introduction in retail veteran (and current Shop.org Executive Director) Vicki Cantrell. Cantrell shared inspiring and motivational thoughts for the hundreds of digital retailing professionals in the room,  but also focused on the “critical juncture” the digital retail industry is facing today in three main areas: globalization, personalization and organization.

Watch the video below for Vicki’s full remarks including her advice to digital retailers at all level for preparing for the future of the industry.

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