Shop.org Blog

Entering this shopping season I was asked by several friends in (non-competing) etail businesses for thoughts, ideas, or tips to increasing online conversion. So I thought I’d capture some of my thoughts here.

My strongest advice to grow and sustain online results is to understand your customer (and act accordingly), and to build a culture of strong measurement, rigor and accountability. (Must read book: “Execution”).

However, if you’re looking for some quick ideas to improve conversion, below are some ideas I’ve seen work…

First, some context… There are essentially 5 customer purchase questions that are critical to answer if you want to improve conversion:

Can I find the item I’m looking for? – The benefits of search engine marketing is that most visitors come to your site to find a specific item or shop a category. Product selection and brand choice aside, the easier it is for them to find this first product they are shopping for, the less ‘leakage’ you will get.

Can I find something that interests me? – Whether visitors start looking for a specific item and continue to shop, or someone comes to your site on to do ‘shopping’, you need to make sure they find products that are tempting to buy. Products that are popular, cool, interesting, differentiated, and low priced.

Do I really want this product? – In the process of “A.I.D.A.”, this is “Desire” stage. Do visitors really have the desire to buy that product. You obviously have to answer all relevant questions, but moreover, provide the details in a compelling way to persuade a customer to buy. Why this product, how does it help me, and why now?

Can I get it for the right price? – Let’s face it, the Internet is the great price equalizer. Have you seen Froogle, epinions, shopping.com, deal.com, and the popularity of coupon sites? So, you need to have a good price, but moreover, can do a few things to convince prospects you have a great price…no need to go elsewhere.

Can I trust this company? – Unless you’re like Land’s End, enjoying 70% repeat business from familiar customers, you have to convince new prospects that you are a trustworthy company. Online shopping is growing fast, but shoppers are still afraid of working with a no-name brand, especially if the site looks ‘sketchy’. Familiarity and trust in a brand is one of the top 3 obstacles to buying from an online retailer.

Can I buy easily? – This is where usability and the art of persuasive reassurance are critical, starting from the home page and ending at checkout thank you page. There are many opportunities for the visitor to rethink their purchase along the way. The above questions are critical to resolve, but along the way, if the visitor gets stuck, none of the work you’ve done will make a difference. It’s just too easy for a frustrated online user to decide ‘to come back later’ – unfortunately, they rarely do.

Within these questions, or stages of purchase, here are some top suggestions to help increase online conversion:

Can I find that item I’m looking for?

• Tune your internal search engine to match top search terms to product pages
• Put top sellers on home page. People buy on impulse or recommendation.
• Match the landing page to the marketing campaign. Use vanity urls for offline advertising.
• Test your categories, naming and navigation with customers. They’re less intuitive than you think.

Can I find something that interests me?

• Put top sellers on home page
• Add related items to a product view
• Add relevant, topical-based shopping navigation or search
• Add interactivity to pull visitors into your site or a page

Do I really want this product?

• Display larger product pictures
• Show the product in action
• Headline the results your product promises
• Feature benefits in the copy
• Make it easy to read – bullets, short sentences/paragraphs, conversational.
• Add substantiated recommendations (“4 out of 5 dentists…”)

Can I get it for the right price?

• Add a limited time promotion to a product or category
• Use Free Shipping (#1 online promotion)
• Show a good, better, best options
• Show comparisons to competitors
• Slash through pricing
• Repeat the deal or promotion on every page

Can I trust this company?

• Clean up the site design
• Add testimonials
• Add security certifications
• Add affiliations
• Get listings in BizRate, Froogle, Epinions, etc.
• Show your personality
• Increase the font size
• Less is more
• Highlight your money back guarantee
• Include privacy, contact us, about us pages.
• Add a phone number

Can I checkout easily?

• Add a call to action on every page
• Copy the best-practices in cart and checkout
• Add reassurance statements (security, guarantee, etc.)
• Add a phone number on every page

Each of these warrant several pages of explanation and exploration. This is a primer for things to think about. If you’d like more details on any of these ideas, or if you are interested in a site evaluation, email me.

Are online product reviews relevant and credible? Another way you could ask this question is do you trust offline word of mouth from friends and acquaintances. And are online reviews as credible as offline word of mouth?

According to a study by MIT and University of Michigan they found a high correlation between offline word of mouth and online reviews for movies:

Another interesting finding is the higher correlation of offline word of mouth to online word of mouth compared to offline word of mouth to critics reviews.

This doesn’t surprise me. Usually when I talk to friends about a movie I hear similar feedback. Now a woman may give me slightly different ‘perspective’ on a romantic comedy than her husband ?, but the general recommendation is nowhere near as diverse as critics’ reviews. See the reviews on Invincible, from B+ to D+.

Ultimately, the question for authenticity is relevant for online reviews. There is the possibility of shills, fraud, and ‘astroturfing’. The truth is, with over 40 clients and hundreds of thousands reviews, we don’t see much fraud (and we’re getting pretty good at catching them). Of course, nothing is fool proof.

With the growth of consumer-generated content, this will continue to be a focus for us to stay ahead. It’s also why our solution includes several fields to add context to the review. In usability studies we find that provides shoppers with review relevance as well as *reviewer* relevance.

The Edelman group found that ‘trust in someone like me’ has tripled over the last two years. The key phrase here is ‘someone like me’. Shoppers identify with the reviewer based on the content of the review, user attributes, and product attribute ratings. I would also assert the community of customers and shoppers are the best judges of authenticity and relevance.

With helpfulness votes (which is sortable) and abuse reporting, shoppers themselves can ‘smell’ fraud. We find many of our clients’ customers are compelled to jump in with their own review when a review that is ‘off’ is posted. So between our content analysts (we read every review and review several factors for fraud) and customers, we can maintain a high standard of authenticity.

Last week was Shop.org’s Annual Summit in New York. It was a great show…2,200 attendees vs. 1,500 last year. Many new attendees. eCommerce is booming.

I led a panel at the Web 2.0 Boot Camp the first day of the show where we shared new technologies to help online retailers reach a market who are ignoring advertising and marketing.

From Meebo that provides instant messaging within a web site to Dotomi that customizes ads based on their last visit to your site to Allurent that presents product content in an ‘alluring’ way! The one day “boot camp” for Web 2.0 was a showcase of strategies, tactics and technologies to reach the increasingly connected, informed and over-advertised market.

I will go on record to say this Shop.org event was an inflection point for retailers…or perhaps better put, a wake-up-call. Over the past year there have been topics at other shows related to consumer generated content, social media, Web 2.0 and word of mouth. However, at the event last week I think we’ve reached an apex.

This is the largest event of the year for Shop.org. The event started with an entire day focused on Web 2.0, followed by the regular agenda with four of the top speakers Shop.org invited (not including Brett or myself) who talked about word of mouth and how the market is different now.

• Seth Godin (author of Purple Cow, Small is the New Big) – Advertising and spamming don’t work. What’s left? Getting referenced by others by doing something unique.
• Barry Schwartz (author of Paradox of Choice) – There are too many choices. Help customers filter and reduce choice.
• Kelly Mooney (President of Resource Interactive) – Millenials are multi-tasking, short-attention-span, trust-one-another shoppers
• Bryan Eisenberg (author of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark) – Customers are in control. No longer like Dog’s responding to our commands of advertising…they are like finicky cats.

Kelly Mooney had a fantastic presentation featuring video diaries of Millenials who are the new bulge of spending power. In the words of one young shopper, “I’m trained now to ignore ads”. Eyetracking heatmaps confirm this. Interestingly, these young buyers want to ‘fit in’.

They won’t buy without looking for justification, whether that be from their friends or from people like them. This is consistent with the Edelman study that found “Trust in someone like me” has tripled in the last 2 years.

I believe the behavior to turn to others for shopping advice is a common theme for all shoppers today. We recently released the results on a joint study with iPerceptions and CompUSA that uncovered 81% of CompUSA visitors believed ratings and reviews were important when they are researching or planning a purchase.

These are exciting times. We (and our clients) are learning, experiencing, evolving, growing and optimize C2C (customer to customer) marketing. And at some level, the new strategies for this new market are not just relevant for retailers, but all B2C, B2B, manufacturers, and service companies.

You can learn a lot from surveys. In a multiple choice question, the survey writer thinks through all possible answers to a strategic question. Therefore, this list of answers is typically a starting point for many strategic options when faced with that question.

For example, I was sent a survey on web metrics. It asked how we use web metrics…and thereby listed a number of options to utilize web metrics in our business.

• Measuring conversion rates
• Measuring online revenue and sales related metrics
• Understanding visitor behavior
• Measuring the usability of the Website
• Measuring the effect of our marketing spend
• Measuring return on investment for the entire Website
• Correlating Web data with other types of data
• Sharing Web data throughout the company
• Incrementally improving our Website by leveraging available data
• Reporting on basic traffic metrics (hits, page views, visits)
• Identifying unforeseen opportunities online or offline
• Having a data solution in place, regardless of its actual usage

Now for the important questions: Which ways are you using web data, or more importantly, not using? Which ones will drive the biggest impact in your business?

Let’s be honest. Maintaining healthy marketing & IT relationships is challenging.

As CMO Magazine writes:

Marketers battle regularly with the other departments in their organizations. Marketing vs. Technology is a cage match between ignorant marketing people who expect technological miracles immediately and the propeller-heads who talk only about the benefits of some coding philosophy that no one this side of the Klingon empire really understands.

I think there are several causes for the strain between marketing and IT…

• IT has ideas on functionality and technologies, which may or may not meet customer or business objectives.
• Marketing typically doesn’t understand what is possible, nor seeks to understand technology.
• IT budgets are constrained, restricting marketing who have more ideas than they have resources.
• Each group sits in another part of the building, and rarely talk.
• Neither marketing nor IT understand each others’ jobs or language.

But at the core of the challenge between any two groups is communication and relationships.

The result? An “over the fence” interaction culture. Marketing sends requirements over the fence (or via email), and IT sends deliverables over the fence…resulting in miscommunication, missed deliverables, and blame shifting by both parties.

In my experience, effective relationships between Marketing and IT requires each side to be:

• Informed
• Interested
• Accountable
• YBH? (Yes, but how)

Here are 9 insights I’ve had that help develop a “culture of effectiveness” between marketing and IT

1. Establish executive relationships between finance, marketing and IT

Do the VP of Marketing, CTO and CFO interact? Do they meet regularly with the CEO/President regularly to discuss priorities and challenges? If this doesn’t happen, there is nowhere for the teams to go for accountability.

Marketing is responsible for driving revenue and marketing efficiency. IT is responsible for delivering capabilities on time, on budget. Both must be held accountable to the CEO and CFO for delivering. But without trust-based relationships at the top, a culture of blame occurs in the ranks below.

2. Share business goals, customer insights, and how the business works: IT

Does IT know how the business works? Do they know how marketing drives revenue, margin and saves cost? Do they understand how customers make purchase decisions?

IT will love to hear about what customers want, how the business works, and where it is going. Present functional topic brown bags or quarterly business reviews with the entire IT team. I guarantee IT has ideas that marketing can use, and this is the beginning of collaboration and understanding.

3. Agree on a prioritization methodology and process

I was once told by a developer that anything is possible…with enough time and resources! IT’s vocabulary is scope, time and resources. The business will always ask for more, delivered faster than before, to get done with less (or finance asks this). Therefore, tradeoffs are a big part of the interactions between marketing and IT.

Prioritization is inherently controversial. Therefore, when everyone is on the same page to how prioritization will occur – both the framework, process and timeline – the easier it is to agree upon a roadmap.

4. Hold weekly operations and project roadmap reviews

Each week the project leaders, development leaders, and senior management should get together to discuss progress on deliverables. This is a time where the business can give updates on results from previous projects and where the business is going.

But more importantly it is a formal, recurring cadence of accountability between the two groups. The key ingredient is senior management involvement in the status and challenges of the projects. If anything is ‘yellow’ or ‘red’, everyone should walk out of the room knowing what action to take.

5. Frequently communicate deliverables owners, dates and status

A launch date for a project is only accomplished by reaching many interim project dates. Is everyone on the same page for deliverables? And do they know who is owner for each deliverable?

If something goes wrong, how quickly does the team find out? If these status of deliverables, along with dates and owners, are frequently communicated, no one can cry foul.

6. Use and know a shared project process

Does both marketing and IT have a deep understanding of how projects are accomplished? How does a project begin, how does it launch, and what happens in between?

Whether you use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) or some other project process methodology, make sure both sides understand how it works and how the project is progressing along that process.

7. Give requirements face-to-face

I once worked for a company where the CEO paid for any 1×1 lunch between a marketer and developer. There are two reasons to work face-to-face: 1) Have you ever misunderstood or misread an email? Imagine IT really comprehending your requirements in writing. 2) Build relationships.

As a manager of product managers I once put a requirement in performance plans to spend at least 50% of their time in the IT building, working side by side (or head over shoulder) with development.

8. Encourage relationship-building activities

Along with face-to-face work (sharing requirements or working on a project), you should also try to integrate the teams during end-of-quarter celebrations, project launches, and informal get togethers.

One of the best product managers I knew joined developers ‘after hours’ for drinks. She always seemed to get more scope delivered in her projects.

9. Share project impact results & conduct project post-mortems

IT loves to see the business impact of their work. So in operations reviews, in project launch parties, in senior management reviews, be sure to share the customer and financial impact of the projects. This allows marketing to show appreciation, but for both sides, it ties a bow of self-fulfillment around a lot of hard work.

I’ve been a part of very productive IT/marketing relationships, as well as dysfunctional interactions. I’d estimate there is a 2-3x increase in scope for the same time and resources — and better quality deliverables — when both sides are interested, informed and accountable…when both sides are contributing to a culture of effectiveness.