Shop.org Blog

Fundamental elements of the customer-marketer relationship are changing faster than retailers can adapt. In fact, they’ve already changed! While it seems obvious most of us are only beginning to appreciate something important: How customers interact via the Web with a brand is an experience.

Ok… seems obvious but let’s frame it in a new light that may strike you as a little odd:

At a very high (basic?) level Web retail is not about clicks, conversions, optimization… it’s not about the numbers or the metrics. It’s about your ability to create hunger, desire or capitalize on a human being’s latent intent. It’s about stimulating, comforting, rescuing and helping (etc.).

The Web is inherently interactive and increasingly social. This sounds trite and simple but it cannot be under-stated.

Recently, I suggested that authentic digital experiences must be the future of online customer acquisition and challenged the affiliate and search marketing industries to step up to the plate. This week I’m qualifying the opportunity a bit more since some are a bit skeptical. I’m also explaining why it’s urgent to start making change.

Retailers are continually hearing the mantra: “Participate and have a conversation with customers.” Why? It’s because of this newly realized element of interactivity among Web users. The power of this element is breathtaking when one considers its raw EXPERIENTIAL power… the Web’s ability to make humans feel a certain way.

According to Keller Fay Group (2008), Americans have 3.5 billion brand-related conversations per day. With a population of 300 million, that means the average American engages in over 10 such conversations per day.

We know that 8 out of these 10 is likely more influential than any advertisement or paid sponsorship. Why? Because nearly 80% of consumers trust recommendations from friends, family, and trusted sources over any form of advertising.

What are you doing to foster such conversations under your umbrella?

Perhaps you don’t see the opportunity clear enough. You may ask, “why should I bother to foster conversations?”

Here’s why: By providing customers and/or prospects with access to trusted recommendations (and other forms of authentic, relevant, engaging content) marketers stand a better chance of winning their business.

Customers are finding new ways to participate in various online activities. Sure they still love search, but they’re rapidly finding more social and participatory elements such as product reviews, product design suggestions and a new thing called “crowdsourcing” (more on that in weeks ahead) to be helpful and even fun. Remember fun? It’s powerful stuff!

The world belongs to companies that can…

1. Identify the right micro-verticals where consumers engage deeply
2. Activate new or existing consumer communities that welcome their participation
3. Make the ‘network effect’ work for them through syndication & aggregation
4. Think the way industrial designers think about ergonomics – in our case it’s form factors of media consumption

So says Jeffrey Rayport, founder of Marketspace LLC.

So how can one become one of these companies?

As new customer behavior patterns emerge new marketing practices are needed to capitalize on them. We need to create them. Customer acquisition and retention cannot survive on traditional strategies like affiliate and search marketing alone. Intercepting customers during buying processes is no longer enough.

What are these new strategies? Some call it “conversational” marketing. Whatever name you give it, this emerging practice area is all about joining in with customers – listening to them and interacting on a more intimate level.

Quite literally this translates into socializing with customers and prospects – a skill set that is a bit foreign to most marketing departments (beyond traditional market research). After all, we’re not formally trained in good listening skills or prone to making altruistic gestures. Rather, marketers expect measurable return on investment (ROI).

Some retailers will be satisfied with following the crowd, others blaze trails. This begs the question: Can you afford to wait to implement pioneering and innovative digital marketing strategies, or will you help lead the charge?

The best way to answer this question is to make sense of and prioritize these emerging, digital acquisition and retention strategies. Your decision should ultimately be based on your market’s active use of digital technologies. If a social, experiential marketing approach is right for you, begin testing now. Eventually you can vet strategies to decide which are worth continued investment.

Before all else, the key to success in today’s digital, multi-channel shopping world is a bold, new mindset. This way of thinking is what feeds new decision-making and creative strategy development processes. I admit… I’m making it sound pretty easy so we’ll get into the details on HOW to do actually dip toes in the water (safely) and experiment with social marketing in weeks ahead.

Holiday 2007 is ramping up! Though Monday probably isn’t the largest online shopping day of the year, we did see big sales jumps across many of our clients in the PPC channel, and overall.

We’ve posted some aggregated median stats by category at our blog:

Median CyberMonday Sales Up 32% (and other 11 benchmarks): Compare Your Results By Category

What did YOU see on Monday? Share what you can in the comments.

A great Q4 to everyone –

Alan

I had the opportunity to attend Google’s CommerceThink ’07 last week at the Google headquarters.  CommerceThink ’07 brought together a group of dedicated online and multichannel retail executives who ventured out of their offices in November to hear Google’s perspectives on search and multichannel retailing and to talk to each other about common challenges and what’s in store for the future.

It’s always a pleasure to get out of the office and think.  Sometimes, just 6 hours of uninterrupted time from a cross-country flight in and of itself is enough to get re-charged.  But, when you can be in a roomful of smart retailers in an environment that oozes innovation, it’s even better.  For me, there were a few key takeaways.

First, as much as our industry has grown and made progress, the challenge of measuring the off-line impact of online is still in its infancy.  Anyone who can crack the code on this can secure their retirement.  I’ve been in this industry for almost nine years and I’ve seen the conversations about this topic become more frequent and arrive in boardroom.  But, they haven’t changed.  Retailers remain frustrated with their ability to measure the impact of the Internet on anything except for online sales.

Second, even with a quarter billion dollars in online retail sales in 2007, the full impact of the Internet on retail has yet to be felt.  How much commerce is prevented simply because someone looking to buy a something still doesn’t know where they can get it when they want it?  If I’m home at 8 pm with a craving for a particular Spanish wine, wouldn’t it be great if I knew that there is a store 15 minutes from my house with a collection of Rioja that is also open until 9 pm?  What if I unexpectedly get tickets to see the Penguins v. Capitals hockey game in Washington DC and I need to find a store that sells Penguins merchandise so I can taunt the Capitals’ fans (believe me, they deserve it)?

Third, in order for retailers to be more relevant to customers both online and off-line, they will need more information about them.  If there is one thing clear from the recent behavioral targeting town hall meeting hosted by the FTC, it’s that there is more work to be done to get everyone comfortable with this equation.

You may have seen that STORES Magazine recently published its list of Favorite 50 Online Retailers.  Some interesting methodology was used to compile the list.  They asked two open-ended, write-in questions to nearly 8,000 consumers:  1. What website do you shop at most often for apparel items (clothing, shoes, accessories, etc.) and 2. What website do you shop at most often for non-apparel items (electronics, home decor, etc.)?  In my opinion, the most interesting finding was that four of the 50 retailers weren’t retailers.  They were search engines, with Google as high as #9 on the list.  Yahoo was #16, AOL was #38 and MSN was #39.

My topic for the Intermediate Search Strategy session was “natural search,” so for my presentation I focused on a couple of great tools that make your SEO efforts a little bit easier. I also talked about some ways to handle duplicate content (either within your site or or on other sites) and keyword cannibalization (when more than one of your site’s pages are competing for rankings for the same search term), because I think that it’s important to minimize these two issues when optimizing your site.

The first tool I mentioned, Xenu, is a free downloadable program that crawls whatever URL you enter. After the crawling is complete, the program generates a report detailing which links were found to be broken or not functioning, which URLs were being redirected, which URLs are valid and submittable to search engines, and much more. Xenu is great because it provides a lot of information about your site to you in a simple, relatively quick manner–all you have to do is run the report and work on other tasks while you’re waiting for it to finish. The information it provides is useful, valuable, and time-saving.

The second tool I mentioned was SEOmoz’s very own Rank Checker tool.
The Rank Checker checks the ranking for whatever URL and keyword or phrase you provide. It supports Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, as well as their foreign TLDs. The rankings are then archived so you can compare them over time and analyze position changes. While the tool does have limited free accessibility (you can monitor 5 keywords/search terms per day with a free account, while Premium Members receive unlimited access to the tool), I urged the audience to try the tool or something similar to it because I feel that it’s important to monitor your rankings regularly. Whether you use our tool, someone else’s tool, or manage the monitoring on your own, be sure to keep track of where your site’s at in the SERPs.

Regarding duplicate content, I shared ways to check and see if your site is experiencing a duplicate content problem. You can copy and paste text from your site into Google and see if other pages are popping up. Conversely, Copyscape.com has a duplicate content detector that is free in limited use. To check for dupe content within your own site, I recommended searching for “example text” site:example.com (put the content you’re searching for in quotation marks, and type your site after site:).

If you’re using licensed content and want to avoid duplicate content problems, there are a few different options. If you are the licenser, you can require that your licensees noindex, nofollow those pages so that they won’t be indexed but so that the links will will still carry value. If you are the licensee, you can embed the licensed content in iframes or you can encourage users to write original product reviews or content unique to your site.

Lastly, I touched on what to do with duplicate content/keyword cannibalization within your own site. It’s a good idea to 301-redirect any duplicate pages to the canonical source–that is, whichever page you absolutely, definitively want to rank for a specific term. You can also opt to have duplicate pages focus on unique variations of your main term (for example, you can have a “snowboards” page and a “women’s snowboards” page), but ensure that these variation pages link back to the original/main term. This tactic aids search engines into determining that the page is the best result to display for that search term. For example, if you have a Children’s Snowboards page, a Women’s Snowboards page, a Custom Snowboards page, and a Discount Snowboards page, you’d want them all to link back to whichever page you want to rank for “snowboards.”