53 Vital Multichannel Website/Online Marketing Tips
Here is the hyper-link to forward to your multichannel catalog and retail colleagues:
http://minethatdata.blogspot.com/2008/01/53-vital-multichannel-websiteonline.html
- Create widgets that allow your customer to create a sub-store on their own homepage (Google, My Yahoo, etc.).
- Give your customers access to their historical online visitation behavior.
- As a perk, allow your multichannel or most loyal customers to create a widget-based personalized homepage.
- Stop guessing what your customer wants --- pay CLOSE ATTENTION to the widgets your best customers put on their personalized homepage!
- Don't treat your RSS feeds like e-mail campaigns.
- Allow every store manager to create a personalized/widget-based "store page", and encourage store customers to interact with that page instead of your typical e-commerce homepage.
- Allow your best store employees to have their own personalized/widget-based "store page", and encourage your store customers to interact with that page instead of your typical e-commerce homepage.
- Have gifted employees write heartfelt blogs about your brand. Give them twenty-four months to build an audience. Keep your PR department out of this activity.
- After twenty-four months, measure the profitability of customers who interact with the blogs your employees write.
- Retail websites serve three purposes: E-Commerce, Research, and Entertainment. Decide which of these elements is most important to your customer.
- Catalog websites serve three purposes: E-Commerce, Research, and a Catalog Order Form. Decide which of these elements is most important to your customer.
- Your catalog/retail audience is homogeneous. Your website audience is heterogeneous. Merchandising a website is more difficult than merchandising a catalog, or a store.
- Divide your online audience into "segments" based on the activity that drives them to the website (i.e. visitors from Google (paid/natural, branded etc.), from E-Mail, from Catalog, from Retail, from Portals, from Shopping Comparison Sites, from Affiliates, from Widgets, from Blogs). Measure everything across sub-audiences. Merchandise to each individual audience.
- It is very likely that your customer visits your site three or four times between purchases, rendering metrics like conversion rate useless.
- Instead of measuring conversion rate, measure the probability of a prior loyal visitor visiting again this month.
- Instead of measuring conversion rate, measure the average number of visits made if a loyal visitor visits again this month.
- Instead of measuring conversion rate within one session/day, measure the probability of a loyal visitor purchasing over a seven/thirty day period of time.
- Instead of measuring conversion rate within the online channel, measure the probability of a website visitor purchasing via mail/phone/store within a seven/thirty day period of time, and add those conversions to your online conversions.
- Your website is a home with many entry doors. Customers are less and less likely to ring the doorbell to the front door.
- Use Multichannel Forensics to identify if e-commerce customers become retail customers.
- Shopping cart abandonment is not a bad thing. For many customers, the shopping cart is simply a "wish list repository", a place to hold items the customer wants to purchase in your store at a later date.
- If you want to increase the conversion rate of your website, pay attention to "ugly" websites.
- In your customer database, record the number of days since last website visit.
- In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit to all of your key landing pages.
- In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit from Google and other search engines.
- In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit from an E-mail campaign.
- In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit from Portal advertising, Shopping Comparison sites, Affiliate marketing, etc.
- In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit from a blog.
- In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit to each of your key merchandise divisions.
- In your customer database, record the number of days since the customer used your internal search function.
- Measure customer interaction with the sub-channels on your website (paid search, natural search, branded search, non-branded search, e-mail, widgets, portals, shopping comparison, affiliates, etc.).
- Once measured, target your e-mail and search marketing strategies around customer interactions with sub-channels.
- Retail Executives: Please treat your online marketing team as equal partners.
- Catalog Executives: Please treat your online marketing team as equal partners.
- Online Executives: Please meet your retail and catalog executives "half-way"!
- Similar to catalog marketing, there is a relationship between online merchandise density and sales per visit.
- Pay close attention to the items catalog buyers purchase online. Which non-catalog-advertised items are customers purchasing?
- Pay close attention to the items retail customers purchase online. Which non-retail items are customers purchasing?
- Personas are communication tools that allow your executive team to understand who is interacting with your website. Executives understand personas better than they understand conversion rates.
- Online Executives: Go "on the road". Visit every store manager, every one of your call centers and distribution centers, and evangelize your craft to those who are not immersed in it.
- Link customer behavior across multiple computers for a complete view of customer interaction with your brand.
- Try something different with e-mail marketing. Stop the "sameness" that plagues the retail/catalog industry, test anything that is not a "best practice".
- Require each executive to respond to one customer complaint per month/quarter on a "complaint blog", and actively listen to customer comments in response to executive posts.
- Require each store manager, or teams of store managers, to execute online marketing campaigns from time to time, to learn and appreciate your craft.
- Require online marketing managers to work the sales floor in your store two days per year.
- Require each store marketing manager (television, newspapers, magazines) to execute online marketing campaigns, and require these folks to measure success across all channels.
- Require each online marketing manager to execute store marketing campaigns, and require these folks to measure success across channels.
- Require store merchandisers to actively monitor "what sells online".
- Require online merchandisers to actively monitor "what sells in stores".
- Test the difference in customer behavior when marketing campaigns are integrated (same across stores/website), and when marketing campaigns are run independent of each other (different across stores/website).
- Retail executives: Your website may well be a media channel. Split your website into two parts, an e-commerce part, and a media channel. Treat each "sub-channel" appropriately. Hint: You're better at managing a media channel, your online marketing folks are better at managing the e-commerce channel.
- Web Analytics: Complement your traditional session/daily metrics with time-based metrics based on fixed groups of customers. There isn't a difference between a customer visiting four times and buying once during a month, and a customer visiting once and buying once during a month.
- The days of +25% online sales growth are winding down. If you are an online marketing executive, be ready to prove your worth in a +4% comp-sales online world.
Labels: multichannel
2 Comments:
Great post, again Kevin! One comment would be not to store the # of days since an activity, but the last date, and calculate in the segmentation tool/analysis tool the "days since" the current date. It's better for databases- less updates each day to increment a value, than storing the last fixed value. I have built a Fact that showed days between fixed points, a conversion-milestone, but if the time hasn't arrived yet, it is burdensome to the DB.
Yup, that's a good suggestion, thanks for offering it to my readers.
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