Leader’s Blog

Online sales are expected to reach 12 percent of the total retail market by 2012, up from 6 percent, or $211.7 billion, now, according to Forrester Research.

Not surprising and most know is just the beginning of the continued growth of online shopping.

So how can companies maximize return on investment of their own online storefronts?

By optimizing their cross-sell and up-sell opportunities – fine tuning them to increase spend per transaction.

But it requires more then just personalization and product recommendations. Companies need to be able to identify trends across customer’s previous purchase behaviour and customer segments and use predictive analytics to foresee what a customer will most likely next want to purchase.

And use the ability to control cross selling and up selling across digital marketing assets, to primarily invest in the campaigns that return the highest level of engagement and close the most selling opportunities following the customer’s visit of your online storefront.

As a result of anticipating a customer’s wants, customers perceive a brand to be the one that best understand them, a deeper more compelling connection, and superior customer loyalty.

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I have worked in digital marketing long enough to remember when email marketers only option was the plain text email.  Many marketers have abandoned plain text for flashier delivery methods, but there are many reasons to once again embrace plain text.

I am not suggesting you abandon the well formatted emails you send now, but rather consider giving your plain text version some extra attention.  This article gives helpful tips on the “how” so I am going to focus on the “why”. 

Professionals and consumers are doing more and more “on the go” which means the likelihood that your email is being read on a mobile device is increasing.  A well thought out plain text email improves the chances that your email will arrive to the mobile inbox in a way that the recipients can read it.  You also need to consider the recipients who receive plain text email in their inbox due to preference or because the HTML is blocked by spam filters.  Taking the time to perfect the text version of your email can help you stand out from the crowd when many senders are ignoring plain text. 

When you accept the idea that users may not be seeing that formatted email you created you’ll realize that spending time optimizing your plain text email is going to be well worth your efforts.

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Digital advertising continues to grow as more and more customers shift to online shopping. And it’s not experimental anymore. Due to the evolution of real-time personalization and deeper customer care programs, digital media is able to transform marketing programs around a single individual.

• Paid Search is enabling advertising to get local.
• Banner Advertising is making the experience more interactive. Used as complimentary content on article pages, customers are able to become aware and knowledgeable about their products on third-party websites. The result is more completed purchases, profitability.
• Email has transformed from advertising to loyalty. Companies are able to learn from their customers and use that information to provide promotions and rewards they will most appreciate, ultimately encouraging repeat business.

It’s more then the rise of a new advertising age, it’s the rise of a target audience of one.

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Rice University set out to verify whether Facebook fan pages could have actual impact on businesses.  The case study followed a Houston bakery and café as they established a Facebook fan page and tracked the impact.  The café only saw about 5% of their regular customers become Facebook fans, but those who did become fans came more frequently and spent more than non-fans. The fan page also seemed to cultivate brand affection and loyalty.

I think this study sheds light on what all businesses can accomplish using Facebook.  The results suggest that although the café didn’t reach all customers using fan pages, there was significant impact on those they did reach.  This is a great example of “meeting your customers where they are”.  It is likely that those who did become fans where already Facebook users.  The café – rather than simply building a fan page and hoping “if we build it they will come” – used the fan page to meaningfully engage with their fans by offering giveaways and discounts.  And the campaign was effective for the target group because the café approached the tactic holistically. 

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Adequately titled “Social Commerce 101”, the article provides a great overview of how multi-channel integrated marketing can be applied to create customer experiences, specifically in the business to consumer operating environment.

What you may be left wondering after reading the article is what exactly bridges the gap between the “buzz” and the “buy”.

At face value, the article may appear to suggest that simply creating and implementing a social commerce framework will result in sales and bottom-line sales growth. But as many already know, a “build it and they will come” strategy is not a strategy at all. So then what specifically encourages user generated content, transitions it to delivering on customer’s wants, and truly results in social commerce – or in other words, sales that are driven as a result of the “buzz”?

It is the emotional drivers you create – your market positioning, your messaging and delivery. Those aspects are what typically resonates with customers and what typically motivates people to take action. For that reason, content strategy becomes a core investment to ensure your social media truly results in and drives social commerce.

Additionally, if you want to get the most return on your investment, it is wise to measure and optimize your positioning and messaging efforts to identify and focus on the exact trigger points that result in sales. For example, you may say the same thing, in the exact same way, in multiple delivery vehicles, across multiple social platforms. But it is the individual source – segmented as far down as the specific digital media asset that was served to the customer, in a specific environment – that generated the actual sale. That is your strongest bridge and where you focus on and optimize around.

Leverage your social commerce 101 lesson to begin creating customer experiences, add in compelling messaging in an engaging delivery vehicle, and in a short amount of time you will be on your way to social commerce success.

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The Sears brand has been around for over 124 years.  Reading this Chief Marketer interview with Sears’ Senior Vice President Online I was surprised to learn that they’ve been vigorously pursuing a multi-channel strategy including online merchandising, mobile commerce, and communities.  They’ve even gone as far as to open up an online marketplace, similar to Amazon.com, that allows consumers to shop directly from vendor sites.

Sears developed much of this approach based on feedback from their customers.  If you visit the MySears community site – you’ll notice that it includes everything from customer reviews and questions about products to compliments and complaints about service in the store.  I think the biggest fear companies face when embarking on an online community is the possibility of negative things being posted.  Sears has really faced this fear head on and their community includes the good, the bad, and the ugly.  What you might be surprised to read is that Sears’s customer satisfaction scores weren’t negatively impacted by the approach – they actually went up! 

Companies are beginning to realize that customers are taking to online communities to discuss products and services whether you want them to or not.  The question is will your company ignore them – or join in and be part of the conversation?

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Interactive components and digital media continue to morph and adapt as new technologies and technology platforms continue to flood the market. Penguin’s approach to publishing interactive books provides continued validation to the hundreds of other innovations that surface daily.

Additionally, approach, implementation, and new channel integration challenges continue to expand and as a result, many new specialty agencies have been created and existing agencies are quickly moving to expand their product and services offerings to take advantage of these new opportunities.  Each is going to market on a promise that they are different from their competitors which leaves marketers scratching their heads about what resources are required to solve each unique business challenge they embark on.

Although it seems complex to identify and choose an appropriate partner, it is actually quite simple if viewed from a big picture perspective.

Because at the core this is about more than the Internet, more  than interactive media, and more than emerging technology platforms. At the core of successful marketing is the holistic customer experience. Marketers can feel confident that along with all of the quickly developing technologies, trends, and platforms, the customer experience remains core to the overarching Internet, interactive, digital and traditional marketing strategy.

The actual challenge for marketers remains the same. Marketers must first plan for how these new opportunities fit into the existing customer experience then  identify resources that are best fit to holistically integrate and manage the solutions that provide the greatest benefit to the business – not from a technical standpoint, but from an experience standpoint. The technical challenges will then be a result of the strategic integration work, or one thread of the larger experience project. This of course is a best case scenario for marketers, because it puts the critical aspects of delivering success in the hands of the experience planners, which is of course where it should be.

By strategically planning and weighing the benefits and feasibility of embarking on uncharted ground and new technologies and working with best of breed experience experts, marketers will continue to position themselves and their businesses for the greatest levels of success and growth opportunities.

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Target now accepts gift card payments via mobile device at its 1,740 U.S. stores.  Card holders can enter the login and pin for the gift card online or on the mobile version of the site, and a 2D barcode appears for cashier to scan.  Target is the first national chain to incorporate mobile enabled scanning across all locations but there are several other retailers - including Starbucks and 7-Eleven – piloting similar programs in their stores.

As the ability to scan barcodes from mobile devices becomes widely available, I envision uses expanding greatly to include other functions.  This would be a powerful way for retailers or even consumer goods companies to offer coupons to customers.  Giving consumers another (and I’d argue more convenient) way to save at the register could do wonders for brand loyalty.  I would love to see this take off as a way to handle store membership cards too.  It seems as if every retail store I go into now offers me a membership card for discounts or rewards, and I have to be honest I have started to turn most of them down because I can’t fathom adding another card to my wallet or key chain.  If they could offer me a version of their membership that could be scanned from my phone when I come in, I’d probably accept every membership I was offered.

The key to this for me is that I go everywhere with my phone in hand.  A retailer or consumer goods company that allows me to more easily spend or save with a few clicks of my phone would definitely be higher on my list than one that didn’t.

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Online display advertising began as one of those memorable marketing channels that often grabbed my attention.  As the market got more crowded though, I seemed to find myself ignoring many online ads – regardless of how visually interesting I perceived them to be – typically, because they just didn’t apply to me.

Google is hoping to change that experience as a result of their acquisition of startup Teracent, developer of a series of “machine-learning algorithms that can create and customize an ad in real-time, based on user preferences and other characteristics”.

What this really means is that Google would have the ability to serve up more relevant display ads based on location, time of day, language, placement of the ad, or even which ads have performed better in a given time period.   Teracent offers an additional expanded ability that could make the ads more dynamic on the page – serving up different creative or size of ads based on the users visiting the site.

This acquisition could mean a lot for a medium that hasn’t seen a lot of innovation lately, so I – for one – am excited to see online display ads get more targeted.

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Apple’s commercial featuring their suite of small business apps peaked curiosity for many business owners and operators. A grand development many businesses face at the local sales level – a streamlined ability to process credit card transactions while out in the field. It would provide the opportunity to replace archaic processing systems with a real-time solution. And it would result in cost saving for the business. What perhaps is not as obvious, is what impact would it have on the customer experience.

That’s right, credit card processing streamlines more then business processes, it streamlines customer experiences. Real-time processing allows end-to-end transactions to be completed in a few minutes, enabling purchasers to receive their goods and services faster, and as a result receive feelings of satisfaction sooner.

And faster turn-around at the point-of-purchase leads to shortened repeat purchase cycles, meaning the customer comes back for more, more frequently – another win for the business.

So as we continue to monitor the integration and transition to in-store, on the sales floor credit card processing systems, and remote credit card processing systems, we will also continue to monitor how these transactions evolve companies’ customer engagement strategies, After all, real-time processing opens the door to whole new worlds of opportunities to engage and profit, such as real-time second chance offers, and “you may also like” opportunities – delivered through the internet, in-store, in-person.

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