Now Twittering: Any chance we can change the name?

Posted September 29th, 2008, by admin

We sense that the rapid evolution and adoption of Twitter in recent months has surprised a lot of people, maybe even the people who came up with the name. Somehow it doesn’t feel 100% right to say Monetate is now twittering, but monetate is now twittering, at http://twitter.com/monetate. (And we’re guessing it’s too late to change Twitter’s name.)

One reason we decided that Twitter was worth getting into was the first presidential debate. No, we’re not going to say who we were cheering for, but we will say that reading Twitter during the debate added to the experience. The immediacy of reaction and a kind of streaming commentary suggests interesting future possibilities. We’re not sure if anyone fully understands what those are yet, but we figured it was time to dip a corporate toe in the water. A business beak in the communal bird bath? Oh dear, we’d better stop right there.

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry

Test Landings and Reduced Bounce Rates

Posted September 27th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

No, we’re not talking about missions to Mars, but we are talking about bounces and landings. Specifically, we are pondering some more solid advice from Jason Burby, writing on ClickZ about the importance of e-commerce site testing, specifically the testing of landing pages:

“Testing of landing pages from campaigns, partners, and paid search can be a great place to start testing and can return a high ROI (define). Often this traffic is just dumped on a generic landing page, product page, or–worst of all–the home page. Take a look at that traffic’s bounce rate. You spend all sorts of money on that traffic, then watch it land, turn around, and immediately leave. Test different versions of landing pages that tie specifically to what they clicked on to get them to the site.”

This advice is right on the money (and following it will save/make you money). From what we have seen, there’s little doubt that something as simple as carrying a logo or phrase through from a paid search link to the point of site entry–the landing page–will increase conversions by double digits. The same goes for email campaigns. Even the best email campaigns will return better numbers if they are backed by a “post-click” strategy.

Of course, Monetate can do a whole lot more for you than simplify the testing of landing pages, but if you are looking for a quick and easy way to evaluate how your landing pages could work harder, and convert landers from bouncers into buyers, then you really should check out Monetate’s targeting capabilities. To whet your appetite, here’s a high-level look at the targeting choices offered by Monetate within the Landing category:

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Personalization, Strategy, testing

Now is the Time! A Clickz Call to Action

Posted September 22nd, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

In all the business and busy-ness surrounding shop.org we nearly missed this article titled “Optimize Your Site” by Jason Burby of Zaaz, which appeared on ClickZ about two weeks ago. Burby made several good points about the value of optimizing the retail or corporate web site to improve revenue and ROI. He also gave some practical points for how to proceed. We’ll get back to these in a separate post because the most urgent point is this: “Now is the time to test”

…we’re into fall and the holiday shopping season is just around the corner. If your business focuses on consumers, the fourth quarter most likely makes the year for you. Even if you are business-to-business, you know things slow down greatly after mid-November; you want to finish the year strong between now and mid-November. The next few months are key. Get in and make some changes and improve your site. Just a few small changes can have a significant impact.

We couldn’t agree more. And because Monetate is so easy to install–it only takes a single tag to get started–we really believe it could be the fastest route to doing some serious tweaking of your site. Right now we’re working on some step-by-step tutorials that show how things like a custom landing page test work in Monetate. These will be posted on the web site soon. In the meantime, we encourage you to review how Monetate works to get an idea of how it could work for you.

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry

Engagement Rates and Cart Abandonment

Posted September 19th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

If it feels like your online store is not performing as well as it did, even though you are getting more visitors, you might be right, and you certainly wouldn’t be alone. According to the MarketLive Performance Index there was a dramatic 20.19% decrease in engagement rates, a measure of the ratio of online shopping carts to visits, from Q2 of 2007 to Q2 of this year. This coincides with an equally dramatic 18.63% year-on-year increase in traffic.

So, more people are visiting online stores but fewer are putting items into carts. The report also shows that, from Q1 to Q2 of this year, the overall Conversion Rate fell by under 1 percent (0.76%) but the Cart Abandonment Rate increased by more than 1 percent (1.30%). This tracks with what we are hearing from our clients.

If you’re like most major e-tailers you have made big strides in search-engine optimization and traffic acquisition over the last twelve months. The result? More consumers are coming to your store but the challenge now is to engage them when they get there and keep their attention right through to the sale. Obviously, we think personalizing the site experience will help you meet that challenge, but there are additional measures you can try in concert with personalization, such as more exciting product presentation and better ways of getting the prospective buyer to the target of their search.

With the current upheavals in the economy, it’s possible that a lot of companies will look to their online stores to keep the sales coming. The good news is that the number of people shopping online continues to grow, the trick will be to convert those eyeballs into invoices.

(BTW, the cart in the picture is being placed onto the only shopping cart escalator we’ve ever seen, located in the two-story Walmart in Albany, New York.)

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry

At shop.org the Word is Personalize

Posted September 17th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

As the dust settles in Vegas after the shop.org Annual Summit 2008, the word that seems to stand out is “personalize”. That’s certainly what Dianna Dilworth thinks over at the DM News blog. Here is some of what she had to say:

And the thing on everybody’s mind at this show seems to be optimizing the personalized experience…But this sentiment wasn’t just echoed in the session hall, it was being discussed on the show floor as well…It seems like the things people have been talking about for the past year or so are now becoming more actionable.

That meshes with our impressions, and with the requests we are getting from our clients and prospective clients. I wonder if the talk at Annual Summit 2009 will be about the few remaining sites that have not implemented some form of personalization.

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry, Personalization, Strategy

Holiday Shipping, Still Time to Act

Posted September 16th, 2008, by admin

Holidays by ComputerIn light of the recent discussion about free shipping over at shop.org I was interested to read that gourmet food company Harry & David has cut prices to ship most items by 17 percent to 34 percent for the coming holiday season (e..g $10.51 off the $32.99 it would have cost last year to ship their $129.95 “deluxe” Christmas basket). According to and article in Gourmet Retailer, Harry & David will eat nearly all the cost of its shipping price cut (the pun was theirs, not mine, and there’s another one coming up).

I have used Harry & David a couple of times myself when I needed to send something special to someone special. About half of the food that the company grows or bakes is produced at, or close to, the company’s headquarters in Medford, Oregon. That’s good for quality control–which was definitely good on the packages I ordered–but it makes shipping to the East Coast expensive. According to Gourmet Retailer–and here comes that other pun–Harry & David “has gingerly expanded its network of suppliers” to reduce shipping costs and delivery times. During the holidays the company “adds distribution centers around the country…to give people faster shipping.”

This is an interesting glimpse into the workings of a company that will probably do around $200 million in web sales this year (the company ranked 80 in the Internet Top 500 for 2007). If companes like this are spending money tweaking their physical distribution arrangements to get the right blend of cost and speed without sacrificing quality of product, it has to make sense for them to also tweak their shipping offers. That’s something which is easy to do with Monetate because Monetate knows where your customers are located, even before they become your customers. Personalized shipping offers can close the sale and, because monetate is so easy to activate on an existing retail site, it could be improving your shipping offers this holiday season, without eating too much of that delicious gourmet margin.

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry, Personalization, Strategy

The Unexpected Consequences of Site Stats

Posted September 15th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

Just read an interesting piece by Chris Kerns over on the Zaaz blogs about the weird conjunction of web page stats and Google News algorithms that sparked a billion dollar stock price drop (the price recovered as the story got straightened out, but you wouldn’t wish a day like that on any company, even an airline with an annoying habit of canceling flights at the last minute).

We mention it here because a. it underlines the need to keep an eye on what your site is doing, numbers-wise and algorithm-wise, and b. this debacle occurred shortly after we uttered words of caution about Google Alerts and reputational risk.

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry

Frequently Asked Questions (About Monetate)

Posted September 10th, 2008, by admin

The Frequently Asked Questions about Monetate is undergoing an overhaul.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them as comments here. We’ll get them answered.

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry

The Free Shipping Debate: A middle path

Posted September 7th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

We are delighted to see the blog at shop.org advancing the debate over free shipping offers. David Bolotsky, Founder and CEO, UncommonGoods, weighed in with a well-argued post titled One Retailer’s View on Why Not to Offer Free Shipping. Here’s an edited version of the comment we submitted to the shop.org blog :

A well-argued piece David, with a lot of points that all online retailers should certainly consider carefully. Of course, there might be a middle ground for some e-tailers, particularly when shipping costs are variable. One might choose to make an offer of free shipping to certain customers in order to close a sale but without giving up as much profit.

Monetate employs customer and warehouse location data to enable offers of free shipping during the shopping session only when the cost of shipping is actually low (for example, when the customer lives within X miles of the warehouse). In other words, if you do want to offer a free shipping promotion there is no need to make it a one-size-fits-all offer.

One aspect of the debate we didn’t address in our comment is the idea that free shipping produces bigger lift than other offers of equivalent cost (e.g. a percentage discount offer). We tend to think this varies quite a bit based on the type of product and the location of the purchaser. Fortunately, Monetate makes it very easy for you, the retailer, to answer this question for yourself, based on your actual experience and not some generalized industry stats.

Whenever you create a new campaign with Monetate it automatically creates a control group. With Monetate’s Analytics module you can quickly see the effect of a free shipping offer, whether it’s a blanket offer or a personalized “intelligent shipping” offer that’s confined to customers within certain shipping zones, or one that’s based on type or brand of products purchased (perhaps to qualify for co-op advertising dollars).

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry, Personalization, Strategy

In the Market for Moms?

Posted September 5th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

With the unprecedented nomination of a mom to the Republican presidential ticket it’s interesting to note that moms in America apparently control 85% of household income. That’s according to Marketing Sherpa which just published, with fortuitous timing, Part II of its article on marketing to moms (of course, for our UK readers that would be Marketing to Mums). You can find Part I of the article here (registration may be required).

For many companies it makes a lot of sense to go after the mom market. For example, the article notes that the annual purchasing power of mothers in America is more than $2 trillion. What I found interesting in the article, apart from this staggering buying power, were two of the “5 Components of Effective Messaging,” namely:

->Component #4. Be Consistent
->Component #5. Be Relevant

I particularly like this assertion: “Consistent messaging across all channels is the only way to truly reach moms. They have to recognize the brand and message in different mediums.” This is good advice for just about any marketing campaign, but for many companies the proliferation of channels has actually made consistency harder to achieve. How often do you see campaigns that are out of sync? You click on a search result for “love seat” that promises free shipping but it takes you to a generic landing page that doesn’t say anything about love seats or free shipping.

How much better to greet consumers landing on your site from that ad with the same offer that brought them there? Even better, greet them with additional personalization, based on their geographic location and all the things that flow from that, such as their weather and the cost to you of making that free shipping offer. And don’t just greet ad responders this way. When organic search brings someone to your online store, show them offers relevant to their search term.

These are a just few of the ways that Monetate can help you be consistent and relevant, whether you are marketing to moms or their offspring.

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in Industry, Personalization

Google Alerts and Reputational Risk

Posted September 4th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

I saw an interesting post today by Linda Bustos over on the excellent Get Elastic e-commerce blog. The subject was Reputation Management. At first glance, that subject might not sound like it has much to do with optimizing the online retail experience, but when you think about it, Reputation Management deals with the fall-out from less-than optimal experiences. With the NFL season now underway, maybe a football analogy would be timely: Reputation Management plays defense for online retailers.

Suppose you run the online division of Sportz Gear, namely sportz-gear.com. A consumer has a bad experience at a Sportz Gear store and puts up a web site called sportzgearsucks.com to make their feelings know to the world. That’s something you need to know about it. After all, you’re spending money on Search Engine Optimization but if consumers are seeing sportzgearsucks.com near the top of their searches for you, that is going to cancel out some of your hard won SEO budget.

As you probably know there are several tools out there that offer help with Reputation Management, for a price. One tool you can use for free is Google Alerts. Now Google Alerts was not specifically designed for, nor is it pitched as, an RM tool, but because it’s free, it’s widely used for this purpose. A remark by Linda Bustos in the blog post caught my eye:

“Linda reminds you to scour the search engines manually also, as [Google Alerts] will alert you to new appearances of the keywords you are tracking, not what’s been on the web for a long time”.

This clicked with my own experience and observations and prompted me to leave a comment which I thought I would share here:

>> I second Linda’s advice about the need for manual checking, particularly for folks who are mainly relying on Google Alerts at this point. You need to know that Google Alerts don’t scour the web the way some people apparently assume they do. Google Alerts are about what’s happening now. (I have seen old stuff pop up in Google Alerts, but this seems to be the exception–in fact, it may mean that the old stuff has been spotted or commented in a new forum and if that old stuff is ‘bad’ stuff, well you may already be behind the curve).

Now I’m not knocking Google Alerts–they are free and very handy and you should be tracking your company and products with them–but the service is not really positioned as a reputation monitoring product. And while there are some good reputation tools emerging, even if I was paying for one or more of these I would *still* have some manual checking done, preferably by someone who is really good at search (it seems most offices have a resident Google-meister–maybe you can put them to work helping the company instead of finding recipes for turducken or the etymology of bounder). <<

p.s. This article over on E-Commerce Times by Neal Creighton, CEO of RatePoint, provides useful background on the topic of online reputation.

1 comment so far. To add your comment, click here.
Posted in Industry, Strategy

So What's Monetate?

Posted September 2nd, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

At various picnics and other gatherings over the long weekend I ran into quite a few people that I hadn’t seen for a while. When I mentioned that I was now working for Monetate several of them asked this question: “So what’s Monetate?”

I found that my answer varied from person to person. This was not because I couldn’t decide what Monetate is, but because there are several ways to describe it. Consider this answer:

“Monetate is a new way to create personalized site experiences for visitors to e-commerce web sites.”

That’s pretty accurate, but somehow it didn’t seem appropriate over iced tea and burgers, particularly when the question was asked by someone for whom “lift” means the number of inches you’ve raised the ride height of your pickup truck. So here’s a different answer:

“Suppose you’re on the Internet shopping for new work boots. You visit a couple of sites that sell the boots you’re looking for. As you switch between sites trying to find the best price, one site pops up an offer, an extra $10 off the exact pair of boots you want, if you order today. [At this point the listener is smiling and nodding like this would be a good thing.] Well, Monetate can make that happen.”

I found myself delivering a couple of different versions of this, using alternatives to work boots where appropriate, such as dresses or digital cameras. People seemed to relate, even the one person at the picnic who who doesn’t have either a computer or an Internet connection (turns out she has her neighbor go online to order things for her).

When I’m talking to people who are in the business, I like to say Monetate delivers real personalization, right now. That seems to ring a bell with people who know what personalization means in the context of Internet retailing. But when I was talking to people at the other end of Internet retailing, the shoppers themselves, describing Monetate with an example of what it can do for them seemed to work best.

Be the first to comment on this post! Click here.
Posted in General, Industry, Personalization