Intelligent Shipping Can Deliver a Strong Holiday Performance

Posted October 29th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

With consumer confidence slumping, online retailers will need to maintain laser focus on revenues and margins in the last two months of 2008. According to Scott Silverman, Executive Director of Shop.org, the outlook is not all bad and might even be “good” relative to the performance of bricks and mortar retailing. Forrester Research has predicted that online sales in November and December will increase 12%, significantly slower than in previous years, but still way better than the 2.2% growth that NRF forecasts for overall retail.

We were interested to see Scott come down on the side of free shipping in this article, arguing that “the rough economy is pushing people to shop online looking for savings. If the savings are cancelled out by shipping costs, customers will be disappointed. Maybe they’ll go to a store, which isn’t bad if you have stores, but maybe they’ll decide not to buy at all.”

At Monetate we’re not for or against free shipping. What we are for is “intelligent shipping.” This means not offering free shipping on every item to every location but instead extending shipping offers that make sense according to your actual shipping costs and individual product margins. Monetate makes it very easy for marketers and merchandisers to personalize shipping offers according to visitor location. So, for example, if someone lands on your site from a part of the country to which you can ship cheap, you can offer them free shipping right away while avoiding the costly free shipping to someone whose location means a hefty delivery charge.

You can still offer reduced shipping to more costly destinations or tie shipping offers to cart size or product category. And just to be clear, with Monetate you can make these offers to shoppers who haven’t shopped with you yet. Monetate can usually determine customer location even for first-time visitors and that means you can make intelligent shipping offers that don’t sacrifice more of your margin than you can afford to spend. The result? Strong sales while maintaining healthy margins

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Posted in Strategy

What "Survive and Thrive" Means for Personalization

Posted October 27th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

Several excellent points were made by Tim Waters last week, posting on the Forrester Blog For Information and Knowledge Management Professionals under the heading Is Web Personalization Now A Matter Of “Thurvival”?

Of course, Thurvival is a word made up by Tim himself, who freely admits that it sounds like something Daffy Duck would say, but Tim’s definition is far from daft: Thurvival = Survival during the downturn + Ability to thrive afterward. As a strategy, thurvival has been pursued effectively during previous downturns. Time and again we have seen that companies who continue to invest in innovation during lean times can came back quicker on the upswing than their counterparts who just put everything on hold. Here’s how Tim applies the concept to investment in personalization during the current financial crisis:

“…it’s very unlikely that [the crisis] will somehow make consumers less demanding, less fickle, and less likely to favor Web sites that, as my colleagues in Marketing and Strategy say, are not only usable but desirable. On the contrary, Psychology 101 suggests that consumers will become even more invested in Web experiences that are engaging, relevant, entertaining, and that allow them to accomplish their goals without (additional) frustration. Don’t expect them to sympathize with a decision to delay improvements to the Web channel.”

That description certainly fits most consumers we know. And so we have to agree with Tim’s assertion that: “now is the time to make selective, small scale investments in personalization tools and skills.” Apart from any immediate benefits you might get from such investments, like increased conversions, there are the longer term strategic benefits of “building up a knowledge base, intellectual capital, and competitive advantages that will be extremely valuable later.”

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Posted in Industry, Strategy

Getting Ahead: Check the time before you call EU/UK

Posted October 26th, 2008, by admin

Just a quick reminder to everyone with clients and partners in Europe or the UK: This week America is slightly less behind Europe than usual (time-wise). The clocks fell back in the EU and UK in the early hours of today, Sunday, so this week Paris is only 5 hours ahead instead of 6 and London is 4 hours ahead instead of 5.

Things will go back to normal (5/6) when American changes its clocks early on November 2. For further dates, check this table; it comes from the very helpful WebExhibits site where a live version allows you to check when Daylight Saving Time changes in future years:

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Posted in General, Housekeeping

Post-click Conversion is the New Battleground

Posted October 24th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

First it was “Build and they will come.” Then it was “Advertise and they will click.” Next came “Search engine optimize and they will find you.” And although the cost of acquiring traffic–using SEO together with affiliates, email campaigns, and so on–probably runs higher than most companies would like, it is possible now to say: “If you spend your money right, they will come.”

The question then becomes, “What do you do with them when they arrive?” The web is so huge (180 million sites and counting) that the attention span of web users is, by several measures, amazingly short. When someone clicks through to your site, you had better be prepared to work to keep their attention. And it turns out that this, the post-click part of the marketing cycle, is not so easy to get right.

Or to put it another way, the post-click phase is frighteningly easy to get wrong. This was documented a few months ago by Compete.com, which produced one chart that speaks a thousand words (we were going to say “launched a thousand clicks” but that is just too cliché).

What the chart shows is the success rate at four different financial sites that sought to get people to apply for a credit card. This could be considered a conversion metric: the landing page visitor started the application. Look at how widely the results varied between these four big names firms:

The value of getting things right, in the case of Citibank, is a 66 point improvement in conversion rate over not getting it so right, as in the case of American Express and Capital One. (Not that this study means any of these companies are doing things badly or brilliantly every time, this was a test over a limited time frame.)

So what does “getting it right” require? Some banks and online retailers are putting a lot of resources into complex testing and analytical platforms that require a ton of internal IT work to implement. Some of these produce a ton of data that can be both informative and somewhat overwhleming.

Sure, you need to analyze your site traffic. And you should be testing the effects whenever you try something new. But shouldn’t the focus should be on the goal of presenting visitors with personalized messaging that makes them feel welcome and wanted, so they stick around long enough for you to convert them?

That’s definitely our focus here at Monetate. Yes, Monetate can track and test, but the emphasis is on making it easy for the people who do the marketing and merchandising at your firm to quickly create and tweak campaigns that deliver custom messaging and promotions to site visitors, enabling a tight but nimble alignment between all of your marketing efforts. Unless you are confident that your current efforts would put on the right side of a comparison chart like the one above, you might want to look into what Monetate can do for your post-click initiative.

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Posted in Industry, Strategy

When Time and Relevance Are Key: Go Sox, Rays, Phillies?

Posted October 20th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

Monetate has its share of baseball enthusiasts, and since we’re based just outside of Philadelphia you can imagine whom many of us are rooting for. But we have at least one Red Sox fan, to whom we had to extent condolences this morning (if you’re not into baseball, the short version is that the Red Sox, a baseball team from Boston, lost the final game of a very close seven game series to the Tampa Bay Rays and so the Rays and not the Red Sox will play the Phillies in the “World” Series).

This turn of events actually brought several post-click marketing thoughts to mind: It pays to be relevant and you need to be nimble. Now it’s not hard to imagine a whole range of online retailers who have a baseball and World Series angle, from the sports apparel vendors to the electronics stores who are eager for you to watch The Playoffs and The Series on the new flat screen TV you bought from them. There are geographic angles as well, with play-off interest obviously higher in cities and regions that have teams in the running.

The point being, you can leverage these angles to attract visitors to your store and, if you’re nimble and your post-click marketing process can handle it, you can adjust and personalize your messaging and promotions as the contests play out. For example, under the umbrella of a post-season pitch for TV sales you could personalize campaigns to target regions who have a stake in the playoffs, and you could get more specific as the series evolves and the final teams emerge. You could even offer condolences to visitors from Boston who might have a little more disposable income now that they are not going to the World Series (sorry DB) and that’s a pitch that a whole lot of retailers could make, including comfort food vendors).

But the bottom line (on this blog) is not about baseball, it’s about marketing. We all know our marketing needs to be relevant and timely whatever the market. And to be relevant you need a marketing platfom that can be as nimble as you (or a great base stealer like T…sorry, but that’s enough of the baseball analogies). Let’s just say: Go marketing team!

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Posted in Industry, Personalization, Strategy

Monetate Twitter Feeding on/to the Blog

Posted October 16th, 2008, by admin

We’re still not sure where Twitter is headed in terms of Internet business and marketing models, but as you can see, we have now added a feed from Twitter onto the blog. (To follow us, we are monetate at http://twitter.com/monetate.

One thing we do know is that we’re a tad skeptical of anyone who claims to know exactly what the future holds for Twitter. Every time we get a rash of Twitter spam we have Usenet flashbacks and wonder if this medium can possibly maintain the level of netiquette and decorum we would all like to enjoy. Here’s hoping Twitter remains a place of polite and postive exchanges.

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Posted in General, Housekeeping

Good Marketing Advice for Tough Times

Posted October 13th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

Today may go down in Wall Street history as “Happy Monday” and at Monetate we couldn’t be happier to see the major indices close up 11%. 

But wonderful as this reversal might feel right now, it will not alter the fact that a lot of Americans are still reeling from recent shocks to the nation’s economic system and their own pocket books, bank books, and net worth. So I’d like to pass along some good advice I read last week, when things were looking very scary:

“In light of the recent turmoil in the global financial markets, marketers must step back and assess all of their communications to ensure they are in sync with their customers’ current situation. In this weak economy, marketers must modify their message to respond to customers’ changing perspective.”

I couldn’t agree more. Few things turn consumers off faster than messages that are out of sync with personal circumstances. And right now it’s fairly safe to assume that the circumstances of most consumers include concerns about finances and the future.

Fortunately, marketers today live in an age of immediacy, as in, immediately being able to change messaging across multiple media. Companies that move quickly to personalize their messaging and promotions in tune with  the current context will do better than their competitors. Marketers who are slow to act, such as those held back by excess layers of I.T. development between message creation and execution, face a two-fold risk: 1. Alienating consumers with “stale” communications that are out of touch with current conditions; 2. Missing opportunities to embrace new customers and strengthen relationships with existing customers with fresh, empathetic messaging.

Oh, and who came up with the advice I quoted above? Heidi Cohen. She’s someone who knows a thing or two about this stuff, having 20 years’ experience helping clients increase profitability by developing innovative marketing programs to acquire and retain customers based on analytics. Currently president of Riverside Marketing Strategies–clients include New York Times Digital and AccuWeather.com–she is also faculty for NYU’s direct and interactive marketing master’s program. I strongly suggest you read her ClickZ piece “Four Communications Strategies for a Down Market.”

(And may the markets move up another 11% on Tuesday.)

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Posted in Industry, Strategy

Search Will Ride Out Storm During Downturn, We Hope

Posted October 9th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

We appreciate Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost finding something positive to write about today. Her article for Online Media Daily begins: “Despite economic woes rattling nerves about ad budgets, experts expect search advertising and marketing to hold up well.” She continues:

Steve Lagnado–controller at Didit.com, which manages 100 accounts, each spending between $50,000 and $2 million monthly–and Peter Hershberg–managing partner at Reprise Media, whose clients shell out about $100,000 per month in paid search–don’t expect to see search budgets cut anytime soon.

We’d like to intepret this to mean that online media and e-commerce will remain relatively healthy even while business conditions in the bricks-and-mortar world endure a rough patch.

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Posted in General, Industry

The Answer to Trying Times? Keep on Trying

Posted October 7th, 2008, by Stephen Cobb

Like a lot of folk we’ve been a little distracted for the past ten days or so. We haven’t been blogging much, partly because it’s a bit tricky to know the right tone to strike when there is so much turmoil out there (markets crashing and surging and bail outs and several other similies suggestive of trying to survive rough seas).

So it was refreshing to read Thom Forbes roundup of news at MediaPost today. He struck a nice balance between humor and frank acknowledgement that times may be getting hard, even in the very hottest sectors of the economy like online retail, content delivery, and advertising. There are some good links there, worth reading.

And on the bright side, he points to this pdf chart from Ad Age that in turn points to an old adage. As Forbes puts it: “Could it be that some marketers are finally paying heed to the AAAA’s hoary admonition that lean times are the best times to advertise?”

We think so. We also think that lean times are when lean and agile companies take the lead. We expect that the web sites of these successful companies will be characterized by:

  • high conversion rates,
  • low bounce rates, and
  • extended customer conversations fostered by consistent messaging.

The good news is that the technology is rapidly evolving to make it easier to achieve these three things. We see Monetate as a key part of that evolution so, despite the very real distractions out there in the roiling marketplace, we’re going to continue to focus on moving things forward. And we’ll continue to pass along helpful “lessons learned” as we learn them.

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Posted in Industry