Segment/Target/Personalize// Blog

This is just a quick blog post to put an important date on the calendar: Cyber Monday 2009, which falls on November 30.

As you doubtless know already, Cyber Monday is: “A Shop.org-coined term for the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is seen by many retailers, consumers and the media as the official kick-off to the online holiday shopping season.”

Obviously, November 30 is the latest possible date that can be a Cyber Monday, which suggests that online retailers will need to make the most of Cyber Monday 2009 and the shopping days that follow.

But why mention this now? Because it’s never too soon to get ready for the high traffic of the holiday season.

I’m not just talking about making sure you have the bandwidth and server capacity to meet expected demand, I’m talking about gathering the visitor data you need to collect before November rolls around. This is the data you will use to segment your traffic in order to target it with personalized offers, messaging, and promotions. You need to be collecting that data now. You can’t wait until November .

And the more of that data you can gather, the more effective your behavioral targeting will be, and the more accurately–and profitably– you will be able to target personalized messaging and promotions during the holiday season.

You know you’ve had a busy trade show when you don’t have time to blog about it while it’s still going on. Last week’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Boston (IRCE 2009) was a case in point.

I had a great time manning the Monetate booth and meeting all kinds of online retailers, from established giants like Overstock.com and Staples.com, to startups who don’t yet have a web site.

With all the travel and follow-up activity that working a show entails, this is the first chance I’ve had to write up what I learned from the show.

Introducing Monetate to such a diverse audience was a stimulating challenge and a great way to hone my answer to that critical question: What do you guys do? That process taught me some valuable lessons about marketing in general as well as marketing online.

Online marketing guru Bryan Eisenberg says I should be able to explain the value of doing business with Monetate in 140 characters or less (you can read Bryan’s TweetVP exercise here). Obviously that particular constraint is the one imposed by text messaging and Twitter, but I found that it also mirrors the attention span of the typical trade show attendee. This is the person strolling down an aisle of booths, all of which are competing for his or her attention. Your pitch to them has to be catchy but honest, brief but informative. You only have about 20 words or 140 characters to engage them in conversation.

Of course, there are some trade show attendees who make your day by coming right out and asking: “What do you guys do?” When that happens it’s tempting to respond with the company elevator pitch: “We segment your site traffic and personalize your web pages with targeted messaging and offers.” And that is what we do, but what does that really mean if you’re an online retailer attending IRCE?

What you really want to know is: Does this product make my life easier? Will it help me meet the day-to-day challenges of online marketing? Does it mean my site will generate more revenue? I would say the answer to those three questions is: Yes, Monetate does that!

But you’d probably want me to back that claim with some examples. I had that part covered, citing case studies and mentally pulling examples from a list I recently created, titled: “25 Online Marketing Challenges You Can Meet and Beat with Monetate.”

I found that every retailer could relate to at least one of the examples I cited. That served to advance the discussion to the next question: “How is Monetate different from other solutions?” On day one of the show my response was to point over my shoulder at the booth where it says: “Zero I.T.” By day three I was also wearing a button that said the same thing, only graphically.

And that will be the subject on my next post. I want to end this post by returning to the 20 word test. Is it really a good way to focus your mind on the essence and appeal of whatever it is you sell? I think so. Here’s my 20 word answer to the question “What does Moneate do?”

Empowers segmenting of traffic, targeting offers and messages to personalize the site experience, increasing conversion and AOV with zero I.T.

Okay, that still sounds a bit awkward, so let’s relax the rules just a little and spell out the initials:

Empowers you to segment your traffic, target offers and messages to personalize the site experience, increasing conversion and Average Order Value with zero Information Technology.

With a few minor tweeks you could tweet either of those. For example, you could use IT instead of I.T., but the implications of that seemingly simple choice will be the subject of my next post.

Have you studied the Amazon.com home page lately? If you’re an e-retailer you should. By my count it now contains 13 pieces of personalization, 13 ways in which Amazon is addressing me personally, and I don’t just mean “Hello, Stephen Cobb.”

The fact that Amazon.com happens to know my name is not nearly as important as the other things that Amazon.com knows about me, like what products I’ve looked at lately and what things I purchased in the past. But why is this important to other e-retailers? Because if you’re not controlling and customizing the experience that visitors get when they visit your web site–personalizing that experience based on what you know about them–then there’s a good chance Amazon.com will eventually get those visitors. And Amazon.com is very good at turning visitors into loyal Amazon customers.

In this blog post I will examine the implications of Amazon’s growth for other e-retailers and what they teach us about the best ways to protect and grow e-commerce operations today. Read it all..

That’s the theme of this month’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Boston, also known as IRCE 2009: Rising Above—Not Just Surviving—the Economic Storm! And we like it! All the signs that we’re seeing suggest that e-retailing is a bright spot in the economy, one that is only going to get brighter.

From boutiques to megastores, speciality retailers to general merchandisers, online is where the growth is. And I think this is due, in no small part, to new technologies being applied to online retailing in new and interesting ways.

IRCE 2009 runs June 15 through 18 at Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and we will be there. We hope you can stop by and visit with us (Booth Number 1203 near Cyber Cafe). We’d love to get your take on where e-retailing is heading in 2009 and beyond.

I was particularly happy to see the Fedex guy today because he was  dropping off my personal copy of Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide: 2009 Edition. I know I will be  thumbing through this hefty 432-page volume for the next 12 months, until the 2010 Edition is published. At that point 2009 will be moved to the bookshelf, next to the heavily highlighted and dog-eared copy of 2008 that I am retiring right now. 

As you probably know, these guides are chock full of stats about online retailing and articles that put those stats in perspective, starting with the Publisher’s Letter, penned by Jack Love. This year he describes the motivation behind the publication: “the firm belief that the more everyone knows about the nation’s 500 largest e-retailers, the faster e-retailing will advance as an industry.”

I think everyone who works in this industry is thankful to Mr. Love, not only for publishing this information, but also for articulating exactly why the industry that it serves–and he serves and we serve–is such an important industry: 

When you consider that e-retailing has been the fastest growing segment of the American retail market for more than a decade, this directory is a vital publication indeed, especially when the recovery of the American economy is dependent on consumer spending at the retail level.

And there are numbers to back that up. As Mark Brohan, Research Director at Internet Retailer, notes in his Overview: “overall web sales were responsible for 20% of the growth in total retail sales last year while accounting for about 6.5% of sales.” In other words, while 2008 was not a growth year for bricks-and-mortar retailers, online retailing kept the cash registers ringing. And the role of the Top 500 can be assessed like this: Top 500 sales grew 11.7% last year, which is more than 8X the overall U.S. retail sales growth in 2008.

There are many things to enjoy in online retailing, like the efficient matching of buyers with sellers, facilitating the smooth delivery of goods from manufacturers to consumers. The idea that you are doing your part to help America recover from its economic woes is an added and welcome bonus.

If you haven’t used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser lately you’re missing a good example of visitor segmentation and behavioral targeting. 

Anyone browsing the web with IE6 or IE7 lately has found themselves subjected to technographic segmentation when they visit google.com. This segmentation is visible as an invitation to upgrade from Microsoft IE to Google Chrome, the web browser made by Google and currently available as a free download for Windows users.

Don’t let the technical lingo fool you, this post is all about marketing. It might even help you find some more revenue, even if you sell clothes and not software.

What makes this marketing approach possible is a form of personalization. In this context, personalization means the customization of web pages based on known data about individual visitors. So what does Google know in this case, and how does it know it? 

Read it all..

This coming Sunday, May 10, is Mother’s Day in America and mothers across the land will be receiving flowers and candy and visits from their kids.

Some of those kids have grown up and left home. Some of them have started online companies. But how many of those “kids” will think to ask Mom for her opinion of the company web site?

I respectfully suggest that you ask her soon, maybe this Mother’s Day. The answers may surprise you. They could even enrich you, financially as well emotionally. And here’s why: Chances are your mother does not see the world quite the same way you do. And that can be a good thing. Read it all..

Some days I think I’ll explode if one more person asks me “How’s it going?” Because I just don’t know. The nightly news is full of recession stories but in the morning I go to work in a business that shows no sign of slowing down. It’s enough to make your head spin.

On April 15, the Wall Street Journal grimly reported that “retail sales tumbled in March as job losses and tight credit left consumers cautious and constrained, damping hopes for a rapid economic turnaround.”

Now I wouldn’t say that the Wall Street Journal is wrong. Indeed, I would say it’s more objective than NBC Nightly News (where NBC apparently stands for Nothing But Crisis). And I certainly don’t think anyone is expecting a rapid economic turnaround. But I work in online marketing and the impression I get at work each day is that the ecommerce department in most companies just didn’t get that memo about the economic slow down. And there are some numbers to back that up. Read it all..

Hopefully you’ve seen today’s news release about the roundtable on May 6 at Shop.org’s Online Marketing Workshop in Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re pretty excited about it and we’d love to see you there.

Shop.org chose “Optimizing Your Online Business” as the theme of this workshop and they chose our roundtable proposal from among many. The title is “Map Your Path to Online Optimization: A whole new way to reach your goals.”

We’ll be talking about an effective new way of looking at your ecommerce data to prioritize the biggest opportunities for improving the bottom line. Our CEO, David Brussin, will be leading the roundtable, which will feature an online retailer who has had impressive results with the techniques that David will be sharing. David will show you how to perform this analysis and teach you how to do it yourself, using tools and data that you already have.

The news release “Finding Best Opportunities to Improve Online Retail’s Bottom Line” is now online at PRWeb or you can download a .pdf version of release here.

Do you ever ask yourself “Exactly what does it take to get started with post-click marketing?” If so, you’re in luck! We have answered that question in a new publication.

Our 60 Second Post-click Marketing Integration Guide is now available for downloading (in .pdf format, no registration required, just right-click the image on the left to save the file).

I should warn you that that the file downloads very quickly (go ahead and try it). That is not an error. There is a reason for that speed: the file size is just 25 kilobytes.

In fact, the whole integration guide is only one page in length and you can probably read it in 60 seconds, hence the title. So what have we ommited from this slender integration guide? Read it all..

When I started writing this blog post I thought it was just an update about two items in our latest Release Notes (you may want to read this post if you are new to our Release Notes). Then it occurred to me there was more to it than that. But first, the two items, both of which expand Monetate’s targeting capabilities.

First, we have added the ability to target messages and promotions based on the amount of time a visitor has spent on the site. We also added the ability to target based on number of pageviews. This pair of new targeting dimensions will be useful when our personalization experts are creating campaigns to target “window shoppers.” For example, we can now extend a discount specifically for visitors to your site who have viewed a lot of pages or spent a lot of time on site but have not yet purchased (my guess is that these visitors are ripe for conversion into customers, so even a small discount might push them past the tipping point).

And as I’m writing this, it occurs to me that Monetate’s targeting dimensions just keep expanding, often in response to client requests. If you’re one of our clients and have requested a particular targeting parameter you are likely to know when it is available, but you might not be aware of all the targeting choices that have been put in place to date. Read it all..

There was an article in ClickZ last week that got me thinking about this question: Should Spring cleaning come before or after the First of April? The answer probably depends on what the weather is like in your part of the world and what exactly it is that you’re cleaning.

When it comes to marketing strategy, Robin Neifield, CEO of NetPlus, suggests that the right time to start the process, if you haven’t already, is now. Her article, “Spring Cleaning Your Online Marketing Strategy,” is a handy checklist you can reference when you get started. And if you want an incentive, how about cash?

That’s right, as I wrote in my comment to Robin, now is a great time to step back, review, and realign; and the process could pay for itself. For example, Robin pointed out the need for “appropriate landing pages for all marketing efforts and promotions.” I agree that’s one area where we all tend to get out of sync. Sadly, there is often a timing gap due to the rapid pace at which PPC, banner ads, and other online campaigns can be rolled out, relative to the more glacial pace at which site changes tend to work their way through IT.

However, as I commented to Robin, it is possible to close that gap these days–using one of the available dynamic site personalization technologies–and when you do close the gap, the numbers can be impressive. In my experience, few things sabotage the sales process more effectively than a mis-match between an ad and the site to which it brings me. Conversely, few things create revenue lift better than bringing a site experience into sync with the marketing program that brought the visitor to the site in the first place (and I’m not just talking about personalized landing pages–although those certainly help–but consistent messaging and creatives synced across search pages, catalog pages, all the way to the shopping cart).

So, now that April Fools’ Day is behind us and we’ve had our fun, it’s time to Spring Clean. It’s good form, prudent strategy, and a potential money-maker. Hey, what could be more fun than that?