Where Your Customers Are At: Location-based merchandising without GPS

Posted April 22nd, 2010, by Stephen Cobb

Ge-location targetingThe GPS capabilities of smartphones can be dazzling but I think they could be leading some retailers to overlook a different and potentially more profitable type of location-based marketing. I’m talking about geo-targeted marketing opportunities that have nothing to do with mobile devices, opportunities with more revenue potential than anything currently triggered by GPS.

I  wrote about this recently in an article that appeared in All About Retail Online Integration. I pointed out that an overwhelming majority of online purchases are still made from notebooks and desktops. What follows is an updated and extended version of that article:

The fact that smartphones can display information which reflects their physical location is generating a lot of buzz. Marketers are getting positive results when using this capability—made possible by GPS technology—for adverts, offers, and coupons. However, marketers should not overlook the fact that any web site, any online store, can market and merchandise relative to location, without GPS. That’s because, whenever you visit a web site from your desktop or notebook or netbook, the site can determine the general location of your device based on its IP address.

This simple fact of Internet technology creates the potential to market and merchandise relative to location, but… Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Blog, Personalization, Strategy, marketing, real-time marketing

Lift Conversion and AOV, Come Rain or Shine, With Weather Segmentation

Posted March 25th, 2010, by Stephen Cobb

Wild weather struck many parts of the world this Winter but some savvy retailers were employing weather-based geo-targeting of web site traffic to use that weather to their advantage. Now that Spring is here and the last of the snow has come and gone—hopefully—the time is ripe to look at how retailers can benefit from weather-based merchandising online, even if that weather is unseasonable.

Marketing based on weather at customer location

Consider a simple example, an offer of free shipping on snow boots that will be displayed as a banner on the site’s home page; but this offer will only be shown to people who visit the site from locations where it’s snowing.

This is accomplished by checking the weather at the physical location associated with the IP address of the computer from which the site visitor is doing their browsing (there are several ways you can do this, for example this feature is built into Monetate Real-time Marketer) .

Online campaigns of this type can win you extra sales in several ways. First of all, suppose someone lands on your home page and it’s snowing where they are; they see the offer even if they didn’t come to your site looking for snow boots. The offer could trigger an impulse purchase. In fact, you might be able to snag impulse purchases without giving up margin, for example, by displaying a message like “Check out our great selection of snow boots” instead of an offer. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Blog, Strategy, real-time marketing

When’s Mum’s Day? Get the right message to the right visitor at the right time and place

Posted March 10th, 2010, by Stephen Cobb

Depending on where you live and your relationship with your mother, forgetting Mother’s Day could be a crime or a sin or both. That means retailers can earn valuable goodwill by reminding customers of this date, not to mention increased revenues from offers and promotions centered around this event.

However, to do this right, you first have to know where your customer is. That’s because “Mother’s Day” happens at different times in different places. For example, Mother’s Day in the US falls on May 9 this year. But it will be Mother’s Day in the UK in just a few days, this coming Sunday to be precise.

To be completely accurate, March 14 in the UK is Mothering Sunday. (While use of the term “Mothers Day” in the UK has grown in recent years, a lot of people—and most importantly, to me, my Mum—still prefer to call it Mothering Sunday; and if you look at this ad that I clipped from a UK retail site you can see it uses a clever linguistic compromise to avoid both terms.)

So let’s assume you’re tracking traffic to your US-based online store by country of origin. You see a fair number of UK visitors who sometimes buy from you. If you want to make an effective Mothering Sunday pitch to this traffic segment… Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Blog, Strategy, marketing, real-time marketing

How Was Your President’s Day? Marketing real events in real-time

Posted February 16th, 2010, by Stephen Cobb

Abraham_LincolnI can’t remember who was president the last time I took a day off work for President’s Day. It’s not that I’m lacking respect for our past presidents but—like a lot of other people who work in I.T, retail, marketing, and a range of other industries—I usually find that the work has to go on despite this particular holiday.

However, I did do some Presidents’ Day shopping, starting with special offers that arrived via email first thing in the morning. Here’s one of those emails, sent to me under the very simple subject line of  ”Presidents’ Day Event — Save up to 70%” from OfficeMax:

Obviously, OfficeMax was following the time-honored Presidents’ Day marketing tradition of promotions that discount a select group of products.

One product promotion that caught my eye was the Brother Labeler (putting labels on things is something I’m always planning to do, but somehow I never get round to it, often because I can’t find the last labeler I bought). From a marketing perspective, OfficeMax was already making considerable progress with this particular consumer. I had not only opened the email but paid attention to the contents. Then they scored a “click-thru” as I clicked on the labeler offer and arrived at the product page on the OfficeMax web site.

presidents-day-marketingYou can see the product page here. What you can’t see, because it wasn’t there, was any reference to Presidents’ Day. The price of $9.99 matched that quoted in the email offer, but this was referred to as INSTANT SAVINGS and not a Presidents’ Day promotion.

And that raises an interesting marketing question: To what extent is conversion affected by discontinuity of messaging?

Note that I am not criticizing OfficeMax here, for all I know I was in a control group or A/B test of visitors who were shown the product page without a Presidents’ Day sticker on it. Furthermore, I’m not saying that adding a Presidents’ Day sticker would have clinched the deal for me or any other shopper. What I’m saying is that it might make a difference, might trigger a conversion, but you don’t know unless you test.

There is plenty of evidence that marketing around real-time events is effective (heck, in the world of brick-and-mortar retailing it’s a tradition far older than Presidents’ Day). Where online retailing can really shine is in testing the extent to which degrees of real-time connection prove effective for virtual shoppers, then capitalizing on those test results. Of course, doing that requires a very nimble real-time marketing platform. Fortunately, such things do exist and can be put in place very quickly, hopefully in time for the next big real-time marketing event.

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Posted in Blog, Strategy, real-time marketing, testing

New Decade, New Blog, Same Goal: Helping you achieve marketing excellence

Posted February 14th, 2010, by Team Monetate

Marketing campaignsThat’s right: New decade, new blog, same goal as the old blog, yet better. Why better? Because the blog will now reflect Monetate’s new focus on real-time marketing. As we see it, ”real-time” is the key to e-commerce and m-commerce success in this new decade.

Sure, all the past posts are here, with their focus on practical ideas and advice for improving the performance of your online marketing and merchandising efforts. But moving forward our focus will be a particular approach to marketing, an approach we refer to as “real-time”.

Working with our clients over the past two years we have seen the terrific growth in online revenue that is possible when commercial web sites respond in real time. At first we thought this growth was simply a result of the post-click tailoring of content to different traffic segments, the instant generation of personalized pages that Monetate has pioneered. But over time, and through extensive analysis, we saw that there was more to it than that.

Real-time marketing means more than marketers creating campaigns that can customize page content on-the-fly to match what you know about the visitor viewing that page. It also means marketers being able to put campaigns in place on their schedule, in real time, not some stretched version of time created by the e-commerce platform or the availability of I.T. resources.

We firmly believe companies that “get” real-time marketing will be the ones that exceed expectations in this new decade. And the marketers and merchandisers who understand and implement “real-time” are the ones who will excel.

We are thrilled to be in a position to help make that happen.

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Posted in Blog, General, Housekeeping, marketing, real-time marketing