February 19, 2010 – 5:02 pm
For experienced ecommerce marketers, 2008 and 2009 came as a bit of a shock. These “old-timers” learned the business when ecommerce overall was growing at nearly 30% a year. And, if you had some skills, you were producing sales growth in the 50-60% range.
When the US Department of Commerce reported online retail growth as 4% in 2008 and as flat in 2009, these old timers must have felt ecommerce drank the same potion as Alice did before entering Wonderland…everything got smaller!
The rest of the US retail economy, though, downed a bucket of Alice’s shrinking potion in 2008 and 2009. As the chart below shows, ecommerce continued it’s fairly steady growth as a percentage of all US retail sales.
Ecommerce Growth Rate
IBIS world projects that US retail ecommerce will grow from about $132 billion in 2009 to almost $300 billion by 2019. In other words, ecommerce will grow by more in total dollars in this decade than it did in the last.
And these numbers still disguise the true impact of ecommerce on retail. Online search and websites are now also driving shopping into other channels.
Ecommerce was in its infancy in the last decade. It’s only just now beginning to grow up. Look for traditional bricks and mortar retailers to pay more attention to and invest in ecommerce this decade. To stay ahead, existing ecommerce sites need to tighten up web design, navigation, search, landing pages and trigger emails.
Ecommerce is about to drink Alice’s “growth” potion and emerge from Wonderland; make sure your business grows with it!
February 3, 2010 – 3:50 pm
Have you ever heard a marketer say, “I know testing is important. I just don’t know what to test.”
I can’t count the times I have heard that over the last 20 years.
When I hear someone say this, I’m reminded of a quote from bank robber by the name of Willie Sutton. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton simply answered, “because that’s where the money was.”
Test where the money is.
For ecommerce sites this means conducting tests around:
- Checkout. One hundred percent of your buyers go through it.
- SEO and SEM landing pages. A significant portion of your new customer acquisition happens here.
- Email signups. Some 90 percent or more of new visitors to your site leave without making a purchase. Each email address you capture is worth $10 to 20 in annual revenue with very little marginal expense.
- Home page. Some 40 to 50 percent of your shoppers begin on this page, particularly repeat customers.
- Cart page. For every dollar you get through checkout, there’s another dollar stuck in a cart. Try to unstick some of them!
You can easily design a year’s worth of tests around these areas. Then, next year, try another year’s worth of tests here. It’s where the money is.
January 12, 2010 – 5:41 pm
Testing!
An effective testing program can produce a 20 to 30 percent increase in online revenue, often with very little off setting cost. And yet, many ecommerce sites rarely test. They all have some justification for it, such as:
- We never have time to test because we’re so busy getting out promotions that we know work.
- We don’t have any test ideas right now.
- We had an idea for a test, but our engineers/web company said it was too difficult to do.
- We tried a test last year and it didn’t work.
If you recognize your company in any of the above, here’s the good news: most of your competitors think the same way. You can get a great competitive advantage by making testing a critical part of your 2010 marketing plans.
An effective testing program takes:
- Discipline. There will always be something more pressing to take care of. Create a test calendar, just like your email calendar, and stick to it.
- Focus. The purpose is to increase online sales. Don’t get distracted with tests that, even if they worked, have no chance of increasing revenue by at least 10 percent.
- An outward view. Look at other sites to come up with test ideas, not just your own.
- Practicality. Test ideas that don’t require significant programming changes. Every site has limits. No matter what your limits are you can find something worthwhile to test.
So now, the only question is what to test…stay tuned for my next blog post.
November 4, 2009 – 2:57 pm
Most ecommerce sites today use a product page or a category page on a site that looks something like the image below.
The page works fine if shoppers already know about your company. However, if you’ve attracted new shoppers, you’re missing a big opportunity to show shoppers how relevant your site is for them. Now look at this image.
This new page:
- Welcomes shoppers to the site,
- Recognizes where the shopper navigated from (i.e., Welcome Yahoo Shopper), and
- Most importantly, it repeats the keyword that they searched for (i.e., stable blankets).
We’ve seen landing pages like this one cut the bounce rate—the percentage of shoppers who leave after viewing only the landing page on a site—in half. In addition, it has lead to a 30 to 40 percent increase in conversion rates.
As I showed in the last post, one key to growing sales on your site is increased new customer acquisition. How much more effective would your paid search campaigns be if your conversion rates increased by 30 to 40 percent?
Could you bid into a higher position on the search page and, thereby, increase your new customer acquisition online? Could you add search terms that were previously not profitable for you? More importantly, in this economy can you afford to leave an opportunity like this on the table?
October 20, 2009 – 2:59 pm
At Lenser’s Client Summit last month, I heard several long time catalog marketers declare that the days of using a catalog to prospect for new customers were gone. Declining response rates and increased postage costs have severely limited the number of prospect catalogs mailed today.
Eventually, though, catalogers need to find a ways to attract new customers. The example below shows what happens to a $20MM business that reduces the number of new customers it brings in by half…as you can see, it’s a downward spiral.
In the long-run, to grow sales you must add more new customers than you have in previous years.
If prospecting with a printed catalog is no longer effective, catalog companies that want to grow must learn new ways to attract new customers. The best opportunities: SEO and paid search. SEO by itself, when done properly, can replace the new customer attrition most catalogers face. For paid search, the big opportunity lies in creating landing pages and micro-sites. Look for more on both of these in subsequent blogs.
October 6, 2009 – 6:43 pm
LENSER, a consulting firm that specializes in direct marketing for traditional catalog companies, released results from a survey of their 70 customers last week. The results show how traditional catalogers are coping with the current environment, though it also shows that these companies have to make big changes in order to return to healthy growth.
Click the link to view the catalog benchmark study.
September 21, 2009 – 9:29 pm
I was on Facebook this weekend and saw an ad that just jumped out at me. I guess that’s because I often gravitate to ads that promote the benefit of a product instead of a feature, which I’m certain stems from my earlier career as a copywriter.
Despite the famous “more taste—less filling” commercials from years ago, people drink light beers so that they don’t gain weight and not because they taste great. The ad shows you what you’d have to do to work off 55 calories, with the obvious message being not much!
I posted it here because it’s a clever use of social media. Facebook is all about taking quizzes and playing games, and Miller took a strong benefit oriented message and found a way to make it fun using that forum.
There are many more ways to make this fun and entertaining, though it’s understandable why Miller choose the family friendly ways you might choose to work off 55 calories.
September 7, 2009 – 10:28 pm
I came across this unusual use of twitter over the weekend: http://tinyurl.com/l5n7rk. It’s a story that produces a smile, yet it also has an ecommerce application.
Get your twitter followers involved by giving them some challenge…maybe to name a new product, write a caption for a photo, or suggest a theme song for your site.
