Do Retailers Need To Become Publishers?

As online retail becomes more crowded and competitive, everybody is looking for an edge. Web 2.0 phenomena such as video, user-generated content and social media are getting a lot of attention and money because they promise that edge. Retailers are just starting to experiment with these, so of course there have already been some failures. Wal-Mart seems to have a particularly hard time figuring out how to use Web 2.0 without embarrassing themselves.

One ecommerce retailer, BabyUniverse, is transforming itself into a publisher in an effort to generate ad revenue and, no doubt, generate more sales to its store. In launching BabyTV.com, they are in effect running an internet TV station. Pregnant moms are a pretty good target audience for this--deeply engaged and seeking community. Etailer Buy.com has taken a more modest approach with its BuyTV, and it appears to be a successful marketing and conversion tool for them.

Are there useful lessons here for humble furniture retailers selling online? At the very least, it's worth keeping a close eye on these kinds of efforts. Understanding what's working, what's not, and why will help you decide when you should start experimenting too.

Better Copywriting in 10 Minutes!

Just kidding. Writing well is hard. Copywriting, or writing with the intent to persuade someone to buy something, is a bit easier. Instead of a blank page, you at least have some features to start with. Taking a list of apparently random features and turning it into a persuasive story is the topic of countless books and correspondence courses. Don't have the next 6 months to devote to perfecting your craft? Here are some guidelines you can follow to get started:

Keep it simple.
This means short sentences written with short words. Even smart people understand short sentences better than long ones. Long, complicated sentences make eyes glaze over. Use a big word instead of a small one and you're likely to annoy or confuse. For a detailed look at the virtues of simplicity, read Can Your Customers Read What You Write?

Use active voice.
This goes with "keep it simple". Simplify a sentence by using an active verb; your copy will be stronger for it. Here's what I mean:
Passive Voice:

This table is distinguished by intricate hand-carved detail which is performed by skilled artisans.

Active Voice:

A skilled artisan carves each table base and chair back with intricate detail.

It's not Shakespeare, but it says more with fewer words. The verb "carves" creates a more vivid picture in your mind than the passive "is distinguished by" and "is performed by".

Verbs rule, adjectives drool
That may sound like something your 6 year-old would say, but it's true. It's also difficult. Nevertheless, action verbs will engage the reader far better than adjectives. Here's a great article on the topic called How Verbs Help You Convert from the GrokDotCom newsletter.

What's in it for me?
No, not you, the customer. If you're given 10 product features, think about which 3 of those are most likely to matter to the consumer. Manufacturers routinely list all kinds of features that consumers couldn't care less about. Effective selling means putting yourself in the customer's shoes. As Daphne Gray-Grant writes,

...when you’re writing copy, you need to get out of the “here’s what I want tell you” attitude and into the “what does my reader want to hear?” mentality. (read the rest of her article "How to Write Copy That People Actually Want to Read")

There is much, much more to writing persuasive copy than this. Write with these four rules in mind and your copywriting will be more effective, guaranteed. This is not to say that Mitch Speers is an exceptional copywriter who can tell you most everything you need to know about selling with words. However, in my experience, these are the areas where people have the most diffuculty.
Other Resources:

I've written on this topic before. You may want to read "Getting Emotional" and "Are You Speaking Your Customers' Language?" You'll also want to look at the links in the Recommended Resources section at the top of this page. Nearly all of them have good information about effective copywriting.

Read Seth Godin

If you haven't read anything by Seth Godin, go now to changethis.com. He has great ideas and expresses them simply, without buzzwords or jargon. As soon as I read something of his (The Bootstrapper's Bible), I was hooked, and you will be too.

Should Your Customers Trust You?

As ecommerce volume rises during the holidays, so does online fraud. It's a significant problem, and one that is beginning to affect smaller merchants more. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to build consumer confidence in retail ecommerce sites. I generally assume that a merchant has good fraud prevention processes in place, but that is not always true.

If you're not sure you're doing everything necessary to protect your customers and your business from fraud and theft, it's time to do an audit.

Here are some basics:

• Don't store credit card numbers. After the order is processed, get rid of them.
• Don't rely on automated approvals for payment. An experienced staffer will outperform most automated fraud prevention systems.
• Consider getting 3rd-party verification of your fraud prevention measures, but don't be fooled into thinking that such verification, by itself, is all you need to do. I've seen merchants who pay for a "HackerSafe" badge on their website do nothing else to protect themselves. Bad idea.
• Do you promote gift certificates? These are popular targets for fraud.
• Does your site, webhost and shopping cart meet the latest Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard?
• Is your shopping cart truly secure? Do you use the highest level of SSL encryption? Has your site and your local area network been scanned for vulnerabilities?
  

If you or someone in your company isn't very clear on answers to these kinds of questions, you could be vulnerable. Large retailers have staff and budget dedicated to fraud prevention, but even small retailers can protect themselves and their customers with the right preparation.

Resources:
Merchant Risk Council (a nonprofit antifraud group that represents about 100 online retailers.)
ScanAlert (Sells the HACKER SAFE® ecommerce security certification service)
Thawte (Sells authentication, encryption and certification authority services)

Google Website Optimizer

Google is rolling out a new service called Website Optimizer that is designed to allow companies to perform real A/B or multivariate testing on their landing pages.

Why would you want to do that? It will allow you to know (not guess) whether a change to a page improves conversion or not. Sounds simple, but doing this in a statistically rigorous fashion on a website has required either buying special software, or services, or both. Now Google is offering it free. I've requested access (it's in invitation-only phase now) and am looking forward to trying it out with my clients.

For some good preliminary advice to testing newbies, take a look at Four Steps to More Effective Web Site Testing by conversion guru Bryan Eisenberg.

Also, I should mention that another free Google product that has shaken things up, Google Analytics, is now my standard recommendation to retailers in need of an analytics solution. It's not perfect, and it's not easy finding an expert to help you configure it. However, it delivers enterprise-class functionality for...free. Hard to beat that.

Wireframes & Gorillas

At the beginning of a new website project, I like to build a "wireframe site". Often clients misunderstand the intent of the wireframe and want to jump right into what it looks like instead of how it's put together. Recently I sent this explanation of the wireframe concept to a client, and it appears to have done the trick.

A wireframe is like a woman's skeleton--it shows how the parts will fit together, but tells you very little about how pretty she is. We want to check the wireframe carefully to make sure we haven't given her a gorilla skeleton by mistake, before we get distracted by thinking about what color dress she should wear. Colors, shapes, fonts, images etc. are all to be ignored at this stage.

Once approved, the wireframe will serve as the functional template we'll use to clearly communicate what's to be done to designers and coders. We can show them how each page type needs to work without building out every single page.

Wireframes are a critical tool to help site owners to focus on structure, navigation and flow without being distracted by colors and images. They save a lot of expensive re-work later in the design & development process. Why do this? Here's what Richard Saul Wurman said in "Information Anxiety 2":

There are two parts to solving any problem: What you want to accomplish, and how you want to do it. Even the most creative people attack issues by leaping over what they want to do and going on to how they will do it. There are many "hows" but only one "what".... You must always ask the question, "What is?" before you ask the question, "How to?"

The Secret to Standing Out Online

It's not actually a secret, but I'm amazed at how many retailers haven't gotten it yet.

Specialize.

The last thing any consumer needs is yet another full-line furniture website with 10,000 items. The last thing any prudent businessperson needs is the burden of trying to build a full-line furniture brand online without an 8-figure budget.

Do your due diligence, stake out your territory and then own it. Customers will respond.

If you're not sure where to start, give us a call. We can help.

Help Customers Help You

I'm hearing much buzz recently about Dove's successful extension of their "Campaign for Real Beauty". Others have already enshrined this 75-second video called "Dove Evolution" as the most powerful use of Web 2.0 by a traditional advertiser ever, so I won't bore you with further adulation. Suffice it to say Dove will end up selling a lot more product for a lot of years as a result of this fairly modest effort.

Can you do something similar for your business?

• Can you get people saying nice things about your company and your products?
• Can you help people see your company as honest and open and transparent?
• Can you create ways for consumers to prefer your store because of how you give them a feeling of being in control?

Yes, of course you can.

• Reward customers with unexpected kindnesses. (we have some great ideas for this)
• Reward repeat customers even more lavishly
• Encourage customers to write testimonials, and let them know when theirs is published.
• Add product reviews to your website, then actively solicit customers to write reviews.
• Give your customers good information for free
• If customers consistently cancel orders because you gloss over some key fact in your store (like shipping times), then make that policy clear, even if you feel it puts you in a poor light.

Notice none of these involve posting video on YouTube. They do, however, encourage customers to like you and share their positive feelings with others. That's the whole point of successfully leveraging customer voices in your marketing.

New Yahoo! Sponsored Search Platform

After 8 years of using basically the same advertiser interface, Yahoo! is readying their roll-out of a comprehensively upgraded system (codename: Panama) for managing paid search advertising across the Yahoo! network.

8 years? That's an unbelievably long time in SEM. Well, better late than never, and the new features being introduced do in fact seem to be what we've been pleading with them to introduce for all these years.

These new features should make the Yahoo! Sponsord Search platform about as powerful and flexible as the Google AdWords system, which should earn them some more advertising dollars. Over the past couple of years I've moved most of my clients' Yahoo! ad spending to Google because I'd lost patience with Yahoo!'s terrible, clunky interface. The new system should make it much easier to optimize campaigns for better conversion.

Did Yahoo! do everything they could? Of course not. They can still amaze me with their cluelessness in marketing to advertisers. And did they build in features to make it easier for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions stores to manage their Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaigns? If they did, they aren't talking about it.

Beautiful CSS

I envy talented designers for their ability to create useful beauty and make it look easy. Anybody who's attempted to create (or adapt) a good website design knows I'm right. Most people have not tried, and so have no idea how elusive beautiful website design really is.

I've also developed an appreciation for minimalist html code. Elegant simplicity requires a certain genius, but it is always delightful. Oh, and it doesn't break nearly as much, it's easier for search engines to index, and it loads faster.

So, what's got me thinking about good visual web design and minimalist code? A site I came across that's devoted to promoting the adoption of cascading style sheets, or CSS. CSS lets you control every aspect of the appearance of your website from a single page of code. Want to change all the fonts on your 1,000-page site? 15 seconds to edit and save your CSS file and you're done.

Every CSS booster I've come across has been focused on the structural benefits of CSS, mainly the ability to abolish tables as the primary layout crutch of legions of website builders. No tables? I can hear the yawns from here. zzzzzz....

This site, called css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design, is devoted to showcasing what designers can really do with CSS. Some of it is quite breathtaking.

The Power of Supporting Words for SEO

Came across a great blog entry on an SEO technique that you geeks will get excited about if you don't already use it. It even has a name that appeals to my inner geek on so many levels: "Latent Semantic Indexing". The blog author prefers to call it "Supporting Words", but any time I can slip a phrase like "Latent Semantic Indexing" into casual conversation, my day is pretty much made.

Here's the link to the blog entry:

Magic Words for Search Engine Optimization: Latent Semantic Indexing Demystified

This blog entry also includes some links to cool keyword analysis tools that are free.

Getting Emotional

It's tough to get a consumer excited about a product when you aren't talking to them directly. This is why a brick and mortar furniture store typically converts 30% of foot traffic to buyers, and a typical online furniture store typically converts about 1% or less of site visitors.

Words, images and design must stand in for the salesperson on a website. If your copy consists of what the manufacturer (or more likely the rep) wrote about the product, people aren't going to be persuaded very often.

It's a lot like dealing with a warehouse worker brought up front to fill in because the salespeople are out golfing. He can probably recite some facts about the product he schleps all day, but he's not going to have any clue about what the customer is really interested in. In other words, she will learn about features, but not necessarily about the benefits that make those features valuable to her.

Anybody who's sold knows you want the customer to feel like she's "got to have it", which requires that she is emotionally committed to owning the product. So how do you get her to feel that way when you can't probe for motivations in person? Here's a great quote from a great book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg:

Identifying and speaking to the emotional needs in your audience has very little to do with being emotive. It's not really about extravagant, flowery writing. It's not really about your ability to get your audience laughing or crying alongside you. Engaging people's emotions is not about escalating flamboyance.

So how DO you help your customers make a buying decision by appealing to their emotions? You focus on benefits to the consumer, not the features of the product. Benefits allow the consumer to relate to product features in ways that matter to her, and help her imagine her life with this new product in it. Here's a tip--if you can't think of a benefit to pair with a product feature in your copy, then don't mention the feature at all.

Websites Accessible to Blind Users?

Interesting news article today in Advertising Age titled "Blind Advocate's Suit Against Target Allowed to Proceed". The article focused on the potential financial impact to companies with large, complex websites who may be forced to re-build their websites to make them accessible to text readers used by the blind.

I admit to indulging in a bit of schadenfreude on this topic. No, I'm not a selfless advocate of the visually handicapped, but I am an advocate of ecommerce site design that is easy to use, fast-loading, and easily searchable. That usually means a site rendered in html with little or no reliance on plugins like Flash for anything important.

I've not read the full complaint, but AdAge referred to the main knocks against Target being the lack of image alt tags and the inability to use the site with only a keyboard (as opposed to a mouse). These are basic, unsexy features of plain html. As long as html is the way we display pages on the internet, including things like descriptive image alt tags should be a complete no-brainer.

Designing your site to be effective at selling both sighted and blind customers should help you stay focused on things that search engines like to see as well, like descriptive links and good copy. It will likewise keep you from straying into unproductive activities like commissioning a Flash entry page to your site. Ugh.

I realize I sound like a Luddite steeped in the stern usability strictures of people like Jakob Nielsen, but only because they work. Technology will march on, making gee-whiz stuff easier to do, more stable, and more accessible. Just remember that gee-whiz for its own sake never sells more product.

Is Someone In Your Company Sabotaging Your Brand?

Think your brand is well-positioned, clearly communicated and favorably perceived by your customers? When was the last time you called your own customer service number and asked some customer service-type questions? If it's been a while, you may be in for a nasty surprise.

I've beaten this drum before, but I was reminded of it yesterday when I went online to purchase some new shoes for work. I found the shoes I wanted, but the site (Shoebuy.com) showed a color (that I wanted) but did not appear to be available. I had an email promo discount to apply, and was a satisfied Shoebuy customer, so I called them to see if they could get the shoe for me.

They couldn't, but in the process of looking up the information for me, the CSR made several comments in the vein of "they don't tell us anything down here". Problem. She just put a large dent in my perception of the Shoebuy brand. The technology on the site is streamlined, fast and efficient, and the prices are great. The only human contact I had was confused about her products and resentful of her own management. Plus, they can't get me the shoe I want.

Next stop, Zappos.com, a site that is generally a bit more expensive than Shoebuy, but has similar selection & functionality. Zappos product images completely blow away every other online shoe retailer that I've seen, which means whenever I shop for shoes I always go there for a good look at the shoes.

I found the shoe, this time in the color I wanted, but not in my freakishly wide size. No problem, I'll just call customer service. Shannon answered the phone, all pleasant professionalism, and quickly got to the bottom of the issue. I gave her a couple of tough questions, which she answered gracefully. Alas, the shoe I wanted simply didn't exist, but my impression of the Zappos brand was significantly improved by my brief conversation with customer service.

Now, multiply those 2 different experiences by the hundreds or thousands of interactions with customers every day, and you have a significant impact to your brand that no amount of stellar advertising will ever change.

Is your customer service bolstering or sabotaging your brand?

Are You Ready To Blog?

You (personally) may be, but your company may not be even close to ready to blog. Here is a great summary of the uses of blogs as a corporate marketing device. Read and understand this before you decide you're going to jump into the world of corporate blogging. Thanks to ClickZ columnist Pete Blackshaw for this balanced, hype-free take on blogging.

Also take a look at Pete's recent column on corporate blogging on ClickZ, which is what got me thinking about this in the first place.

Balancing Algorithmic and Anecdotal Insights

Yes, I am a marketing geek at heart. I get excited by elegant, algorithmic answers to the messy, complex questions of how to help consumers buy. At the same time, the power of a few conversations with actual customers to get to the reality of things is astounding.

Today I spoke with Phil over at Cleverset, a company that has some exciting predictive modeling software. Here's what they say about it on their site:

Our dynamic behavioral models analyze past and current behaviors of each customer to predict what your customers want to buy. Each customer is presented with Product Recommendations that are tailored to their current shopping session.

Does it work? Don't know yet, but I'll be testing it to find out. At the same time, I'm talking to customers, looking at chat transcripts and reading order notes to ensure that marketing efforts are relevant to customers' reality. It may not be elegant or statistically significant, but it keeps me from floating off into some theoretical neverland of consumer behavior.

Making Better Category Pages

Here's another practical article from Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow Inc. It's called Three Steps to Creating Better Category Pages

Read it, look at the examples, and do what he suggests. Most PPC advertising is spent driving people to your category pages, so it makes sense to take a good hard look at how well they are (or are not) meeting your customers' needs.

Tax Nexus for Ecommerce

No, it's not a marketing topic, but it's a vital one, especially if you're new to ecommerce.

Sales tax is for sales occurring within a given jurisdiction. State & local governments can only enforce taxes within their jurisdictions. This is why if you have facilities (a tax nexus) within a jurisdiction, you must pay local taxes on sales that happen there. Conversely, you needn't collect sales taxes on behalf of states where you don't have nexus.

In this context, nexus is interpreted as the connection that links the vendor to the state’s sales tax rules. Underlying Constitutional provisions of the nexus requirement include the Due Process Clause, to treat taxpayers fairly, and the Commerce Clause, to reduce impediments to interstate commerce.

So far, the Supreme Court has ruled that keeping track of over 6,000 state & local tax jurisdictions is an unreasonable impediment to ecommerce businesses, and thus placed the (largely unenforceable) burden on the consumer to pay a use tax to their home state on internet purchases.

Some states are forming agreements to collect each others' sales taxes, so merchants may have to collect for neighboring states in the future. Also, the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) is an initiative by over 35 states to create a common framework for collecting sales taxes, so that the "unreasonable impediment" argument will no longer be a valid protection for ecommerce businesses.

This is a good, easy-to-understand summary of the relevant issues by Neal Sessions and Matthew Williamson from the Georgia State University law school, and it includes links and references: Sales and Use Taxation of Internet Transactions

DISCLAIMER: I am neither a qualified accountant nor any kind of expert on state & federal tax laws. This is simply what I've learned through hands-on experience and research. Before you make any decisions regarding tax laws and whether they apply to your business, you should consult with a tax attorney well-versed in current rulings on taxation of ecommerce transactions.

Are You Ready for Web Video?

Growth of video over the web is exploding, and you should pay attention. I can see your eyes glazing over from here, but wait! The reason video is booming on the web is because it's now cheap and easy to do. That wasn't true 2 years ago.

Do you need to stand out from a crowd of look-alike competitors? Are you working with an ad budget that doesn't allow for splashy brand advertising in People Magazine? Then get creative and make use of your customers' fast connections to the web and thirst for more information.

How would you make compelling video of a sofa or dining room set? I can think of dozens of ways, but the main thing to remember is that you DON'T need Madison Avenue production values or professional actors. You just need a clear vision, some creativity, a digital camcorder and some tolerance for embarrassment.

Is Ecommerce a "Computer Thing"?

Is your IT Manager also your Director of Marketing? Does your building contractor also pick your carpet and paint for a new store, and then teach your sales staff how to close? Silly questions? Not so long as there are merchants who still believe the first person they should talk to when they decide to sell online is "the computer guy". No, the first person you should talk to is the marketing guy. In this scenario, Mitch Speers is "the marketing guy".

The technology behind an ecommerce store doesn't determine its success as a business any more than the choice between a metal or tile roof determines your store's close ratio. The success of an online furniture store is determined by the same things as your physical stores.

1. A unique selling proposition (USP) that sets you apart from competitors, and a brand promise that builds on that USP to help the right prospects choose your store
2. Advertising and promotion that trades on your USP to cost-effectively drive the right prospects to your store
3. Merchandising--selecting the right mix of vendors, styles, products and price points to appeal to your target consumer and differentiate your store from the competition
4. Store layout and signage that guides prospects through your merchandise mix in a way most likely to result in sales
5. Sales people who can qualify prospects with questions and then use the prospects' answers to close the sale
6. A store manager who can see what stops prospects from buying and can then make changes to increase the close ratio
7. Back-office processes that make it easy, pleasant and quick for the customer to pay and be on his way
8. Logistics and vendor relationships that allow you to set realistic customer expectations for delivery
9. Customer service processes that keep good deals from going bad between the order and final delivery to the customer's home, and encourage repeat purchases

Your customers will never know or care how your product database is turned into a web page.

They want to buy the right product from a store they trust at a fair value. Making decisions about navigation structure and page layouts happens about 10 steps into the engagement, and should be based on empirical research, not gut feel. The days of shooting from the hip and hitting your target in furniture ecommerce are, unfortunately, over.

To persuade prospects to buy from you online means understanding that customer and translating that understanding into a store that they want to buy from. This includes design, layout, product copy, photography, marketing and a hundred other factors that together form a persuasive system to sell furniture online.

Shopping online is nearly as mainstream as shopping at the mall. Don't abandon your hard-won business sense in the face of a new sales channel that happens to manifest as images on a computer screen. You probably don't know how to install an electrical system in a new store either. Who cares? You can turn on the lights and sell furniture, and you can apply most of the same concepts to selling online.

What the Heck is "Web 2.0"?

Chances are you've heard references to Web 2.0 and either ignored it ("my CIO will tell me if I need to know about it") or researched a bit and found mostly more confusion couched in bleeding-edge jargon.

Here's a "mind map" created by Markus Angermeier that may shed a little light on things for the geekier sorts out there (click to see larger version you can actually read). If you're really geekin', you'll want to explore the version annotated with links.

Web 2.0 is usually employed as a sexy label to stick on some new (or seemingly new) web service or product.

It's used to refer to a bewildering variety of new (or newly-buzzworthy) websites, applications and internet user behavior, most of which have something to do with "social networks"(LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster) or "cool stuff you can do with only a browser" (Google Maps, Flikr, WebEx) or "easy ways to publish my thoughts to the world" (blogs, wikis, podcasts).

Many of these are being touted to marketers as new ways to directly or indirectly reach consumers who have learned to tune out advertising. For retailers, it's often as simple as realizing that they need to leverage the power of their consumers' voice if they want to stay competitive.

The Power of Unexpected Context

This is a great article on MarketingProfs.com that you must read. Want to stand out from the clutter? Delight customers in unexpected ways.

SEO Sweatshops

Here are a few things to keep in mind the next time you get a call from someone who says they will get your website to the top of the search engines for only $52 a month.

If it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is

Getting your website to appear near the top of searches for terms that actually matter to your business is generally a time-consuming process. Of course, I could wave my magic marketing wand and get your site ranked #1 in Google for "Iberian Bamboo Dining Table Set From China", but will it do your business any good? No.

If the approach is high-pressure, and you hear lots of other telemarketers pitching in the background, run away.

SEO is too important to make a snap decision based on pressure tactics from some poor slob reading a script from a bullpen in some office basement in Florida.

If they try to buffalo you by throwing around jargon like "paid inclusion" and "metatags", get them to send you something that describes their offering in detail.

If the description they send is as filled with vague description as their phone pitch, don't do business with them. These kind of outfits prey on the insecurities of small to medium size business owners with their aggressive telemarketing approach. They may not do damage to your business, but it's unlikely they're going to help it much, because most of them focus on discredited approaches or on "selling" you things you can get yourself for free or at a lower cost.

Dayparting For The Rest Of Us

I am loving the newly-introduced Google Ad Scheduling feature. In typical Google fashion, it was easy to set up and I had one of our clients up and running in about 15 minutes.

What is it? Dayparting means bidding different amounts at different times for paid search ads. If you know what days and times the most sales happen on your website, you can move your spending around to ensure your ad is front and center when most customers are searching, and conserve your funds at other times.

This is a feature previously available mostly through high-end SEM firms with the resources to develop a custom application through the Google API. Now even small advertisers can do it. It'll be interesting to see how popular Ad Scheduling becomes, and how it will change the PPC dynamic over the next 6 months.

Don't Tell Me, Show Me!

Verbs are much more powerful at persuading someone than adjectives. Many of my clients think that the logical next step after you've gathered basic product data is to "flower it up" with a lot of adjectives. This column from today's GrokDotCom newsletter (How Verbs Help You Convert) clearly describes a better way.

Thinking Big

Great column by Al Ries on AdAge.com called Why Small Marketers Need to Reach for the Stars. I especially like Al's admonition to keep a narrow focus. Worth reading.

Are You Speaking Your Customers' Language?

Give customers the information they need using their words, not yours.

It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming customers will understand you because your co-workers do. Customers aren't interested in how things are done your company or your industry. Customers just want know know "what's in it for me". Ignore this and you WILL lose sales to competitors.

I just gave a development company an RFP to redesign a client's website. I'd spoken with them at length about what we wanted, and I included further detail with my RFP.

Yesterday I got their proposal and was surprised to see that none of the key features I'd specified were mentioned in it. Instead of moving me closer to buying, the proposal left me doubting if they could in fact deliver what I'd asked for.

I'd just started the search for another developer when they called. 30 minutes later I was comfortable that they could in fact do the job. The rep admitted that he'd simply plugged their standard descriptions of features into their proposal document, descriptions which were useless to me.

That's a second chance you don't often get. Are you telling your customers what they need to hear in the words they'd use themselves?

When You Assume...

Are you putting yourself in your customers' shoes? If not, you're throwing away sales every day.

Here's a good example. Yesterday I purchased an upgraded subscription to an online service I use. I noticed that they offered the ability to turn off the "auto-renew" feature, so that my credit card wouldn't be automatically charged for another 6 months at the end of the term.

I thought that was a good and ethical thing to do, and so I chose that option. Next thing I knew, I was seeing a page that said they were sorry I'd chosen to end my subscription, and that I'd still have access for the next 6 months.

I thought I was simply choosing a payment option that appealed to me, and they were automatically assuming I wanted to cancel, minutes after I upgraded my subscription!

Instead, they could have shown me a page thanking me for changing my payment preference and assuring me that they would send a reminder email when my 6 months was nearly over.

Look at your site and make sure you aren't making similarly bad assumptions about your customers' intentions.

Transfer of Enthusiasm

It's been said that successful selling requires the transfer of enthusiasm. Genuine enthusiasm is infectious, like laughter. Make me enthusiastic about your product and chances are I'll want to buy it from you.

Mainly you do this with your copy. After I'm pretty well convinced that this is the product for me, what's the final bit of persuasion you're dangling in front of me?

Add to Cart
Add to Shopping Cart
Put in Shopping Bag

Woo-hoo, I'm jazzed! Uh, not really.

Maybe you should try something else to see if it has an impact. I tried unconventional "add to cart" language for a client recently and it's working very well indeed. Today Nick Usborne is recommending the same idea in his Marketing Profs column The 'Tail' of the Headline: Rethinking the Call to Action.

Too Good To Be True?

Yesterday a client forwarded a solicitation from a company called Star Position, who had an apparently fool-proof method for getting them to the "top" of all major search engine results for a single search term, all for a single fixed fee.

It's a very seductive pitch to small business owners struggling with the rising cost of PPC advertising. I took a look at their site and the description of their product. It is a virtual clone of an offering from a company called "Rocket Positions" that thrived with aggressive sales tactics and a series of affiliates companies seemingly designed to hide their identity. The fact that the "Business Segment Analyst" sent the email from a residential email address was an easy-to-spot red flag.

Do they get you to the top of all the major search engines? Yes!

EXCEPT...you only appear on the top of search engines for people who have been unlucky enough to download their browser plugin, which puts a large scrolling frame at the top of the browser when you conduct a web search. Advertisers who purchase a keyword can put whatever they want in that frame, including the landing page of their website related to the search term.

Now, let's think about this from the customer's prospective. How many people want to see a giant ad taking up a third of their screen when they are searching for something? Not many. How many people download this thing without realizing that it does this? Most, I'd say. How hard is it to remove from your system? I didn't install their product, but I practically had to wipe my hard drive to remove the Rocket Positions plugin from my computer.

Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Marketers Must Listen Before Talking

Great column on ClickZ today by Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Buzzmetrics. As co-founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Pete is at the forefront of thinking on the hot topic of consumer generated media (CGM). CGM encompasses things like blogs, forums and the like, where ordinary people talk about their experience with your product or service.

Pete's point in this column is that marketers don't use the best customer touchpoint they have--their company's own call center. Want to build an effective ecommerce website? You'd better have done some serious listening to your customers first.

Integrated Marketing? Not!

Integrated marketing is a fancy way of saying that all your sales channels work in concert, allowing your customers to buy easily wherever they feel most comfortable.

Many retail chains with commissioned salespeople are so afraid of offending them that they throw away business rather than figure out a way to manage the perception that "the website takes money out of my pocket". This results in salespeople who warn customers away from the ecommerce store.

These retailers should be far more afraid of competitors who will take business from them by making it easy for customers to shop where and when they like. Here is an example of this flawed approach at retailer Jos. A Bank.

Useful Resources

There are a few websites I've found useful in keeping abreast of the newest and best thinking in multichannel marketing. I've created a "Recommended Resources" sidebar with links to them. If you've found other useful resources, let me know.

Why do words matter?

If you're selling online, you probably know the answer to this--words stand in for the salesperson. Unfortunately, words can't qualify the customer and adapt to their needs on the fly. This makes what and how you write at least as important as any other element of how you market your products online. Seems obvious, but few online retailers really pay attention to the quality and function of the words used to persuade visitors to buy from their website. I find the following attitudes nearly everywhere:

"The admin can do it when he's not answering the phone"

No, he can't. Writing words that both persuade someone to part with their money and contribute to your site's visibility is a specialized skill that takes years to develop.

"I can just use copy the manufacturer provides"

Well, it's certainly better than nothing, but not much. Manufacturers who move product through a retail channel are focused on their customer (the retailers or reps), and the words they use reflect that bias--filled with industry-centric jargon, and more about reminding the retailer what they've bought than convincing a consumer to buy. This will not give you a competitive edge

There are many other reasons to think hard about the words you're using to close sales on your website. One great resource I recommend is the Grokdotcom newsletter from the folks at Future Now. They are all about conversion, and the role of words in persuading people to buy.

Well-Written SEO Copy?

Is it possible to write persuasive copy that also gets you noticed in search engines? Of course. Is it worth doing? Absolutely. Are large SEM firms routinely providing this to clients? Uh, no.

I'm thinking of one company in particular, one of the biggest players in the industry, who seems to take a "path of least resistance" approach to SEO copy. This means they find a few good keywords in Wordtracker, jam them into collections of words that might be called sentences, and call it a day. Here is a one sentence sample, currently live on the web:

Is your living room shaped where it's hard to fit a lot of furniture in it?

Some of you are thinking that sentence doesn't look too bad. You may stop reading now. For the rest of you (if there are any), my point is this--good writing should always trump jamming keywords into sentences. Don't let SEM firms write copy for you unless they have demonstrated that they actually understand what good copywriting is.

Are You Keeping Your Customers Happy?

Here's a statement you've likely heard in some form many times:

"It's 7 to 10 times more expensive to generate a new customer than it is to sell to an existing customer"

We nod our heads in agreement, and promise we'll get to work on that whole customer service & retention marketing thing really soon, and then go back to buying more PPC search ads.

Why? Well, it's easier to avoid the inevitable messiness of keeping customers happy. Marketers usually don't have direct oversight of the call center or customer care function, and are often more focused on demand generation than retention and loyalty programs.

Because we offer outsourced call center services, I get a close look at the effects of good and bad customer service. Good customer service can mean a lot of things, but mostly it means keeping the customer well-informed post-sale and pre-delivery, and being available and responsive when unexpected problems arise.

Most customers become irate when they sense they are being ignored, making them feel powerless. Some will attempt to gain control of the situation by lashing out at the retailer in any way they can. We've all heard the horror stories about disgruntled customers building a website like www.YourStoreNameSucks.com

That probably won't happen if you train your customer service agents to actively listen and communicate to your customers, and give them clear procedures for common problems. A quick email update, or a few minutes spent working with a customer can have a big impact on your bottom line.

One of our new call center clients decided to shut down their in-house call center when they realized that cancelled orders alone cost them nearly a million dollars in revenue last year, most of which could have been saved with better customer service.

Q4 Paid Search Advertising Report

Some interesting facts & trends in the Performics Search Trend Report. The cost of paid search advertising continues to increase (no surprise there), and the extreme focus on Q4 by most online retailers drove prices up significantly. The "representative pool" of online stores that makes up the Performics 50 also saw 40% of clicks and 48% of Q4 conversions in December.

I doubt many home furnishings retailers selling online saw that kind of result, but many of the insights in the report were useful. Referring to the abrupt shifts in keyword price trends, they noted

"In order to respond to this kind of dynamic marketplace, marketers need to be flexible with their programs, their expectations and, in some cases, their budgets."

Yes indeed.

The Magic Marketing Wand

Epopus clients are always looking for the single element that will catapult their online sales from so-so to stupendous. Unfortunately, there is no magic wand for anyone to wave over your store to make it an overnight success.

Instead, success usually comes from a persistent testing and improvement of every possible aspect of your marketing, content and site design. In fact, it seems to mirror the "tipping effect" phenomenon pretty closely. Create enough positive customer experiences, and at some point you'll see a significant upturn in your business that can't really be traced to any single action.

Last week I tried something at the request of a client that was supposed to be another incremental site improvement, and it generated so many calls we had to temporarily remove it from the site because our call center got overwhelmed. In other words, it appeared as though we'd stumbled on a magic wand that produced a spike in response that doubling our client's advertising spend would not have accomplished, and it was free. I think we simply put the last piece in place to get past the tipping point, but it certainly seemed like magic.

Would this single change work for your store? By itself, probably not. What we did was tied to several other tweaks we'd already made to the navigation and calls to action our client's site, and probably wouldn't have succeeded so dramatically without those things already in place. It did open my eyes to a new way to think about calls to action for an online store--exciting stuff.

Are Online Product Reviews a Good Idea?

An article in today' AdWeek newsletter alerting readers to "The New Realities of a Low-Trust Marketing World", repeated something all marketers have been hearing a lot lately. Customers don't believe (or pay much attention to) advertising, putting more faith in recommendations of others who already own the product. No big news there. The buzz-worthy part is the Product Reviews functionality available at many online stores that can turn this into a powerful marketing tool. Instead of relying on the small circle of family & friends that a recommender might influence offline, online product reviews greatly extend the influence of personal recommendations.

Of course, Amazon is best known for this, but many online stores do this well. Zappos.com and Buy.com come to mind. These are all sites with high transaction volume, so they have a large pool of customers who are willing and able to contribute comments.

There are several reasons why most of the home furnishings retailers we talk to haven't done this:

• What if nobody comments? it's sad to have a robust product reviews feature on your site, only to see it collect dust when nobody uses it.
• Labor intensive--takes time to review and moderate comments to be sure you aren't getting spammed or offending prospects with offensive language.
• Risky--anyone who's allowed merchant ratings on their site knows that disgruntled customers are most likely to comment.

Despite these negatives, there are compelling reasons to look closely at this opportunity:

• It will help conversion to sale
• It can improve how people perceive your store (if your customers are generally happy with your service level)
• It will give you an early warning on products or manufacturers that have problems
• It will (if properly implemented) give you a little more presence in organic search engine listings

Customers believe other customers. If your customers like what you sell, they will become powerful advocates for your business.

Click here to chat now

This is the transcript of a chat I just had with Google AdWords tech support. It seemed like a pretty straightforward advertiser question, but it wasn't covered by their scripts, so I ended up with a not very helpful conversation.

Thank you for contacting Google AdWords. Please hold a moment while we route your chat to a specialist who will help you with your question:

"I've noticed that metacrawlers like Dogpile, Metacrawler and the like aggregate both organic and paid search listings. If a Dogpile searcher clicks on a result that is actually an AdWords ad that I've placed, will I be charged for that click? Does that mean that metacrawler sites are in your network, or are they basically throwing you guys some free business?".

(Auto-generated text removed to protect your sanity)

Claire: The ads that appear in the AdWords section and the Google search results are separate and unrelated. It is possible that a website will appear in both sections. Is that what you are referring to, Mitch?

I'm thinking: [Hello? Hello? Anybody there?]

Mitch Speers: no, i understand the difference between organic and paid listings on SERPs. I'm specifically interested in metacrawlers like Dogpile.com. Since they aggregate and return a mix of results from a lot of search engines, including Google, and some of those results are actually paid listings. By contrast, if a user searches on AOL search, they will see my paid adwords ad, and I KNOW I pay for that [click]. But I don't think Dogpile works with Google that way

Claire: The Dogpile website is in our search network, meaning that the ads shown on that website are paid for. I am not sure I understand your question correctly, does that answer it Mitch?

I'm thinking: [OK, we seem to be getting somewhere. Maybe I'll get to the bottom of this]

Mitch Speers: yes, it does in fact. It's confusing because the ads are not separately presented on Dogpile but all mixed up with organic results, though they are flagged as "sponsored by". Is there any way to get a listing of the top sites in your network? It would be really helpful

Claire: Excuse me, it appears that the listings on the Dogpile website are from the Google search results, not AdWords.
There is no way to request the top spots since placement is automatically determined by the AdWords ad ranking system. AdWords ads that appear in the first, second, or third positions above search results rank the highest among AdWords ads. Ad Rank is determined by the maximum cost-per-click (CPC) and Quality Score of the matching keyword.

I'm thinking: [Um, yeah. That canned explanation of Ad Rank was just what I needed to clear everything up]

Mitch Speers: OK. I'm not requesting top spots, i'm just wondering where you distribute my AdWords ads

Claire: To view examples of where your ads display in the search and content networks, please click on this link: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6712.

At that point, I thanked Claire for her time. I knew she wouldn't give me a list of sites where Google ads are distributed, but I had to take a shot. Nevertheless, I didn't get an answer to my main question, which was "Do I pay for clicks on ads that are scraped into the results page of metacrawlers like Dogpile?". Anybody out there know?

Information please!

Home furnishings manufacturers, take note. I won't presume to speak for everyone, but I'm pretty sure this will sound familiar to online furniture retailers everywhere:

All the data provided by a manufacturer (who shall remain nameless) for a dining room set to retail for $1,500:

"Asian Hardwoods with Oak Veneers. Deep Nutbrown Finish. 44 x 68 x 88"

Um, OK. Does is have a leaf? (yes, but you have to take a magnifying glass to the picture to learn that). What fabric is used in the chair upholstery? Any features we should know about? Does it reflect any particular style? This is not rocket science, nor do retailers need fancy words; just some basic information. Online, it's the words and pictures that sell the product.

Want to stand apart from other manufacturers? Make it easier for e-retailers to present and sell your products. We know a thing or two about helping home furnishings manufacturers create an effective ecommerce strategy based on real-world experience, not theory.

PPC Marketing Checklist

4 things to consider when creating a search marketing plan.

Choose PPC media on value, not CPC.
Don't think about your campaigns in cost per click (CPC) terms. If it costs the same to buy 100 clicks at one search engine as it does to buy 1,000 at another, it's tempting to choose the traffic. However, you should buy clicks based on value. The same keyword can generate much higher revenue on one engine than another, for no apparent reason.

The only metric that really matters is sales.
When conversions are difficult or impossible to trace, it's tempting to focus on something you can measure, such as brand awareness or some other "brand lift" metric. However, brand lift should ultimately lead to sales. Only brand lift among potential buyers will correlate with sales; otherwise you're wasting money.

Your media plan must be flexible--don't fall in love with an engine or position.
If you bid with emotions rather than data, you won't make good decisions. An emotional bid is when your CEO insists that "we need to own that term" no matter what. When competitors all bid emotionally, only the search engines win.

Spend carefully and don't assume.
Invest your budget as carefully as you can, and actively question the person signing the checks. Don't assume you know all the objectives of the marketing budget if you haven't asked. Senior executives tend to expect you to read their minds. Don't fall into that trap, and don't ask how I know.

How Much Should I Bid?

Good question, but before you look at these and other optimization strategies to get the most from your advertising dollars, make sure you've taken a long hard look at how effectively your website encourages prospects to buy from you. Is your website a well-oiled conversion machine? Good, now let's look at your pay per click (PPC) advertising.

How can you approach bid setting in a logical way that ties back to your bottom line? How do you know what your upper limit is for any given term or AdGroup? The answer is to calculate the cost per order (CPO) ceiling that keeps you within your budget for advertising as a % of gross revenue. The easiest way to keep track of this is to look at each category, figure out what the true average ticket sale is, what the true blended margin is, and how much profit you need.

Simple Example:

Category X has an average ticket (or average price, if you don't know the
average ticket) of $100.

The margin on average for Category X is
40%, or $40 gross profit per
transaction before marketing
expenses.

If you need to make 20% profit, then you have $20 to
spend on advertising for each order.

Therefore, your CPO ceiling for Category X is $20. If you're spending more than this on a keyword without generating a sale, then you need to cut your bid or eliminate the keyword. If you're using a high-traffic keyword like "furniture" or "digital camera", you'll blow through that in about 3 minutes unless you're bidding a nickel per click. If you have a highly targeted term, you can afford to set your bid high, because these are likely to send a smaller amount of better-qualified prospects to your site.

If you're lucky enough to be selling products that usually convert on the initial click-through, you can just use the CPO calculations provided by nearly all PPC media outlets to gauge whether to raise or lower your bids.

If you can't rely on those numbers, then you need to start looking at ways to track customer interactions that jump from online to phone and back. Why is this so important? Well, what if 80% of your conversions are coming from 20% of your keywords (as is generally the case)? You need to know where to move your bids to get the biggest return on your ad spend.

Is that all there is to it? No, but it's a start.

While you're burying yourself in the mind-numbing detail of trying to optimize your campaigns, don't forget about optimizing your landing pages. In most cases, improving your site's ability to convert browsers to buyers will have a higher ROI than trying to affect conversion from your advertising.

Lousy Ad or Lousy Page?

The most attractive feature of direct response online advertising is its "trackability". There are numerous ways to track the effectiveness of your online campaigns down to a very granular level. In spite of this, I know some pretty big players who pay little or no attention to these ROI measures when making decisions about their ad spend.

While this is indeed a head-scratcher, what about the rest of you who dutifully turned on all those various conversion tracking mechanisms, dropped those tracking scripts on your web pages, and laboriously configured your web analytics, and STILL don't have a clear picture of what's working?

If you're selling low-consideration items with an average ticket of under $50, you likely have very accurate conversion stats. If you sell furniture and have 3- and 4-digit average tickets, it's another story.

Why? It's something called "lagged conversion", which just means that the customer doesn't buy the first time they come to your website. In fact, they may visit 3 or 4 times, and call you a couple of times as well, before they finally buy. Unless you have some pretty comprehensive systems in place to deal with this behavior, your conversion rates as reported by Google or Yahoo! will likely be discouragingly low because the tracking data can't follow the customer through all these steps.

The most common way to lose conversion data is when the sale is closed over the phone. Can the customer remember the keyword phrase they typed, or the ad version they clicked on, or even the site they found your ad on? Not likely.

So if you're selling something that invites a large % of phone inquiries, don't immediately assume that your online ads are worthless because of the low conversion % they show. Instead, look at the products that seem to sell strongly over the phone. Are these items easy to order without assistance online, or do they have lots of options to choose from? If people are buying a lot of certain products over the phone, maybe it's becuase they can't figure out how to buy it without help. If so, fix the page!