Should You Cancel All Your Advertising?

Source: http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/01/06/should-you-cancel-all-your-advertising/

In February 2003, Amazon.com canceled all their advertising and put that money towards free shipping as a word of mouth strategy. Many thought Jeff Bezos was crazy and that Amazon.com would never turn a profit. In 2007 they were solidly profitable with over $15 billion in revenues. Bezos knew that marketers used to get paid to make promises the business had no intention of keeping.

He understood that, in an increasingly transparent environment, being truly customer focused would matter more than telling customers about how great your service was.

Recently, Joe Nocera of The New York Times told millions of people that Amazon puts customers first in his part article, part testimonial, part morality tale, "Put Buyers First? What A Concept." You should read it in full but here are a few excerpts:

"They care about having the lowest prices, having vast selection, so they have choice, and getting the products to customers fast," [Mr. Bezos] said. "And the reason I'm so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them."

Anybody who has spent any time around Mr. Bezos knows that this is not just some line he throws out for public consumption. It has been the guiding principle behind Amazon since it began.

[…] Amazon says it has somewhere on the order of 72 million active customers, who, in the last quarter, were spending an average of $184 a year on the site. That's up from $150 or so the year before. Amazon's return customer business is off the charts. According to Forrester Research, 52 percent of people who shop online say they do their product research on Amazon. That is an astounding number.

[…] Indeed, in a presentation to analysts in late November, the company's chief financial officer, Thomas J. Szkutak, showed one slide that read, "Over $600 Million in Forgone Shipping Revenue." And that was just for one year.

Wall Street, however, has never placed much value in Mr. Bezos' emphasis on customers. What he has viewed as money well spent — building customer loyalty — many investors saw as giving away money that should have gone to the bottom line.

[…] There is simply no question that Mr. Bezos's obsession with his customers — and the long term — has paid off, even if he had to take some hits to the stock price along the way. Surely, it was worth it. As for me, the $500 favor the company did for me this Christmas will surely rebound in additional business down the line. Why would I ever shop anywhere else online?

Clearly, it was worthwhile for Amazon to cancel its advertising.

Am I advocating that you cancel your ad budget? Perhaps. How are your products, service and customer experience doing?

Your customers' delight matters even more tomorrow than it did yesterday, especially online.

When a visitor comes to your website, will they brag to their friends about what they bought and who they bought it from, or will it be somebody else they rave about?

Can you tell me why they shouldn't brag about you, your products, and your service? After all, it's the customer experience that matters. So why aren't they buying?

Do you need help figuring out why they don't buy from you? We can't fix your products or services but we can help you improve your online customer experience, increase your conversion rates and help you understand your customers better.

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Google Reveals What People Are Buying Online

Source: http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/01/11/google-checkout-trends/

Wouldn't it be great if we could get insights as to which products people preferred. We could get research into which products we should merchandise more prominently. Google just released a new trending tool for those of us curious what people are buying and selling online. From the official Google Checkout Blog:

Many of you are aware of Google Trends, the handy tool that enables you to track and compare what Google users are searching for. Now imagine a similar tool that can give you some insight into what people are buying and selling online. That's exactly what we've built: Google Checkout Trends aggregates the sales data of Google Checkout merchants and charts it in a matter of seconds. (Of course, all the data is anonymized first.) So if you're interested in how sales of Batman or Spider Man paraphernalia compare, or are wondering just how popular Ugg boots are these days, visit Checkout Trends for a glimpse into online shopping. Go ahead and try it out — and get creative with the searches. You may be surprised at what you find.

I was having problems this morning getting any results from my searches, even from their six suggested searches. Every time I searched, I received a message that said:

Your terms - ipod, zune do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

If you want to see what the graph of results looks like you can find people discussing it here, here, and here.

Regardless, I think once these issues are resolved, like Google Trends this will provide some interesting data. One thing to keep in mind though is that in our analysis for our 2007 Customer Experience Retail study we found only 10% of the 300+ top retailers offered Google Checkout as an option.

How meaningful will the results really be?

Have you had better luck with Google Checkout Trends? Your impressions?

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Old Navy's New (E-commerce) Tricks

from GrokDotCom by Daniel McGuigan

Recently, Old Navy redesigned their site, adding a lot of value with a few changes. The new site provides several good examples on how to improve e-commerce usability by focusing on ways to reduce friction in the customer experience.

So, let's take a look at some of the changes to their product pages and shopping cart to get a better sense of what they've done a good job of so far, and share a few ideas for other changes worth testing…

Better Image Views on Product Pages

As you can see, the site allows you to easily zoom into the product you're looking at by using your mouse as a virtual magnifying glass. This saves the visitor time by not requiring them to open a pop-up window to view the product in detail — although they provide that option as well, it's not as helpful as this excellent zoom view. By not forcing the customer into an extra step, the zoom feature will likely reduce Bounce Rate. But more importantly, better product views make people more likely to buy.

Easy Size Adjustments + Cart View

When you add items to the cart, you're not taken directly to the cart and away from the shopping process. Instead, they acknowledge that your items are in the cart with this mini-cart drop-down on the upper-right side of the screen. After you've added the item, the mini-cart retreats to a simple checkout summary (# of items in cart and total price). Of course, you still have the option to go to checkout if you're done shopping, but they're not in a rush — in fact, they'd like it if you bought more stuff — which should help increase Average Order Value.

Adjust Your Order Without Leaving the Cart

Once again, OldNavy.com is looking out for the customer — right in the shopping cart, this time. They make editing item details as easy as I've seen it on any e-commerce site. One click of the "edit" button brings up this slick tool (pictured above), which allows you to change the size and color of your items in case you have a last-minute change of heart. Now that's a smart way to lower cart abandonment. (Here are a few more.)

Ideas Worth Testing…

• I'm not sure why they're advertising "free returns on all womens plus styles" when all the items in my cart are menswear; nor does it make sense that they let me know they have the product "Up to XXXL" when I've already chosen "Large" as my size; but those are minor details that shouldn't have much effect on the shopping process. Still, this is prime real estate they're wasting by delivering me a message that's meant for someone else. The OldNavy.com team should consider tailoring these messages based on what customers have already added to cart, and testing whether it improves conversion and/or average order value.

• When planning an e-commerce site, ask yourself at least this one question: "What do I hate about shopping online?" I'd be interested to hear your response in the comments section, but in the meantime, I'm sure that if I were to poll everyone at Future Now, most of us would answer, "When sites make me 'register' before checking out." They should test getting rid of that immediately. If you want to a customer's permission to be contacted when they're not currently trying to give you money, the least you could do is ask them instead of forcing the issue. If you do ask — and you most definitely should — please do everyone (your customers and your CFO) a favor and only ask people to 'register' after you've got both their money. You'll have their email address by then, anyway, so it's not as big of a deal at that point.

[Editor's Note: Want more tips on how to optimize your e-commerce site? Read our free white paper on website optimization. Need specific ideas for your checkout process? We can help.]

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Seven Years of Change, Seven Years of Staying the Same

from GrokDotCom by Bryan Eisenberg

Time flies in the Internet world. It doesn't seem like that long ago that I wrote my first ClickZ column.

Over the past seven years as a columnist and marketing practitioner, I've continued to be impressed by how dramatically the Internet has changed our lives and our world. Blogs have become a major voice in society. Social media and online video have become giants. Google's revenue is growing like a major leaguer's biceps on steroids. New technologies continue to barrel at us like a hailstorm, and the industry is bright-eyed and bushytailed about the promise of Web 2.0.

But the more things change, the more they remain the same. Companies still struggle to monetize their traffic. Organizations still look to technology to bring them dollars on silver platters. Overall site conversion rates haven't increased as hoped.

What stays the same is why people do what they do. How they buy. Principles of marketing, business, and sales.

During my time here, I've done my best to shout, beg, and plead that we not lose our focus on these basis principles. So as I looked back at some of my 273 columns, I wanted to again share some of the columns that have caused the most stir, been popular or helpful to readers, as well as a personal fave or two.

Bloodletting and Why Testing Can Be Unscientific

This column explained how testing marketing and persuasion is not a linear, scientific process:

Persuading is influencing opinions or affecting attitudes by means of communication. It means not only informing but also providing new information to the readers so they can make decisions. It also requires motivating people. It means affecting the hearts as well as the minds of people (a message has to have emotional appeal while possessing rational elements).

It continues:

There is a human need for rules, especially in the Web's technology-worshiping culture. Just look at the demand for successful books and articles out there with titles incorporating things like seven habits, nine rules, and 12 mistakes (we do it, too, because people want it). The left brain demands control while the right brain insists on freedom. Left- and right-brain concepts collide in your cranium every day. We constantly struggle with choices between cold logic and heartfelt intuition, control or liberty, exactness or beauty.The process for persuading human beings to take action is indeed a system, but it's not a hard science based on predictable rules that could produce perfectly replicable results in a laboratory.

Do You Want to Inform or Persuade?

The process we use to plan persuasive elements of a Web site is called persuasive architecture. It is the organization of the buying and selling processes married to the information flow. The focus is persuading visitors to take action. It's similar to information architecture, which involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully. Whereas the goal of information architecture is to inform and educate, a commercial Web site should inform and persuade your customer. [Read the entire column.]

There is No Egg in Eggplant

I've found that the fascinating similarity between all the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sites I've been analyzing is the weakness of the copywriting. Each site fails to precisely and fully describe what the writer wants from the visitor. After all, the word "egg" may superficially resemble the word "eggplant," but, if you mean "eggplant," you should say it. [Read more.]

The Difference Between ROI and Marketing Accountability

A bit of wisdom from my brother Jeffrey:

Measuring the ROI of lead generation isn't the same thing as full accountability. If marketing is a profitable activity, it still doesn't mean that what it is communicating to the universe of buyers is building the business. I've seen lots of marketers sacrifice early and middle stage buyers because they had to show an immediate ROI on each campaign they ran. Who is accountable for all the potential business they lose by saying the wrong the thing to the right people at the wrong time?

How to Decrease Sales by 90 Percent

How can it be that two case studies contradict each other so blatantly? The answer is no business is linear. There are many facets, or topological elements, to consider in designing an effective online strategy to maximize your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is only a reflection of the marketing and sales effectiveness and your customers' satisfaction. It depends! It always depends! If you're looking for one canned, simple solution, you're bound to be either bankrupt or very disappointed. [Read the entire column and the follow-up.]

The Land Beyond Usability

Make your Web site easy for your visitors to use, and they'll become more proficient users. But if you want them to become customers, you have to think beyond usability. Think of it like taking a road trip. Usability gets rid of the obstacles to driving: the potholes, bad signage, dead ends. It makes it easy for your customers to go places comfortably and smoothly, with minimal interruption.But it can't intrinsically tell them where they ought to be going, much less how to get there the quickest, easiest way.

Usability testing usually measures the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment. Wouldn't you want your goal in e-commerce to be a sale and, eventually, a delighted customer? Just because users can complete a purchase does not mean you delighted them or that they will ever buy from you again. [Read more.]

The Power of the About Us Page

Your "About Us" page should:

• Let customers see a more human side of your company. E-Trade's advertising makes it seem like a fun company, but the "About Us" page displays none of that human personality.
• Tell your company's story. McDonalds's does a nice job with this, as does Dave and Busters. A company history timeline is a great way to highlight achievements without braggadocio.
• Reflect your company's passion. Check out Nike.com's "About Us" page.
• Reflect your company's personality. If you're a fun company, your "About Us" page should be fun.
• Let the customer inside your company. Bungie, makers of Halo, go so far as to have Webcams online.
• Reiterate your company's competence to serve the customers by using all the above tools.

The Next Seven Years

Here's to the next seven years. Thank you for paying attention, commenting, and inspiring me in so many ways. May you have great success. May your conversion rate soar.

Any topic suggestions for one of my next 273 columns? Let me know.

[Editor's Note: Originally seen on ClickZ.]

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Evo Builds Green Marketplace Via Affiliate Feeds

from Earth2Tech by Alistair Croll

There are huge volumes of product data in the affiliate marketing data on the Internet. Now eco-rating site Evo wants to use this information to do for green what Zillow did for real estate.

When sellers want to promote their product on the Internet, they often rely on other sites to send them traffic. This means millions of referring sites and millions of products for sale. There are several affiliate marketing aggregators (such as Linkshare; Performix, which is now owned by Google through the Doubleclick acquisition; and Commission Junction) who handle the commission programs of thousands of sellers. Referring sites get from 5 percent to 20 percent of the product price, depending on the product and market.

The aggregators provide product information — such as price, description, discount, and country of origin — to the sites that want to promote a product. Evo.com, a green rating startup, searches this data to decide which products and vendors are better for the planet. It's a tough challenge, because there aren't any well-defined standards for publishing environmental data. So Evo built a keyword analysis system to look for green-relevant data in these unstructured feeds.

The result is technology that can tell how green a product is.

Most consumers, says Evo CEO Dan Siegel, are asking, "What does it mean to be green?" Prior to Evo, Siegel built Student Advantage to bring college students and marketers together. When he wanted to build homes that were more green, he realized there was no reliable way to find relevant products. Working with co-founder and COO Mark Eastwood, whose background includes working with eToys, rent.com and eBay, they realized that the Internet's affiliate data feeds were an untapped source of product detail.

The pair started by defining a set of "green" attributes, such as where products are made, materials, transportation, and the company's practices. They also determined the impact rating of each class of products, since some products, such as energy and home materials, have more significant effects on the planet. They fed several million products into their system. Roughly 5 percent qualified as "net green," meaning that their green benefits outweighed their drawbacks.

Evo uses human editors to tweak these initial results, as well as spiders to crawl the web for new products. The company also plans to add data from other green rating sources such as Coop America and Climatecounts to further improve accuracy.

The real way to ensure the right rankings is to create a community that will rate products and flag violations. "If a seller is claiming to have practices that aren't true and they get called out, they first get a warning, and then they get taken off the site," says Siegel.

Dealing with misleading referrals is nothing new to the pair — Rent.com (part of eBay) faced a similar challenge: Landlords would list properties on the site, but in order to avoid paying fees, wouldn't tell the company when someone had rented. So rent.com offered a $100 rebate to consumers for telling them an apartment had been rented.

User feedback isn't the only clue Evo uses. Their analytics detect deviations and suspicious behavior — for example, if a vendor who previously listed their country of origin as China deletes the country in order to hide the long shipping distance, Evo flags the change.

The company is taking steps to prevent sellers from gaming their algorithms in the way Search Engine Optimization tries to improve Google rankings. But Evo wants sellers to add environmental data to product descriptions, since it ultimately improves transparency and increases environmental awareness.

Evo also ranks members, and will eventually implement a system similar to the Karma scores of Digg and Slashdot, in which positive recommendations improve a reviewer's credibility on the site. But like any community-based site, there are bound to be cases of abuse. "We're already starting to see a company that says, 'we don't like products from this other company,'" observes Siegel. "It doesn't take more than a click or two to find out they represent another company with a competing product."

Evo makes its money from referral fees, just like any other affiliate. Siegel feels that smaller sites are happy to give him a piece of the revenue, because referral fees are a normal part of online business. But if a site isn't participating in affiliate programs today, Evo just sends them the traffic for free. "We don't have a 'We're free for six months' window," says Siegel. "Our intention is to work with the folks that don't have an affiliate program in place."

Down the road, if Evo becomes big enough, it might bypass the affiliate aggregators and offer its own affiliate system the way online giants like Amazon and Pricegrabber do. "It's a question of getting to a certain scale," says Siegel. "It's a lot easier from a management perspective to have three points of data distribution."

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