Salmat DigitalForce Blogs

Day one of eTail2010, in Palm Springs California, covered in-depth two critical areas of retailers’ marketing success: search and email.

These two areas are number one and number two respectively in importance to a retailer and their ROI in digital marketing. Both were covered with a full day of workshops, panel discussions and presentations. As US retailers continue to refine their strategies in these areas, the message was to “tune and prune”.

The Search stream covered in-depth paid search, organic search, search feeds, attribution, ROI, strategies, technology and new innovations. Presentations were given by eBay, Gap Inc. and Drugstore.com. Highlights included insights into strategies for new innovations from search engines; such as personalised search, real-time search and product search. The importance of optimising your product feeds, integrating SEM and SEO strategies and reporting; and properly attributing further forward than the last click were illustrated with real case studies and figures.

The Email and Personalisation stream continued to highlight the value of this channel for any retail marketer and the payoff for offering personalised, relevant messages to your customers. Key presentations from the very successful eBags and Dell were complemented by a series of focused round-table discussions with key vendors and retailer partners. This was an opportunity for retailers to discuss individual issues and ask key questions. The key outtakes of the day were consistency of data, case studies and research. Best-practice email and personalisation techniques were clearly communicated along with meaningful hints, tips and strategies on how to achieve it.

Paul Marshall

Exclaimed one of the usability professionals during one of the live critiques of a retailer’s site. The retailer sunk into their chair and didn’t respond. Yet over three days of the Web Design and Usability conference in Orlando, many retailers volunteered to have their sites reviewed live on stage by design and usability specialists, in front of hundreds of their peers.

Delivered with a genuine desire to help, the advice was invaluable throughout the sessions as it continued: “We have a usability problem”, “you may want to think of doing something better here.”, “That seems a little bit confusing”, “I’m not sure what you are trying to achieve with this.” That was interesting…how do we find that again?” “What were you trying to achieve with that?”

The Conference covered Usability and Design in a very effective manner. In addition to real time reviews, the theory and practice of succeeding in design and usability were dealt with via contemporary case studies, research, and best practice presentations.

Participants learned how to choose a designer, how to run and manage the process, challenges to over come, tools to use and best practice outcomes. Through the sessions specific focus topics were covered with some detail such as search and navigation, checkout, SEO, mobile, product pages, social community, new technologies and of course maximising conversions.

Highlights for me included the free private 30-minute sessions with usability and design experts, where I have to say Lasoo.com.au passed with flying colours for all four sessions. The importance of research was highlighted, mixing both quantitative and qualitative research along with your site analytics - “make decisions from facts and not opinions”.

Overwhelmingly everything was focussed on understanding that you have real people with real needs looking at your sites and in other locations talking about you or your competitors. Understanding, listening, and ensuing you interface with them in the most intuitive, relevant and easy way is the secret of success.

Paul Marshall

“If you’re going to be naked, you’d better be buff!”

Wise words from Best Buy’s SVP and GM John Thompson, the keynote opening address at day two of the Internet Retailer’s Web Design & Usability conference in Orlando. Speaking of course about the new transparent and exposed nature of operating online, in an evolved consumer world, North America’s largest retailer of consumer electronics, PCs, appliances and entertainment software outlined the key strategies for staying relevant in a changing world. In other words, how they got buff.

After outlining some very compelling statistics about the changing socialisation, media consumption and shopping behaviours of consumers, Thompson highlighted the three key pillars of Best Buy’s strategy: Accessibility, Localisation and Personalisation.

Accessibility is all about being where the consumer is, and that is increasingly in places other than Best Buy’s site. Key areas of focus here included search engine optimisation (although they sell one in every three TVs in the US, only nine months ago they did not make the front page of Google for a “TVs” search); availability from mobile devices; and participation and presence in social media platforms and applications.

For Localisation, Best Buy focussed on true cross-channel harmony, utilising the strength of its 1300 stores along with its digital media presence. A local store page was created for each store, with the editorial control given to the store manager. A true sense of community can be created in this way. Best Buy has even gone to the level of consumer-generated store ratings – a truly transparent move.

The goal of Personalisation is to understand each customer uniquely and then to ensure all communications with them is relevant. Best Buy uses advanced site analytics to create a differentiated experience for the customer based on their profile and behaviour. For those who are new to Best Buy, it’s known internally as Personymous – a special Persona created to deal with new (anonymous) customers until more can be learned about them.

Offering value through connectivity is the key to Best Buy’s on going success as a multi-channel retailer. Staying relevant to the customer is ingrained in the culture as staff continue to focus on their customers, listen to their needs and let the customer lead them into the future

Conference wrap up tomorrow.

Paul Marshall

There are $3.2 billion of aftermarket automotive parts sold online in the US each year. Speaking at the Internet Retailer’s Web Design and Usability conference in Orlando this week Scott Bauhofer, the SVP & GM of ecommerce for Advance Auto Parts, the US’s leading retailer in the sector, warned retailers not to delay in participating and gaining expertise in multichannel retailing. It was an important statement to help set the scene of the conference.

Focussing on critical elements of usability and design, the conference is bringing together a great range of presentations featuring real case studies by the people involved. This year, in particular, brings a great show of “look what we have done” and presents actual results for the past year, highlighting the power of the online channel. With key success stories about traffic, conversion and sales revenue, we are soberly reminded that it is a difficult process to get right.

Taking a site to market, or redesigning a site, is an exhausting process. It’s a process which must have specific business goals and not generic ones, according to Tellus, a design firm in the US. The process from envision through to completion involves the juggling of the (often opposing) demands of marketing, technical, financial, design and usability.

The show is offering live public critique of websites, for the brave sites owners in the audience, as well as free 30 minute private critiques by leading design and usability specialists from across the US.

The conference has close to 1000 attendees, including a good smattering of Australians, noted as last to leave the end-of-day function on the first day. Stay tuned for a further update on the show tomorrow.

Paul Marshall

There are many different approaches to search marketing, and so many different levers to pull to cater for different strategies. It’s understandable that people feel overwhelmed when making decisions, or disappointed when looking at results. A lot of the time it comes down to experience and unfortunately there is a cost associated with learning, be it time or money - depending on how you like to learn your lessons. One thing that is often overlooked and/or misunderstood is the keyword matching strategies at your disposal.

The options are “Broad”, “Exact” and “Phrase”. To provide you with a better understanding of these search strategies, our customer insights and search manager Damien Donnelly explains all below.

Broad Match means your keyword is matched with any set of keywords containing that word.
Phrase Match means your keyword phrase is matched with exact combination of words in the same order with any other words.
Exact Match means the keyword phrase exactly matches the keywords you are bidding on.

Each of these has their place in a campaign in terms of the strategic benefits that they can deliver, but, as with most things in life, there is always a trade off.

Broad Match is the best friend of Google – and the lazy marketer.

This will have your keywords matching against anything that remotely resembles your keyword, so long as it will produce a click through. This is fantastic for casting a wide net, which is highly targeted by traditional media standards, but pretty poorly targeted from a digital perspective. It will help you get to scale quickly in terms of volume, but there is a price to pay for this. By keeping Broad Match bids low (in proportion to the actual value of a Broad Match visitor), you can wield this blunt tool of search with far less risk of blowing you budget purely on untargeted clicks in the long tail.

Phrase Match is the slightly more dignified cousin of Broad Match.

It gives you less of the irrelevance issues of Broad Match while still delivering more reach than Exact Match. Obviously, the results from this kind of targeting are more valuable than Broad Match and less than Exact. As a result bid values should reflect this and be somewhere in between Broad and Exact.

Finally we have Exact Match.

This is the logical end-point for the perfect search campaign with optimal spend efficiency (but possibly not build efficiency). Exact Match is often overlooked because building and managing a large campaign that predominantly uses Exact Match is very time consuming. Yet for smaller retailers with small budgets, Exact Matching is the only option – find those terms that you are completely relevant for, craft the perfect ad copy (A/B tested) and bid based on the revenues generated. However, for large campaigns, this thinking often gets thrown away because of scalability.

With the tools available today, it is possible to Exact Match large proportions of well-targeted campaigns to give you much more granular control over what is actually happening within the campaign. Sure, it may look unwieldy when you are essentially seeing data for every single query that you used to be Broad Matched against, however knowing this information allows you to act and control or refine. (Conversely, Broad Matched campaigns can look deceptively neat until you see a raw query report – ie the report that shows the exact phrases that your broad keywords were matched against). By using a highly Broad Matched strategy, data is often obfuscated under raw queries that often never see the light of day in reporting.

How much of each strategy you should use is highly dependent on factors like time, money and objectives. Despite these variable factors, the most important take away is that each match type should be valued appropriately to prevent overvaluation for search, which is quickly becoming an essential marketing service.

Paul Marshall

Lasoo.com.au

I hope the holiday season is proving to be good for your business. Before we know it we will be in a new year - and a new decade. The start of the 10s. So what will happen next year in the Australian retail landscape? I’ll take a stab:

1. Sex please

2010 will see the vying for customer information increase in intensity. Email continues to be a very cost-effective marketing channel and mobile will play an important role in the future. Furthermore, we are aware of the benefits of making our one-to-one customer communication relevant and therefore the importance of capturing profiling information will be a large focus. So Australian shoppers can expect to be dazzled, coerced and bribed to “opt-in” to your database.

2. What are they doing here?

We understand the strong share Amazon has of online book purchases in Australia. In 2010 we will continue to welcome new, large, experienced and aggressive competitors from offshore who will take advantage of the strong Australian dollar and underserviced appetite for Australians to buy online. Apparel, electronics, books and cosmetics are categories that will continue to lose market share to overseas retailers in 2010.

3. Dah Dahhhhhh!

We will see some significant movements in the ecommerce industry with some major brands upping their presence online, or in some cases launching their ecommerce play. This will fuel multi-channel marketing even more, which will see more marketing budgets and campaigns including digital media in a serious way.

4. Backyard blitz

Success in the multi-channel world will mean a more efficient, effective and synchronised back-end to your business. From customer data to product information, from inventory to reporting, analytics and marketing production; 2010 will see retailers invest in cleaning up their systems and content, gaining efficiencies and improvements across the business.

5. Who can you trust?

As multi-channel marketing gains momentum and the retail community continues to embrace it (IAB predicts one billion will come from retail and FMCG into online in the next four years), there will be greater demand for your online marketing dollar and endless ways to spend it. 2010 will see more clarity on channels and businesses that deliver real value for retailers. It will also be the time to ensure you have digital media expertise in-house and important future investment.

6. Multi-channel arrives

2010 will be the first year when the majority of retailers will market, sell and service across multiple channels in a synchronised way. Consistent marketing campaigns will be accessible through different media, in different ways, to targeted audiences. Customer data will start to recognise channel contact points and behaviours and respond accordingly. It should be your New Year’s resolution.

Of course, I could be wrong on all the above, but I don’t think so. What do you think? Please comment below.

Have a great holiday season, a restful and safe break, and, like me, look forward to a great 2010.

Paul Marshall

www.lasoo.com.au

If you’re handing out labels, 2009 was arguably the year of social media (in the Internet world, at least). Everyone and anyone seem to be climbing on the bandwagon at the speed of light. If you don’t believe, check out this nifty social media counter to see exactly what’s going on in the space in real time.

This was the year it became clear to all savvy marketers that if you want to have any sort of online presence, then you need to be across as many forms of social media as possible. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, blogging – all these platforms and more will help you engage consumers and therefore boost your brand.

Now we’re into 2010 – and it’s crunch time. Your aim for this year should be to raise the bar and not only do social media, but to do it well. A half-hearted effort such as a Twitter account that is only updated once a month will not only do you no favours, but it could actually damage your brand.

There were many social media campaigns that stood out for me this year, some for the right reasons and some for the wrong reasons. A couple of the better ones were:

The Fun Theory: Volkswagen built this site to prove that “something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”

People were able to submit entries demonstrating how they would creatively solve various problems. At the time of writing, submissions were closed but you could still vote on your favourite entries and leave comments. Make sure you watch the video for the Piano Staircase – guaranteed to make more people take the stairs over the escalator!

Bring It Back!: This is a local campaign devised for medical hair centre Ashley and Martin. In a similar way to the Fun Theory website, users can submit videos, pictures and info about things they’d like to bring back (as the name suggests). The campaign was devised by agency Thinq – you can read more about the process behind Bring It Back here.

Beat Cancer Everywhere: Proving that short and sharp campaigns are often the most effective, the Beat Cancer Everywhere initiative involved a one-day push exclusively on Twitter in October 2009. Each time a Twitter user mentioned the #beatcancer tag in their Tweet, eBay/PayPal and Millers Coor donated one cent to breast cancer research. In the space of 24 hours, nearly 700,000 Twitter users tweeted the tag, proving that social media campaigns work just as well for non-profit organisations (not to mention the goodwill created for the sponsors).

(Dis)honourable mentions should go Witchery Man, Toyota and, of course, the Vegemite iSnack 2.0 fiasco. Yes, these were all social media campaigns that attracted negative feedback and therefore failed dismally… or did they? Well, it depends on how you define success. At the very least, most people are aware of these campaigns and were talking about the brands behind them. It comes back to the “is any publicity good publicity?” debate.

Of course, these campaigns should provide you with inspiration, not a template for creating your own social media strategy. As they say, lightning never strikes twice and what worked for these brands won’t necessarily work for others – in fact, launching a “me too” or copycat attempt will most likely damage your credibility. The best strategy is to be bold, be creative and think outside the box to engage your customers.

Paul Marshall

Lasoo.com.au

In retail, content is a collective noun for many things. Today these many things have many names - such as images, assets, product information, SKUs, barcodes, EANs, merchandising, pricing, sales collateral, training, inventory, catalogues, user guides, warranty details etc. Yet as you become multi-channel it all becomes important content; and it is all very important to your multi-channel success.

Why is content important? There are many reasons, but I’ll highlight the top three – each one strong enough to take content seriously.

1. If you don’t have the information people are looking for, they will go elsewhere to get it. This is the case in physical stores but is even more so for your online presence. The 50% of people who research online prior to buying go to sites with the content that will satisfy their needs – whether that be images, video, product specifications, ratings and reviews, price, warranty information, user guides etc. These sites will influence why they buy and from where. Great content will help ensure you are one of the influencing sites.

2. Good, relevant and unique content will help with your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). For the search engines to consider your web pages relevant to a search, the content on that page must be relevant. The more content, the more specific, the more unique – the better the result.

3. Your web presence is as important as your physical presence and an extension of your brand. If any of the following are important to your brand or to your stores - service, advice, range, convenience, expertise, stock, quality etc - then it should be online.

Develop and manage your content as an important asset for the business.

It is important to develop your content for success in the multi-channel world. Some tips:

1. Start now. The earlier you start the greater the lead on your competitors and the greater the impact on your SEO.

2. Externalise all your content. This means making it suitable for all audiences – particularly external customers. Avoid short codes, internal language and jargon, and poor copy.

3. Describe your content well. Understand how search computers will read and understand your content, and ensure that you cater for this audience. For example. consider the way you name content (images, video etc) and the words used (consider keyword density).

4. Structure your content. Develop your taxonomy and content database to best represent your content assets. Structure the content consistently and try to separate data into unique fields wherever possible to enable good publishing, search and comparison for the user.

5. Create unique content. Author, produce, design and create content which is unique to your site. It will be favoured by the customer and the search engines.

Content is king. It will be the important differentiator moving forward. Start to tackle the challenge now and the benefits will come.

Paul Marshall

Lasoo

Social Media Preso

There are some interesting technology applications which link traditional campaign media, such as catalogues, to mobile phones and the internet. Two worth keeping a watching brief on are Augmented Reality and QR codes. Both are in the early stages of both business trial and consumer take-up, but the benefits for marketers may not be too far away.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is where information from a physical item (such as a catalogue or even a street view) is merged with (or augmented by) computer-generated information. The best way to understand this is with a few examples.

Best Buy and Wal-Mart have both used Augmented Reality to provide additional information experiences to their catalogue readers. The reader can take a special section of the printed catalogue and after going online to a certain URL, they are able to hold up the catalogue to their webcam and see additional information unfold. It’s quite cool, and the possibilities are ex(t, p)ensive.

To try it yourself print this out and then go here.

Australian company Insqribe is using the camera on a smart phone to look around a shopping strip and have information “tags” come up. These could include current offers or specials etc. See a video here to get an understanding of how this might look.

Augmented Reality is still new and there is plenty happening overseas. It would be wise to keep a lookout for strong examples in retail and possibly look to incorporate in your future plans.

QR Codes

QR codes are 2D barcodes which can we read by most phone cameras (after the reader application is installed). They can contain information such as addresses and URLs. The codes can appear in catalogues, magazines, newspapers, on outdoor advertisements, business cards or almost anything that users might need information about.

Users can then use their camera phone (with reader software) to scan the QR code. This will then typically launch the phone’s internet browser and go straight to the programmed URL for that code to give the information back to the user.

For example, QR codes may sit in your printed catalogue to bring the reader to additional offers or information. Starbucks is using the QR codes to enable payment via the phone; Marks & Spencer is using them to provide product information; JCPenney uses them for coupons; and Kidrobot for promotional campaigns.

QR codes are not mainstream and there are some arguing they will not make it into mainstream marketing. But like Augmented Reality, it is important to be aware of what is available and ensure you remain on top of the applications, uses and results. They may be cool technology that goes away or they may turn into serious marketing tools. Either way - bets to keep an eye on them.

Paul Marshall

Lasoo