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