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 have added, or are about to add, online shopping to your business, your multichannel journey has only just begun. You need to now move to cross-channel retailing. What is the difference?

Multi-channel is simply that; running more than one channel to sell, market, service or deliver. Cross-channel however is “the coordinated use of multiple channels to gain market share, grow revenue and profits, create a differentiated experience and increase customer loyalty.” It is where the real business benefits are delivered.

The evolution from Multichannel to cross-channel can be broken into three phases:

Phase one – Multi-channel development.

This is really about having a portfolio of channels in which to sell, service, market or distribute. For example you may have an eCommerce website, or you may have a call centre to take orders over the phone. In this phase however there is no synchronisation between the channels. The channels operate in silos, the business is product focussed and channel focussed and the marketing is campaign focussed.

Phase two – Multichannel coordination – cross-channel retailing

Here the links start being made. Marketing campaigns are beginning to be synchronised across channels. Testing and measuring multi-touch media and communication strategies are a regular occurrence and you start to build up a picture of your customer across channels. You may be coordinating across channels in areas of delivery and customer service. For example buying online, picking up in store. Channels evolve to start collaborating at a technology level and a job/responsibility level.

Phase three – Cross-channel optimisation

This is where you will truly have one business, one view of your customer, one overarching strategy; played out through a well synchronised set of strategies and tactics using the many channels (and their unique advantages) available to you. This phase is all about customer focus; a single, holistic and heuristic customer view, regardless of the communication channel. You will be creating unique customer experiences through the cross-channel value proposition and providing unique benefits through the use of integrated channels.

While this is definitely a journey and will take time and resources, you should be planning for it today. In your technology, your internal communications, your staff roles, responsibilities and performance measures. It will pay big dividends and there is a bigger prize for those that get to the end faster. Where are you today?

Paul Marshall - CEO

Lasoo.com.au

Following on from ensuring your retail marketing messages are both Accessible and Available (where and when people are looking), this article deals with the Applicability of that message to the recipient. Applicability, or relevance, is a key ingredient to effective digital marketing.

We all know that our messages are not applicable to everyone who gets them. The blunt instrument of mass media has meant that in order to get to those who we are targeting, we need to get to a lot more. Therefore there are many people out there getting irrelevant messages. It is all part of the famous advertising waste.

In the digital world, to be a successful marketer, you cannot have a mass audience message. It needs to be targeted. And more importantly, behind the veneer of a well-targeted message must be the substance (hereafter called content) to back it up - content that is relevant to each targeted consumer. Starting with search as an example, you can only appear high in search results if your messages and content are relevant to that search. It is even difficult (and more expensive) to pay to get into the search results if you do not have relevant information to take (link) the searcher to. If your advertising is completely relevant, then it magically transforms into information – rather than advertising.

So how do you build relevance into your message and your content for each target customer? It’s not easy, but there are tools and disciplines available today to achieve this. The key to these tools is scalability. If you need an individual message targeted for each consumer, then all of your costs will be eroded creating each of those uniquely crafted messages, unless you crate them dynamically.

Google allows for Dynamic Keyword insertion, which helps with the relevance of your creative, but not so much with your content. Some enterprise email targeting solutions allow for dynamic content insertion into specific email segments. There are advanced site tools to dynamically personalise the pages on your website as a user journeys through; based on what you know about them and how they are behaving.

Once you have a method of automatically generating messages you then need to match that up with how you target them. At your disposal are the current methods of keyword targeting, demographic targeting (network behavioural targeting), onsite behavioural targeting, day-parting (time targeting), technology targeting (eg – ads just for iPhones or Firefox) and geographic targeting. The important thing to understand is that this is now a well understood and mature business practice for online marketers. And it should be for your business also.

Now that I’ve finished with the three As, I’ve thought of a fourth. It’s one that should be close to your heart – Accountability. Next week I shall look at this new (and final) ‘A’ – Accountable marketing. This is something that the digital space makes easier. Until then, happy selling.

Paul Marshall
Executive Director
Salmat Digital
www.lasoo.com.au

Following on from ensuring your marketing messages are Accessible where people are looking, as addressed in the previous accessible marketing article; these messages must also be Available at the time people are looking.

In the traditional offline retail store, people are looking during your opening hours and therefore you are “available”. However online researchers and shoppers do not restrict their research behaviour to store hours, instead they are looking 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So, unless your marketing messages are accessible at a product level (remembering that this is predominantly how people research) and can be discovered every minute of every day, you are missing out on prospective customers.

With traditional stores, there was no availability conundrum. Stores were 100% available (open) during the time people would look in the store (shopping hours). However, it is impossible to get the same 100% availability through traditional media; due to logistics, cost and the nature of offline media.

So the paradigm of ‘Availability’ under traditional media and with traditional channels, was based around two key instruments

- opening hours; and

- promotional campaigns.

Opening Hours – online must be always open

The online behaviour of prospective customers changes this paradigm. Opening hours for a retailer online (whether a customer is buying or just researching) should be 24/7. This 100% availability is a significant change from the 33% availability (9-5, 7 days a week) current stores have. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to achieve online.

Promotional campaigns – re-think your marketing messages for online

The difficult thing for retailers to achieve is producing the information the consumer is seeking in order to make a decision and making it available 24/7. This is where the traditional marketing behaviour of promotional campaigns, with defined start and stop dates, must be modified or supplemented to be successful online.

What happens to the millions of searches that occur when you don’t have a catalogue campaign or a sale event on? Are you closed? Do you not sell products during these “down” times? Of course the answer is you do sell and you do want people to find you. So you must have content, applicable to helping people decide to buy from you, available at all times. In sales times and in non-sales times, every day of the year.

This content doesn’t have to be discount- or event-driven. It could be your key inventory lines with images and product information and your every day pricing. But it must all be easily accessible on your site and through other channels and be available whenever and wherever somebody chooses to look for it.

Filling the gaps between marketing campaign pushes with consistent information to cater for the person seeking for “thongs” in June and “woolly jumpers” in December is crucial to optimising the online experience. There might not be many of these searchers, but they exist in numbers greater than you expect; so you might as well be prepared for that opportunity.

The beauty of the online channel is that for the first time you can reach all the people searching for the products you sell at the time they are searching, something no other media can do. This could be late at night, or at work during the lunch hour, or in the car via the mobile phone. If you have nothing available for people to find you are putting up a “closed” sign – when in reality, for most products retailers are open for business.

Having covered marketing that must be accessible and available; next week we shall look at the final “A” – Applicable marketing. Until then, happy selling.

Paul Marshall

Executive Director

Salmat Digital

www.lasoo.com.au

I know of an Australian retailer whose online manager is measured by the volume of traffic to the website, rather than the quality of that traffic, or most importantly, the influence the online channel has on in-store sales. It’s disappointing that in 2009 a retailer can have staff working on a marketing channel with no performance tied to sales. In other words, they really have a website manager and not an online channel manager. Sadly there are more.

This is a strategic mistake many large retailers have already made in more advanced online retail markets, such and the States and UK. However, these mistakes have been reversed, the lessons have been learnt. The USA and UK markets are great windows into the future for how retailers and consumers are interacting online. We can learn from this and not make these mistakes in Australia.

An online marketing strategy should of course include a website and various KPIs around that. However it should be much bigger than your web site. Why? Because your website is not where the majority of your potential customers are making decisions about what to buy and from where. If your messages are not found in the places consumers are online, and are confined to your site, you are missing out on the majority of the active market at any one time.

Your key focus should be to have your message online, when and where the consumer is looking for it. And we know from Google search insights and website trends that most of them are not looking on your site. The most obvious example is being discoverable among the product terms they are researching and not just your retail brand.

As a quick test, look at the search terms (you should be looking at these regularly) that are bringing people to your site. How many of these search terms are for the products or brands that you sell? How many are for products that you advertise heavily in other media? I would guess most of them will simply be your brand terms. So you are not being found by people who are looking for the products and brands you sell and advertise so heavily in other media. If you take that back into traditional media and did not advertise any offers, products, brands, sales, benefits etc, and instead only advertised your brand name, what would happen to your store traffic and sales?

To achieve this you need to do two things. Firstly, make sure your marketing messages about what you sell are discoverable online in a style that can be directly linked to. Secondly, make sure you advertise these messages actively off your site. Consumers are searching across multiple channels including manufacturer sites, consumer review and networking sites. Universal search engines (such as Google) and vertical search engines (such as Lasoo) are important places to be because this is where many customers start their research online.

The bottom line is that reducing all the barriers to finding your product offers for a consumer is the name of the game, and these barriers consist of time, money and effort. By leaving your home turf and playing “away” you can reduce the time and effort for consumers. From there, many will go straight into your stores, without ever having visited your web site. This should be a celebrated achievement and a measure of success, not a failure because they did not make it into your monthly visitor numbers for your site.

Of course, once you have found them on their home turf you can try to bring them to your site, which is an opportunity to focus on engagement and conversion. A good number will do this, but this should not be the only number you focus on for online success.

Paul Marshall

CEO