Clever Blog

5 Opportunities to Improve E-Commerce

Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester came out with a great report yesterday called Five Immediate Opportunities for E-Commerce Improvements. She mentions the need for sophisticated product discovery like our’s and says that surprisingly few e-commerce companies are embracing the technology. From our perspective, we’re definitely seeing traction in the marketplace among both large and small e-Commerce companies, especially in the last six months. Online retailers are catching on to the fact that creating a relevant, personalized site experience is a must have not a nice to have. We’re really trying to focus our sales and marketing messages on our fast time to implementation and revenue lift per visitor. E-commerce is extremely competitive and if customers are going to implement a new technology they need to know that it’s going to work and it’s going to work fast. Expect to see more results-oriented customer success news from us in the coming weeks.

Why You Should Care About Personalization

“Personalization” is in the news again lately. Last week, Acxiom Digital acquired dynamic targeting company, Kefta.  According to Acxiom’s news release, "Kefta and Acxiom together will finally enable clients to capture the full potential of their digital marketing campaigns through comprehensive personalization and integration across marketing channels”.  Also, Aggregate Knowledge and ChoiceStream each raised money this week. 

I think of these deals as continued validation of the emergence of post-click marketing, a subject I’ve blogged about already.  But, more specifically, it’s validation of the promise of true personalization. Of course, we’ve been hearing about the personalized Web experience for at least the last six years, if not the last decade. But, so far, no one has really delivered it. Because when I say personalization, I don’t mean getting an email with your name on it, or seeing an ad that might interest you because of a keyword you clicked on. And I’m not referring to getting product recommendations based on the past, collective buying behavior of segments, either. Personalization, to me, means seeing products and content that are completely and totally tailored to your immediate tastes, desires and needs.

Let’s step back a bit. The value of demand generation is well understood by most online retailers. This has driven the willingness to pay for effective outbound marketing services to the edge of breakeven in many cases. (Just look at what’s happened with average AdWords CPCs over the last 24 months.) Now, online retailers are looking for the source of incremental revenues, and they’re focusing their attention on the effectiveness of their sites to acquire and retain customers. They also want to drive up average order size.  In other words, they want people to come to their sites, stay there, and buy more stuff.

As we talk to executives at online retail companies, the desire to use personalization to achieve these goals is a common theme, if not a necessity.  In fact, personalization is viewed by many of these folks as the solution to every marketer’s dream of a real-time, one-to-one marketing program that can operate effectively at scale. Based on these conversations and the “personalization buzz” in our market, expect to see more press releases from more companies promising personalization. But be careful how you read these announcements: true personalization isn’t about breaking people into segments of millions of “like-minded” consumers, it’s about delivering a real-time, one-on-one, totally unique experience to each and every visitor, each and every time they visit your site.

Todd Humphrey, CEO

The Dawn of Post-Click Marketing

John Miller wrote a great piece for SearchEngineLand recently about what he calls “Post-Click” marketing.  The basic idea is that what happens after the AdWords click is just as important, if not more so, than the click on the keyword itself.  In other words, getting a visitor to your site is only half the battle.

This insight holds equally true for B2C companies.  Perhaps even more so given the fierce competition for keyword inventory among online retail sites.  With increasing click costs and already thin contribution margins, the online retailers we talk to tell us there is no more important metric within their control than conversion rate (generally defined as orders/visits per unit time). Up to this point, online retailers have leaned heavily on costly promotions such as free shipping, price discounts, and “buy x get y”.  Let’s not forget that margins are tight and getting tighter in the online retail business.

So there’s a problem.  Where do retailers turn to to convert more visitors into buyers, drive down acquisition costs, and increase margins?  There is a significant need in the market to optimize the post-click experience for every visitor.  At CleverSet, we study this problem every day and see many opportunities for sites to do just that.

Here are a few tactics we’ve picked up on from some of our customers.

1.                  Define the primary use cases for which your site is designed.  Compare these use cases against the actual behavior of users on your site.  Are they aligned?  Do people get lost or bounce right back out when they come through natural search?  Answers to these fundamental questions can be found in your analytics and with a basic use case framework you can go a long way to understanding how well your site is optimized for post-click.

2.                  Optimize the order path.  Make it as easy as possible for people to complete the ordering process.  Sounds obvious but you’d be surprised at how many sites out there make it difficult and/or confusing for consumers.  Closely examine the order path, remove unnecessary hurdles, and assist the customer in completing the transaction.

3.                  Deliver a user experience that is personalized and relevant to the interests of every individual user.  Give visitors something fresh and new, with useful information, that will give them a reason to stick around, explore products and browse.

Check out how awinestore.com has seen significant revenue lift by personalizing the site experience for their customers. 

Todd Humphrey, CEO