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web analytics system to help understand how effective your communications and site are. When I’m training on analytics, I’m still amazed how rarely this approach is used, but savvy marketers use it to isolate traffic from a single source such as AdWords generic keywords or returning visitors and understand how this group of visitors behaves to provide relevant messaging for them.
instant revenue improvements. But there are many opportunities to improve the experience higher in the conversion funnel and improve the path to purchase through working on on-site search, category and product pages. Improvements here won’t only rely on analytics, but also gaining audio and video feedback from relative low-cost online focus groups through services such as WhatUsersDo or UserTesting.
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com, you’ll see that the majority go online to learn, to have fun or to socialise. So to engage online audiences, this is what you need to provide. Using the same product photos and descriptions as your rivals just isn’t going to cut through. In 2010, I’ve noticed the growth in popularity of instructional sites such as eHow or Video Jug, where there are explanations of how to do just about anything, but many are product-related, about-the-house challenges. What a great opportunity to spread your reach and sidestep Google—many of these guides rank well in Google and on other sites. And of course, the guides or videos you produce can work on your own site too with the right tweaking
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I’ve recently reviewed the options for online recommendations services that can be integrated within a site and there are many options used for cross-selling that represent excellent value if you can overcome the technical hurdles of integrating them into your content management system.
7 with the launch of the iPad and increased adoption 8 Customer communications strategy
Finally, the year of mobile You’ll know that every year over the past 10 years has been heralded as “the year of mobile” or wireless devices. Well in 2010,
Personal recommendations Even after all this time, we still turn to Amazon for good practice when discussing cross-selling through recommendations.
Instructional content Why do you think your audience goes online? To shop, to do business? Not at all. If you look at the excellent Intentindex.
Whole-journey optimisation Many retailers have made great strides in optimising their basket and checkout approaches since efficiencies here lead to
of smartphones including the iPhone, I think this was the case. Publishers and social networks have had to act, but I’m not so sure it’s a priority for retailers. So I’d urge you to look at your analytics to see the number of visitors accessing your site or emails through mobile. For most businesses I’ve reviewed this with, it’s currently less than 5 percent of traffic, so at this level you have to have a large audience base to justify investment in specific apps or mobile sites. But certainly make sure your site renders well on the Apple devices.
and will have automated ways of tailoring frequency and messages according to purchase category and purchase activity levels. In 2011, I think smaller retailers will look to use event-triggered email automation more and integrate it with site activities. For example, if a customer searches or browses a category but doesn’t buy, follow-up with a relevant email or integrate the offer into the enewsletter.
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Email and social-media integration There were predictions of the death of email in 2010 with the
rise of social networking, but email is still alive and well—albeit finding it difficult to compete for attention. It was reported that around one in five messages within Hotmail is a social network notification. Gmail’s priority inbox and similar approaches from other email platforms have again made cut-through difficult. Marketers now have to fight harder for relevance by adding value through more than product offers alone. Integrating emails with social campaigns is one method of achieving this. Campaigns by
Buy.com and Toys R Us, for example, have used email to highlight special offers and competitions on their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.
Social commerce Of course, no review of trends in digital marketing would be complete without reference to social-media
marketing and we’ve heard a lot more about social commerce, both in the form of established reviews and ratings and the newer approaches to group- buying. I’m sure you’ve encountered the hype about Groupon, which has attracted plaudits for the incredible response rate it can drive and brickbats for the way it can kill profitability.
Dr Dave Chaffey is insights director at ClickThrough Marketing, a search- engine optimisation and online marketing consultancy.
Email and site integration Many larger retailers have now improved their customer welcome strategy beyond the plain-text “thank you for your order” email
Tactics
pages 8-13 Special focus:
looking ahead to 2011 Eleven ecommerce trends for 2011, doing more with less next year, and future-proofing your supply chain
pages 14-19 Special focus:
highlights from ECMOD Winners of the Supplier of the Year Awards, catalogues are on-trend, creating iconic brands, and more
pages 20-21 Continuous improvement
The last in our series on change management.
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