The Retail E-Commerce Challenge

I’ve written before about the challenge of bringing a bricks and mortar sales operation online. Well it seems those in the know in the e-tail sector are all too aware of the relative poor level of sales being generated online for some of the well known high street retailers.

Speaking recently to an e-tail Director, it became apparant at some of the internal issues faced by traditional retailers, including a huge misunderstanding of online trading. It is not enough to use a successful store model online. Why would you try and cash in on those £4.99 value transactions online which work so well in your stores to drive footfall and sales, when the online delivery charge is £5? Am I prepared to pay £5 for convenience? Perhaps, but the online commercial model, whilst sharing the same business foundation as the high street stores, requires a differing layer of development.

In today’s world of high-speed internet, choice and convenience, it can hurt your business considerably by not playing the online game seriously. Consider it a new branch of your business as opposed to a new sales channel… one that needs to be thought out for its business proposition, product placement, differentiation and marketability amongst other things.

The good to come out of the challenges faced by a recession and reduction in footfall for retailers is to find cheaper routes to market and market penetration, leading retailers to give online commerce the commitment and investment required to leverage lower cost sales and marketing to those already online. This leads me onto the issue of customer insight, far too big a discussion area for this post, but one which must be at the centre of the online drive.

On a final note, the travel sector is in many opinions years ahead of most other sectors. Perhaps retailers in particular have lay in wait too long with the comfort of their traditional sales channels negating any need to change. Now’s the time to review your business model.

SEO and Multivariate Testing – Be Aware

Multivariate Testing (MVT henceforth), the art of testing more than one page element in a given space of time simultaneously (almost) has proven its worth to me over the years on numerous projects.

Gone are the days of testing single page variants and instead we can now test numerous permutations of pages with various page elements in a fraction of the time required for simple A/B/n testing. However this does introduce an interesting element of concern to us SEOs, concerned not only with ensuring page content converts but also that the page performs at capacity as far as Search Engine Robots are concerned.

So with your MVT tool serving many variants of various parts of your website, have you considered the impact on your SERPs? Many of the MVT tools do recognise a bot from a web browser, but have you actually checked your tool? The effect that this could have is profound.

Take this example; your site is highly indexed and you’re running MVT iterations on your homepage. Your MVT tool is not segmenting robots out of the tests and the Search Bots see different layouts every day (because your site is visited every day). All that hard work you, the SEO guru, spent on optimising the homepage for maximum SEO performance may well be compromised and undermined by way of changing layouts and content.

Even if the Search Bots are being filtered out, what if the winning permutation of the [Home/Product/Insert Name] page reduces the effectiveness of your page in the eyes of the Bots? This is a crucial aspect of MVT that is often overlooked.

My advice? Unless you’re also responsible for MVT, ensure you are fully aware of what is being tested and the impact any new layouts will have on your SEO strategy. After all, increasing page conversion yet decreasing traffic may leave you spinning your wheels in the sand…

What are your experiences? Would love to hear of other real-life examples

Affiliate marketing – the long-tail approach

My biggest earning affiliate marketing website exists within a highly competitive sector: travel. The website itself targets the uk market which is a small playing field with a large number of players. Ranging from OTAs (Online Travel Agents), holiday providers, private and franchised accommodation providers, from hotels through to caravans, cottages, cruise ships and B&Bs and of course a mass of well run, fully established affiliate sites it could easily put many new players off joining the ranks.

My approach as with all projects is to start small, test the waters and then take a call on whether to continue or scrap it. I was close to scrapping this particular venture 4 months in but persevered to see average page impressions each month hitting 50k. With an average of 10k UVs (unique visitors) a month that is an average of 5 pages viewed per visitor per visit.

Traffic is acquired primarily through SEO (search engine optimisation). I have PPC (pay per click) campaigns set up ready to drive more volume but the website is still in learning mode, to find out which keywords are driving traffic and converting into a sale (for free).

The point of interest raised from analysing the keywords, is the level of brand traffic this website is attracting. That’s not to say it is outperforming the brands for which I’m promoting holidays for, but that I am plugging a gap in the SERPs (Search engine results page) for those brands.

This is a crucial area for affiliate marketers without a strong niche – it can be done. What the big brands don’t have time for is chasing that 20% of long-tail traffic when the 80% of short and part long-tail they already acquire is turning over the majority of their revenue… and this is where affiliate marketing can work with the brands to complete the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction.

The majority of my efforts have gone into on-site SEO to begin with. By creating a strong search architecture, it allows for the website to continually take advantage of a well structured, robot friendly infrastructure together with the ability to maintain the daily content release process without the need to concern oneself with the technicalities of SEO. It is for this reason the daily content management of the site is out of my hands as is the on-site SEO, leaving time for more off-site SEO. This is the key to enhanced and sustainable search engine positioning.

This has also given me a rich dataset of top performing keywords to build a successful PPC campaign from whilst earning its own marketing budget. Therefore in year 2 of its operation I aim to double income by both increased SEO traffic (domain age, authority etc) and highly targetted PPC campaigns…. and whilst that’s all going on I know a thing or 2 about conversion and retention I’ve yet to utilise.

I shall keep you ‘post’ed!

Depesh

Online Branding & eMarketing Techniques

I’ve spoken to a number of leading companies in the ecommerce arena recently including retail, advertising, investment and travel. Most of the brands, which will go unnamed for reasons of trust and confidentiality, have a strong traditional ‘offline’ brand, well known as being leaders in their industry. However, they share 1 commonality – using their brand strength to drive online revenue, without too much focus on recreating the core brand messaging online.

What’s wrong with this if your company has continued to grow from strength to strength since early 2000? The problem is both of market saturation and losing out to your competitors. Using the stronghold that your brand has on a particular sector to drive online sales, will eventually mean you are losing out on a chunk of online sales of customers that do not know your brand well enough.

A true multi-channel sales approach considers online as more than an end-point and instead uses emarketing as an integral part of your marketing strategy. Consider direct mail; how many of your direct mail customers also receive the same marketing message via email? Which one do you consider most valuable? The DM piece that lands on their doorstep for immediate attention? The email that can be fully tracked from opening to clickthrough? How about using both mediums in tandem, holding back on emailing those that have received DM with a follow up email if they’ve not responded within a certain amount of time? Or perhaps you want to reduce print and distribution costs and encourage more customers to use their emails?

The key here is to think about your website as complimentary to traditonal marketing tools.

So how does this relate to online branding? What I’ve found time and time again is that brands are reaching a point now where they’re finding it difficult to continually grow the online channel, with 2 key elements missing from their websites; brand proposition and user experience.

Brand proposition is the portrayal of your core brand values; who are you? What do you do? Why should I buy from you? Why should I choose you over a competitor? How much? What’s in it for me? Etc etc

With brands driving traffic online through traditional marketing channels and seeing a heavy bias towards brand searches online, they’re not increasing their visibility online and not converting ‘brand virgins’ with their ‘buy from us if you want’ mentality. Sorry guys, this won’t cut the mustard too well these days, in a world of millions of choices and websites. Today, you need to maximise potential conversion of every visitor to your website to stand out against the competition.

User Experience covers your brand, product, marketing, pricing, competition and of course the look and feel of your website, ease of task completion and cohesion of each page to delivering a sale or lead. So much to cover, just where do you start?

You know your brand proposition right? You know your product(s) and you have a website. That’s a great place to start. Next, put yourself into the shoes of your customer and look at the various marketing messages you throw at, sorry deliver to your customers. Does online and offline carry a unified message? Do the designs and branding at least look like they’re from the same company? The place to start is to see things from the perspective of a new customer. Do you ‘get’ the brand and would you have enough information to at least visit the website?

Marketing material is as much a hook into your website as it is a communication channel. That’s why the user experience spans each customer touchpoint before you even consider how well your web delivers the user experience.

There are lots of optimisation techniques to hook potential customers in, but i’l leave that for another article. The next stage is how to give the customer what they want when they visit your website. Now worth pointing out is to appreciate and understand 2 things.

1) your customers expect to be able to find what they want quickly. They are the most important person on your website at that moment in time.

2) your customers don’t always know what they want!

Kinda tough to please everyone? Using a basic understanding of the hunter, tracker, explorer model of user journeys, you should at least cover off 80% of you user’s needs. For the other 20% ensure they can call or email you with ease.

Landing page optimisation is also in itself a key area of study, with numerous techniques and tools at your disposal. However, don’t rely on a one-size fits all design and consider instead at the very least, creating 2 landing pages for your marketing; for new and for repeat visitors. Their likely needs will vary with a number of areas of crossover.

Note: whilst this may not be the case for all businesses, invariably customers do not always type forward slash web addresses in. They simply go directly to the homepage. So if your DM campaign directs people to a dedicated microsite, you may be missing a trick if it is not also accessible via the homepage (an obvious challenge for below the line marketing).

Considering you have created 2 basic journeys into your website, again ask yourself whether you really fulfill the majority of customer needs. This is where an internal brainstorm with your brand/product team or external focus group with potential customers can really make a difference in uncovering hidden gems.

Creating a compelling brand journey doesn’t require a completely new approach to the layout of your website. Instead, incorporating existing collatorol into your key product and sales pages can in itself make a huge difference.

The point I wish to stress is to assume nothing. Once you crack it, your website will not only serve as a fully functional tool for those that already know your brand, but will also become a central platform in driving new business through your brand marketing.

What brand marketing challenges do you face? Get in touch for some advice or feedback.

Realistic Affiliate Marketing Expectations

Affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive arena. Even if you find your niche, it will only be a matter of time before a super affiliate or merchant challenges your space.

You need to be realistic in your vision of what you can leverage; if you’re working alone alongside your 9-5 role, it is very unlikely you’ll be joining the elite any time soon unless you hit a goldmine or perhaps suffer from insomnia with more hours in your day than most people.

Super affiliates become a network of specialists in their own rights, leveraging highly skilled talent to help further their profits.

I’ve seen a number of affiliates struggle from setting unrealistic expectations. Take my example. I aimed to become profitable after 6-9 months and achieve my first monthly income target within 12 months, using a structured approach to building my online presence. I’m well on track and with continual traffic and revenue growth at a steady pace, giving as much back as we put in.

Knowing what to set and how to set targets comes with knowledge of the industry which many affiliates may not have, but start small and over achieve. It will help massively with your motivation and give you further confidence to build on from each success.

What is worse than striving for success without seeing any payback? We have more ambitious targets next year, followed by global domination! Ok, maybe not just yet, but by starting small, your failures are also less magnified, from selecting the right host for your website to creating and marketing it the right way.

Finally, having consulted on a number of affiliate ventures, through the brilliant affiliates4u forum, I know how daunting and tough it can seem, but with a wide network of support available through forums and down to earth super affiliates there really is no reason to give up!

What challenges have you faced and how have you kept your motivation levels up?

Analytics brought my site down!

One of the most crucial tools in your online toolbox is your website analytics tool (you do have one right?)

I’m currently using Google Analytics and a newer application called GetClicky. I’m using 2 because Google Analytics is quite possibly the most functional and useful of the free web analytic tools with advanced features and functionality. However I love Getclicky for its real-time reporting and simple dashboard. The paid for version opens up more functionality but for the time being I’m quite content.

Personally I use Getclicky everyday to check site visits and GA less frequently for a more in-depth analysis. It is this very thing that had me running circles recently…

I’d changed a few things on the site, to improve usability and help better our SEO. A day later and visits had plummeted to barely 20 or 30 unique visitors a day from a far healthier number! What had I done? Was I being penalised for black hat SEO that I wasn’t aware of? Was this a seasonal shift (being the bank holiday weekend).

I decided to wait a 2nd day before worrying – yet the same again! Getclicky was reporting only 25 UVs.

It was only until my other half suggested looking at Google Analytics that I found the problem.

I’d inadvertently deleted the code required for the Getclicky tool, except for on the homepage! Google analytics was showing the correct volume of visits!

It is these experiences which help you as a marketer to sometimes remember that the most obvious of answers can reveal the best solution.

But most of all, don’t always trust the numbers!!

The Art of Selling – Can Online Shops Compare

One of my facinations in ecommerce is in comparing the real world of ‘bricks and mortar’ sales to online.

Real world commerce existed ever since man decided that he wanted more than what he could create himself. Therefore, with online commerce barely 15 years old, it comes as no surprise to see so many websites failing so badly; after all, humans have been trading for many centuries. The art of traditional selling is light years ahead of the Web.

Having a little time on our hands we ventured into London town for some site seeing (yes even Londoners do this). However en route to Bond Street via Oxford Circus we alighted the bus outside of Hamleys, the self-confessed biggest toy shop in the world.

As she’d never been to Hamleys, my wife wanted to ‘take a look’ – generally for women, (a generalisation may I emphasise) going into a shop to take a look could result in losing several pounds – not of the weight-loss kind either.

It is indeed a vast experience, with toys for genders, ages, types and crafts – quite a daunting experience being parents, knowing where to start. Back in my day (many moons back) a toy was usually something second hand, received quite unexpectedly, though with appreciation. Of course these days it is a given right of children it seems… I digress.

So why was I compelled to write this article? With so much choice, Hamleys would surely suffer if it were not for their fantastic team of skilled helpers. We walked out a few hundred pounds (£) lighter than if these helpers were not available.

Put simply, not only on hand to offer assistance, they were always willing to offer that little bit extra to find out exactly what we were after and demonstrated their knowledge of the toys they were responsible for enough so to pursuade us to buy them. Had they not been on hand we may well have bought fewer things otherwise not available at our local Toys’r'Us and shopped again later. Instead I spent the rest of our ‘relaxing’ afternoon together carrying bags upon bags of toys around, to the amusement of tourists.

So how can we create this experience online? Amazon.com do a great job with lots of great widgets such as recommendations, wish-lists and peer reviews, but do these websites really know who I am and what I want? Surely if the Web was a truely great sales tool, traditional shops like Hamleys would suffer.

I for one believe that the mid-term future is a better integration of these traditional trading establishments together with a web presence fully integrated in giving the customer the best possible experience.

Long-term the Web still may mature enough to become intelligent. I wrote a while back on Web 3.0 and the possibility of the web actually knowing enough about you to give you truly customised experience. Imagine searching for a summer holiday and the results knowing that you love the Med, prefer a villa and have a family of 4…

Until then perhaps we will constantly swim the tide trying to out-do well run businesses like Hamleys…

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing, or AM for those in the inner circle, is a lucrative and thriving sub-economy on the Internet.

I’d toyed with the idea of becoming an affiliate for a few years before I took the plunge. It’s one of those ‘wish i’d have done it sooner’ moments which you look back on with regret. My wife’s website is already earning a nice side income considering the small amount of time she has for it, using mostly SEO to drive traffic. Its provided me with a great test-bed to put SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing to the test.

If you’re sitting there procrastinating the decision then stop thinking and start doing!

I have a little more time on my hands now than i’d like so I will be posting some learnings, findings and stats from what I’ve found to help you out.

If you have questions in the meantime feel free to post them here.

Once again we raise a toast to the Internet and its far reaching possibilities for us mere mortals.

Depesh

Google Android G1 Phone: Increased Battery Life

Here are a few unscientific proven steps you can take to maximise your Google Android G1 smart phone battery life. It may well work for other Android mobile/cell phones  but until I upgrade (or get a free one through the post) I won’t know!

Firstly, like many smart phone owners I began by downloading loads of cool Apps and doing lots of unproductive stuff like using 3G to watch funny YouTube videos, connecting via the Wireless card just because I could and checking emails and of course Tweeting from the Android G1. (My previous phone being a Sony Ericsson Cybershot – great for calls and photos).

After completely draining the battery on the first day (initial charge was around 12 hours) I soon realised that this wasn’t too practical; yes I liked the fact that my underground tube journeys or longer train journeys would not be as boring anymore yet I still needed to be able to make calls with it too!

Step 1 – 3G is Wrecking my Mojo

After some research I found that the most battery draining feature was actually the 3G Internet browsing option. Apparantly it requires more power than Bluetooth and the Wireless Network card. It is far more superior in speed to the 2G network but this comes at a price.

Whilst 3G enables faster internet browsing, really, what difference does this make to background applications? If you’re on a data plan then 3G will of course download quicker but it will still download the same amount of information as 2G so unless your network operator is charging by the hour, you won’t gain too much.

Besides, I’m on a UK network on which I pay a small monthly amount for unlimited (loosely speaking) Internet usage via 2G and 3G.

Now what I do is to default my connection to 2G, and switch to 3G only when I really need it (like when using Google Maps or checking in on work emails).

Step 2 – Radio Silence

If you’re not actively using Bluetooth, disable it. Same goes for GPS and the Wireless internet card. I use Bluetooth in my car so its switched on when I enter and switched off when I leave. I use GPS for maps, simple switch on and off. Finally I use the Wireless card at home and I only switch this on when I need it.

Great, already increased battery efficiency by around 40% I reckon! (don’t quote me, I made that up).

Step 3 – Exposing the Undercover Sync

Another battery drain is background sync. What is it? It will sync your email, calender and contacts amongst other things via the internet. Unless you’re constantly updating things and *need* your G1 synchronised (I currently don’t) then switch this to manually update. This includes things like weather Apps, Twitter and partially pointless Apps like moonphase (did I say pointless? I did download it afterall… I mean sometimes useful).

By reducing the number of background sync items  you save your battery life 2-fold; firstly by reducing your internet usage but also in reducing your CPU usage by not having these items burning your CPU whilst on standby.

Step 4 – The Terminator

What a cool intro to step 4. Actually it is nothing more than closing applications that you were running. Since many of the G1 Apps do not have a simple ‘close’ action to close the program down, it will sit as a task on your Android consuming small amounts of memory and CPU (which wastes your battery). By installing a simple app like the fantastic Task Manager App (free trial version, worth paying for) or the freely available, yet basic TasKiller App you can ensure your G1 is running optimially by closing down apps.

Step 5 – Smaller Tweaks

And finally here are a few other things you can do to improve battery life. Again this is based on my experience with the G1 so you may have differing results.

a) Reducing the screen brightness will save battery. I’ve set my back-light to 0% which means I have a slightly dimmed view of my screen but as I’m now used to it, I don’t notice it until the sun is shining on it, when you do need to turn the back-light up (i.e. using Google Maps on the street!).

b) Ensure any Apps you stop using for example when the trial is finished, are not consuming your CPU. I installed a trial of an email client which when expired, still continued to request updates. Delete the App or upgrade it if you use it!

c) Set your screen timeout according to your usage. Mine is set to 30 seconds which is more than enough. If I’m browsing the map for directions I’ll use the handy Toggle Settings desktop widget to quickly set the screen to ‘never timeout’.

d) Ok some sarcastic person would probably write this so here it is; to save maximum battery, don’t use the phone. Heck, turn it off. Not highly practical though hey?

e) Or perhaps buy another phone. My old Nokia lasted 5 days. It made calls. Period. However I don’t want to ‘just’ make calls I want to surf the ‘net, take pictures, write a blog and check twitter updates whilst reading an e-book from my phone.

The Results

There you go. Some if not most of this has probably already been covered off seeing as though the Android G1 is now at least a year old (G2 looks great, though I love the keyboard on the G1). Let me know if any of this works on the G2!

Perhaps they’ve improved battery life on the newer versions of the Android phones but in any case, I’m now getting 3 days usage from my Android G1 which includes perhaps 1 hour talktime a day, 2 hours Web usage and other apps. Not bad me thinks.

Recommended Apps List to Help Save your Battery

• Task Manager (monitor and close apps)
• Toggle Settings (quick on/off actions for popular settings)

What are your experiences? Have I missed something off the list? Or perhaps you’re not experiencing the same level of battery karma as me?

Depesh

Time for Twitter?

Like many people out there, many thousands of people, I’ve been using Twitter now for a while and it is getting to that point where it is no longer something ‘fun’ to check up on to see what’s going on, but actually quite a burden and time consuming to keep tabs on! There are some great tools out there like TweetDeck and HootSuite (which I use, more on that later) which help to manage Twitter but it has become quite difficult to find the time.

The reason email is so successful is because you can queue the emails to read later as a recipient; I’m finding this difficult with Twitter. To the extent that I’ve stopped following some good Twitterers like Guy Kawasaki due to the mass of updates they make which makes tracking difficult!

I’m still following Mashable but that’s on the borderline too – where is the line drawn between being useful and being a burden?

When I first joined Twitter, it was great to see short excerpts on what other people were linking to like articles and releases. It is a shame that the most simple of things become difficult. Just look at the number of issues Facebook is having right now. I read a report that the sign-up rate is slowing down and the return rate (i.e. logging back on) is dropping, both signs that people are not interested like they used to be.

And this is when the playing field starts levelling and other, possibly better, innovative players enter the market. Just look at MySpace. Still going strong yet with a fraction of the market it used to have.

So am I still going to use Twitter? Damn right. But perhaps not as often as I’d like or as often as I’d used to.

About those Twitter tools….

TweetDeck - I like to use this to keep tabs of Tweets. It sits on your desktop and alerts you when a Tweet arrives. You can also create vertical windows within the application to keep tabs on conversations. In addition you can also log into your Facebook account though I’ve not found that feature too useful.

HootSuite - A fantastic little tool primarily due to 2 things; you can use its URL shorting service, which gives you access to click-stats and you can monitor/Tweet from more than one Twitter account. Great if you have a personal and business one!

There are loads of other tools out there but hey, here’s 2 for starters!

Depesh