$MarketLive

Webinar preview: Building community to compete with Amazon

May 21, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

If you caught the first webinar in our series about competing with Amazon, then you know that the online giant dominates U.S. eCommerce like no other brand, with year-over-year revenues growing at an average of 36% annually– more than double the rate of U.S. eCommerce sales overall for the same time period. Amazon is the biggest of the mega-brands attracting the lion’s share of online sales revenues, even as the number of small- and mid-sized merchants continues to grow.

But specialty merchants have some distinct advantages when compared with the mega-merchant — and one of them is the capacity to forge strong ties with shoppers through a brand community. Because Amazon warehouses so many disparate product categories, the brand is largely impersonal; there’s little opportunity for its customers to unite around a common lifestyle or passion. Whether via social media or on the Amazon site itself, interactions among shoppers are limited. The only trait many Amazon customers share is the desire to earn free shipping. By contrast, small- to mid-sized merchants who focus on a particular product category or audience have the opportunity to provide their customers a platform for meaningful interaction and a shopping experience that connects them with other like-minded consumers.

In tomorrow’s webinar, we’ll examine key strategies for building community — and not just via social networks. While social networking sites provide broad exposure and the opportunity to entice new shoppers to follow brands, brand followers tend to be passive; just 6% of social network users actively engage the brands they follow, according to marketer ComBlu. By contrast, branded community experiences provide a platform for committed brand advocates to shine, and for customers to contribute meaningful input on products and promotions.

Among the methods for creating on-site community the webinar will address:

“Socializing” the path to purchase with integration tools. One increasingly popular way to marry community and commerce is to use tools available from social networking sites to integrate consumers’ social networking data with the shopping experience. Taking advantage of these tools gives merchants a means to create a community hybrid that incorporates the best of both worlds – the critical mass represented on Facebook and other social sites combined with the ownership control of their own eCommerce sites. Shoppers on the Macy’s site can poll their network of Facebook friends about which products to buy — giving the shopper a recommendation from trusted friends as well as introducing the shopper’s friends to products on the Macy’s site.

Deepening the conversation via branded communities. Merchants should tap their deep knowledge of the customer lifestyle to find unique ways to build community around specific activities and passions. That community can take many forms, from customer reviews that spawn in-depth discussions to mobile apps that encourage members to engage with the brand, as Nike’s Nike Plus running community tools do. Runners download an app that tracks their runs via GPS and enables sharing with the main community site, where the fastest times for popular runs are spotlighted via “leaderboards”.

Tune in tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific for more strategies for building one-of-a-kind communities. Meantime, how do you encourage shoppers to engage with the brand and each other?

Filed under Acquire, Convert & Retain, Social Commerce Tagged with Compete with Amazon, Facebook

The value of thinking long-term

April 30, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

By now, merchants know that connecting with shoppers across touchpoints is crucial to their business — but quantifying the interaction of channels and and influences remains elusive. So it’s helpful to see new data from Google that shows just how important it is to maintain well-rounded, cohesive messaging. The interactive report “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase” parsed transactions from more than 35,000 sites using Google Analytics to demonstrate how a mix of influences convert shoppers to buyers.

Crucially, the report analyzed the length of the customer journey as well as the variety of touchpoints, and found that in retail, fully 50% of revenues are generated by purchases made over more than one day of interactions. Not only that, but a whopping two-thirds of revenues are generated by purchases that take place after more than one interaction — and the average order value for purchases rises as shoppers have more interactions with a brand. Compared with the average order value of a purchase made after one transaction, purchases made after about 10 interactions are 50% higher, and the average order value keeps rising (although incrementally) from there.

The data suggests that merchants need to rethink their messaging and strike a balance between enticing shoppers to buy immediately and building the long-term brand connection that pays off in the longer term. Among the strategies to consider:

Use “flash sale” style promotions wisely. The popularity of flash sale sites such as RueLaLa, Zulilly and Woot! has prompted retailers to tap into the daily-deal mindset with extremely limited-time offers that expire after a day or even just a few hours, often focusing on a single product. Such promotions can drive signups for email or mobile alerts on daily deal products and spur increased engagement with products on the Web site as shoppers are exposed to an array of fresh products. To encourage still further engagement across brand touchpoints, merchants should layer in longer-term messaging, using secondary positions in email promotions and on landing pages to encourage shoppers to keep coming back even if the featured discount doesn’t spor them to buy. Victoria’s Secret’s email promotion featuring a one-day sale on bikinis uses a secondary banner position to promote dollar-off discounts not tied to a particular product category, thereby appealing to shoppers not on the hunt for swimwear.

Use layers of social media interaction to spur long-term engagement and sales. Merchants should find ways to go beyond posting promo codes and product links to create a truly participatory experience for brand followers that leads inexorably to purchasing. American Eagle devised a months-long contest that spawned content across touchpoints and encouraged product browsing. Followers were first asked to vote for “real life” models for AE’s spring 2013 campaign on Facebook; the winners were featured in video profiles on the AE.com blog and their top product picks were displayed on Pinterest, leading followers to engage on multiple social platforms. Finally, those same contest winners appeared on the AE.com site as product models in shoppable collections.

How do you build long-term engagement with your brand?

Filed under Acquire, Convert & Retain, Social Commerce

A different view of thinking visually

April 16, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

We’re still processing all the ideas exchanged during last week’s MarketLive Summit, our annual gathering of MarketLive merchants, technology partners, and guest experts. There was valuable information presented at every turn, from inspiring keynote speeches to nuts-and-bolts breakout sessions and training seminars.

One thread from the opening day’s keynotes resonated with our recent post on thinking visually — or rather, jarred loose a few assumptions. Tim Ash of Site Tuners gave a bracing keynote titled “Why Your Online Catalog Sucks (And What to Do About It)” which revealed how shoppers actually use web sites, as opposed to how merchants design them. He urged merchants to validate new site concepts with user testing, rather than just internal vetting, and to jettison ideas that didn’t contribute directly to boosting conversion.

Ash demonstrated how the power of imagery can either significantly enhance a site — or overpower shoppers with the wrong message. The takeaway? Merchants experimenting with new modes of visual selling must balance aesthetics with utility — starting with these tips:

Motion requires cohesion. Humans are hardwired to pay attention to motion, Ash noted: we have 220 degrees of motion perception, as opposed to just two degrees of detailed visual acuity. For merchants, that means elements involving motion are bound to dominate viewers’ attention to the exclusion of the rest of the page; home page slide shows promoting a variety of offers and products can contribute to a sense of chaos, as well as rendering the rest of the page nearly invisible.

While scrolling elements are unlikely to disappear from the landscape any time soon, merchants must be judicious in their use. Throwing a grab-bag of promotions into a slide show is no substitute for editing; scrolling displays should have a through-line of theme, tone and message and should support the brand’s overall identity. Pottery Barn ties together its home page slide show with the tagline “Colors of Summer,” showcasing a variety of housewares for the upcoming warm-weather season.

Choose heroes wisely. While too many images can overwhelm viewers, too few can be limiting. Ash displayed several sites whose single main home page image did little to convey the breadth and depth of the product offering — whether because a graphic touted a sale (without showing what products were discounted) or because a photo showed just one ensemble or item from a single category on the site, potentially leading viewers to believe only women’s apparel was available, for example. Merchants should divide home page real estate to display multiple images for several major categories, use personalization to serve the most relevant array of images for returning visitors, or choose a “hero shot” that demonstrates the array of products on offer, as L.L. Bean’s featured image does by showing both a male and female model.

Use images as organizers. Because images can convey so much more information quickly than text, Ash advocated using them to help browsers quickly comprehend category organization. The key is to create custom, composite images that accurately reflect the array of products within a category, rather than selecting a single item to represent the whole, which can mislead shoppers into thinking the selection is limited to what’s literally on display. B&H Photo’s home page offers shoppers a visual guide to the site, displaying images for each major category that instantly convey the array of goods on offer — such as the tripod and camera with boom mic and eyepiece for “Professional Video.”

Use social images with staying power. Ash didn’t touch on social media during his presentation, but a snippet from fellow keynote speaker Sucharita Mulpuru dovetailed with his usability-centric theme. According to Mulpuru, who’s principal eCommerce analyst at technology researcher Forrester, fully 70% of links on the visual social network Pinterest are dead ends, presumably in some cases because the featured products or offers are no longer available. And the phenomenon surely isn’t limited to Pinterest; with merchants now able to embed product links into photos shared on a variety of social media, and with consumers now able to redistribute those images freely, merchants must have a strategy re-routing defunct product links to relevant category or index pages. At the very least merchants should offer an “item not found” page that displays relevant alternatives based on the original product. Pinterest users clicking on a year-old link to an individual RCA product that’s presumably no longer available are routed to the home page, where the main display features links to related items in the power and chargers category.

How are you balancing aesthetics and usability when creating image-rich features?

Filed under Acquire, Convert & Retain, Social Commerce Tagged with Pinterest, Summit 2013

Trend watching: the importance of thinking visually

April 5, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

Merchants have long known that a picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to online selling. According to Internet Retailer’s database of the top 500 merchants, 72.8% of the largest U.S. eCommerce sites offer multiple product views, 85.8% offer an enlarged view of products, and 53.8% use zoom functionality to let shoppers hone in on specific product features.

While such tools greatly enhance the effectiveness of eCommerce site product pages, they’re no longer enough. A growing number of signs indicate that the Internet is becoming an increasingly visual, rather than textual, medium — which means it’s time for merchants to expand their view, as it were, of how to use images to promote their brands and merchandise. Consider these trends:

New technological capabilities process information visually. Building off the growing ubiquity of cameras built into mobile devices, a slew of new technologies enable consumers to take pictures and then retrieve related information from the Internet. Google’s mobile app, Goggles, delivers search results based on images rather than keywords, while the company’s Glass wearable device and promises to give users instant access to information on whatever they’re seeing, without even having to snap a picture.

QR codes that connect consumers to content via scannable codes are also part of the trend; their usage has grown exponentially; fully one in five U.S. smartphone users scanned a QR code as of a year ago, according to data from comScore.

The fastest-growing social phenomena are image-centric. We’ve commented before on the meteoric rise of Pinterest, the social networking site where users share images and links through visually-oriented “pinboards”. But it’s not the only picture-oriented social site that has taken off. According to data from measurement firm comScore, the visual blogging tool Tumblr and the snapshot-sharing site Instagram have also amassed tens of millions of users since launching, and Instagram shares Pinterest’s blistering 284% year-over-year growth rate. The phenomenon isn’t limited to still images, either, with video-sharing tools such as SocialCam, Viddy and Vine rapidly finding audiences.

Boundaries between screens are disappearing. Fully 58% of U.S. adults go online while watching TV, according to industry researcher Forrester, with tablet computers providing an essential bridge between computer and television: more than 90% of tablet owners use them at home in the living room or bedroom, according to eMarketer — suggesting they’re used for companion browsing while the TV is on — and at the same time they’re large enough to serve as portable televisions themselves, with more than 1 in 3 tablet owners using them to watch movies and nearly 1 in 4 using them to watch TV shows, eMarketer found. This rich mix of visual content and online connectivity is an increasingly ripe opportunity for brands to engage shoppers during leisure hours when they’re receptive to browsing and buying.

For merchants, these trends suggest an emerging imperative to engage shoppers visually at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Now is the time to re-imagine the shopping experience to take into account what Trendwatching.com calls the “Point-Know-Buy” culture, and to experiment with new strategies for combining products, offers and images. A few starting points:

Use video for more than product demos. When devising video strategy, merchants should create compelling content that supports the brand and the lifestyle, not just individual products. How-to content, footage from the brand’s archives, and behind-the-scenes event videos can all enhance the shopping experience visually. Note that these opportunities aren’t limited to brands with “sexy” product offerings such as high fashion apparel or designer home furnishings; more mundane products can benefit from in-depth video treatment, as demonstrated by Yankee Candle Co., which offers an array of video content about getting the most from their products, including a video on “basic candle care”. Such offerings establish the brand as the leading information resource on candles, boosting the credibility of the brand while simultaneously helping shoppers make purchase decisions.

Experiment with ways to marry products and images. Merchants should seek to meld shopping with visual experiences at every turn. We’ve already touched on the emerging phenomenon of shoppable video, which enables shoppers to browse and select products as they’re featured in video content, but solutions also exist for still images, whether it’s an interactive look book that seamlessly marries a visual narrative with the opportunity to select and buy featured items, or individual images with embedded product information that can be displayed across touchpoints, such as when Levi’s used ThingLink during the 2012 holiday season to create links to product information. Brand followers on social networks could mouse over the image and view product links in a popup window.

Tap into user-generated image potential. Whether or not merchants establish their own brand outposts on Pinterest or capture images using Instagram, they should find ways to tap the creative impulses of their brand followers. Prize contests or community recognition can provide the incentive to participate. The Armani Exchange Dressedfor.com site displays fashion photos uploaded to Instagram by brand followers, with contributions occasionally called out on the brand’s Twitter feed.

Use images to bring online offline. Merchants should seek new ways to draw consumers everywhere into the online experience, whether through QR codes in store displays or via product tie-ins on television shows. During New York Fashion Week early last year, L’Oreal offered free rides in taxis emblazoned with product images and scannable codes so that passengers could shop with their mobile phones en route to their destinations. The campaign reached fashion-obsessed consumers in a location conducive to shopping — what else is there to do in a cab stuck in traffic? One in three riders snapped a product image, according to SpyderLynk, which furnished the scannable tags.

How are you using images and video to enrich the shopping experience?

Filed under Acquire, Convert & Retain, Client Innovations, Connected Commerce, Social Commerce Tagged with Video

Social media watch: 5 Ways to Use Twitter’s Vine app

February 19, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

Our 2013 trends presentation touched on the importance of video as a means of connecting shoppers with products. With the recent launch of Twitter’s Vine app, merchants have yet another reason to make video a top priority this year.

For those who haven’t already checked it out, Vine is a mobile app (currently only available for iPhone or iPod Touch) that enables users to capture and share 6-second looping video snippets, which display and play within a Twitter post. The app enables users to capture pivotal, colorful or just wacky moments in live action, rather than with a still image, and share instantaneously. Vine is the latest of several apps to enable quick sharing of mobile video, starting with Viddy and now also including Tout, which features 15-second video status updates.

A perusal of VinePeek, which streams newly-posted Vine videos as they’re added, suggests that the new app will be used to capture plenty of cute moments involving pets. But there’s also serious potential for merchants to engage social followers using Vine and other mobile-video apps. And because the format is quick and simple to use, merchants can experiment without breaking the bank. A few potential uses include:

Promotion of live events. While merchants may well want to shoot extensive video at live events to edit and post after the fact, Vine is designed for instant sharing — enabling followers to share in the excitement as it happens and perhaps get a backstage sneak peek. When a NASCAR driver was featured on ESPN’s “Sports Night” program, NASCAR posted a Vine video showing a glimpse of the interview, as well as the scene from behind the cameras in the studio — enticing Twitter followers to tune in.

Demonstrate a quick how-to. While 6-second clips won’t replace extensive product demo videos, merchants can use Vine to highlight a specific feature, expert tip or handy trick. Cadbury UK recently promoted its new “Egg ‘n’ Spoon” product with a quick video showing how to scoop out the candy filling, and encouraged sharing by offering a prize drawing to those who retweeted the clip.

A new format for user-generated content. Consider a contest inviting followers to submit Vine clips featuring your products, or encourage customers to use clips to illustrate their product reviews.

Build brand identity. Advertisement-style clips that build on a current campaign or reinforce brand image are quickly becoming popular. Gap asked followers what shoes they’d wear with its Skimmer pants, and illustrated the question with a quick clip that encouraged followers to “be bright.”

Reinforce lifestyle affinity. Like longer-format videos, Vine clips can give followers a glimpse behind the scenes of a brand and demonstrate that staff members are attuned to the tastes of their clientele. And with the brief format of Vine, the clips can be quirky and tongue-in-cheek, as in this post from Urban Outfitters paying homage to National Beer Can Day.

Have you tried Viddy, Vine or Tout yet? What potential do you see in mobile-video tools for your brand?

Filed under Mobile Commerce, Social Commerce Tagged with Twitter, Video

Best practices for social login

February 15, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

As noted in our last post on 2013 trends, using social login can help merchants individualize the shopping experience for brand followers. And research shows that consumers appreciate the option: according to marketing firm Monetate, 40% of shoppers prefer using social login to creating an account on the eCommerce site.

But despite the potential upside, few of the largest U.S. merchants have taken the opportunity to implement social login — just 30 of the merchants in Internet Retailer’s Top 500 have done so, according to marketing firm Sociable Labs. The threat of brand dilution posed by displaying other sites’ logos on the eCommerce site, and the fact that merchants don’t own the data shared by social login users, are perhaps among the reasons driving this reluctance. As a recent analysis by email service provider MailChimp demonstrated, the key is to avoid assuming social logins can solve all a site’s conversion and engagement challenges. Merchants need to assess the potential upside of social logins for their own unique brands and act accordingly.

Despite the caveats, we believe social logins have the potential to drive significant brand engagement, and worth pursuing. But doing so is more than a matter of simply putting a button on the first page of checkout. To maximize the effectiveness of social login, merchants should consider the following strategies:

Know which logins matter to your audience. By far the most popular social login is Facebook’s, according to the Monetate study; fully 60% of shoppers use it, while other social networks’ logins each have less than 15% share. Given that 66% of U.S. online adults use Facebook, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, most merchants considering social login should plan to implement Facebook Login. But depending on their audience, merchants should also consider adding logins from other social networks, from Twitter to LinkedIn. Careful study of analytics and an assessment of which social networks have the largest audience of brand followers can help merchants assess which logins to use. The key is to offer the right mix for the audience without presenting an overwhelming array of options for shoppers.

Integrate fully. Too many merchants who use social login go on to ask shoppers to set up a separate account password for the eCommerce site — but the aim of using social login should be to smooth the path to purchase, not erect more barriers. Of course merchants should strive to establish their own direct relationship with shoppers; but they should implement a phased approach that encourages existing social login users to deepen their relationship, rather than forcing the issue up front. 1-800-Flowers gives Facebook Login users full access to the eCommerce site’s account tools, such as reminder services and address book creation, without creating an additional password.

Develop true social shopping opportunities. As a corollary to the above, merchants should make it worthwhile for shoppers to connect via social login by doing more than pre-populating a few checkout fields. Easily-shareable wish lists are a good starting point, but merchants should also develop shopping experiences that draw on shoppers’ social profiles to bring their network of friends and their personal preferences into play. Apparel merchant Charlotte Russe enables social login users to view a real-time stream of what items are being liked and commented on. Shoppers can filter the stream to view only their friends’ picks, and control whether their own selections are shared or not.

Merchants should also consider reminder services that incorporate social login users’ friend feeds. Amazon.com not only lets shoppers know which Facebook friends have birthdays coming up soon, but also makes gift recommendations based on friends’ prior purchases and history of product “likes” on Facebook.

Give users privacy controls — and message prominently. With Facebook and other social networks often grabbing headlines for privacy gaffes, it’s crucial for merchants to clearly outline how social login functionality will work, what user data will be culled from their social profiles, and what information will be shared with users’ friends by the merchant — and social login users should be able to exercise privacy control at multiple points along the engagement path. When designing their social login experiences, merchants should pay special attention to:

Signup messaging. Shoppers offered the option of a social login should understand the benefits and what information will be shared before beginning the process. Then, once they’ve opted to use the social login, they should be able to exercise control over how their information will be shared. On the first page of checkout, Wine.com gives shoppers an extensive explanation in a pop-up window of how Facebook Login works. Those who opt to use the social login are then notified of which data the tool will use and given the option to control how information is shared on the social network.

Sharing “likes.” When social login users add products to their list of favorites or “like” the items, they should be alerted to how that information will be shared — and given the option to edit the settings. Department store Barney’s launches a pop-up window when a shopper first uses the “Favorites” tool and lets shoppers select whether or not to share their picks.

Global control. From any page of the site, shoppers should be able to access their account and turn social sharing on or off; they should also be able to log out completely. Accessory retailer Claire’s offers a drop-down menu in the global navigation that enables shoppers to switch sharing on or off without leaving the browsing experience; users can also opt to log out completely. A fly-out help menu clearly delineates how sharing works and offers the further option of disconnecting from Facebook altogether.

Are you using or considering social logins for your site? Why or why not?

Filed under Connected Commerce, Social Commerce Tagged with Facebook

Webinar recap: Shopping without borders

February 12, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

If there’s one theme that emerged from last week’s webinar on trends for 2013, it’s that this year will see shopping escape the confines of the eCommerce site.

MarketLive founder Ken Burke explained how often-discussed but rarely-implemented concepts such as social commerce and multi-channel execution are due to come to fruition, resulting in an experience where shopping seamlessly blends with a consumer’s individual lifestyle. Rather than having to seek out products nested within eCommerce site categories, shoppers will be able to access items in new formats, presented with their individual devices, locations and situations in mind.

Finding new ways to marry shoppers’ preferences with products is an essential means of brand differentiation, which — as discussed in our preview of the webinar – will be merchants’ core challenge for 2013. By attuning technology to match shoppers’ priorities and the core identity of their brands, merchants can stand out in the crowd. A few top strategies the webinar covered:

Designing tablet-specific experiences. Burke estimated that 25% of all online shopping now takes place on tablets — and there’s growing evidence that tablet shoppers are more likely to buy, and buy more, than mobile and perhaps even desktop shoppers. So it behooves merchants to take advantage of the devices’s unique properties — not only its screen size and swipe-and-tap navigation, but the environment in which shoppers use tablets. Tablet owners use them at home 74% of the time, according to eMarketer, while just over a third use them in stores. By contrast, the vast majority of smartphone owners go online on their devices from on-the-go locations, with 75% using them in stores, industry researcher Forrester found. Merchants should optimize the shopping experience for tablets with display-driven formats that enable swiping to browse, as Staples has done with a tablet-specific site that includes an array of “hot deals” and best sellers for shoppers to swipe through.

Connecting on-the-go browsing to buying. Smartphone shoppers are 14% more likely to convert and make a purchase in the store than non-smartphone users, according to data from Deloitte — the trick is to provide deep, location-relevant content that encourages purchasing. As a corollary benefit, developing mobile content intended for in-store use helps merchants quantify and track consumers’ movement across touchpoints – enabling them to tighten the mobile-to-purchase connection and justify further investment in mobile efforts. QR codes are increasingly prevalent, with one in five U.S. consumers having scanned one in the past month, so merchants would do well to experiment with this format for physical stores. As an extreme example, Burke showed how eBay has transformed its Inspiration Shop window at 404 Park Avenue South in New York into a buying opportunity using QR codes to link passersby to products and transactions.

Embedding products in pictures. Merchants have long known that multiple images and product videos help increase conversion; now, it’s possible to make the transition from image to transaction even more seamless, with product links and displays built into rich media that can be syndicated far beyond the eCommerce site. Barney’s New York used a behind-the-scenes video to showcase products with a product popup display that allowed shoppers to add items to the cart without disrupting their viewing experience. A timeline across the bottom of the display lets shoppers scroll back to items of interest.

Redefining social shopping. At first, merchants who wanted to monetize social media focused on Facebook stores as a way to enable shoppers to buy within the social environment. Those efforts have seen mixed success, largely because merely adding a “buy” button fails to take advantage of the unique properties of the medium. Rather, by integrating social data with products merchants can create an engaging experience for brand followers. On social networks, that means building interactive social media experiences that allow shoppers to share and tailor product arrays. But perhaps even more exciting is the prospect of bringing social data back onto the eCommerce site, where merchants can blend shoppers’ personal preferences and social data with relevant products using Facebook login and other social connector tools. When shoppers use Facebook in conjunction with accessory retailer Claire’s, they can access a “Fashion Feed” showing which items other shoppers — everyone or just friends — are tagging as favorites, and they can opt whether to add their product picks to the mix.

Using social login is so important that we’re planning a post dedicated to best practices for implementation — watch for it in the coming week. Meantime, to access more key strategies for 2013, replay the webinar — and tell us: what are your priorities for the year?

Filed under Acquire, Convert & Retain, Connected Commerce, Mobile Commerce, Social Commerce Tagged with Facebook, Tablets, Video

Webinar preview: trends to help brand stand out in the crowd

February 5, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

Now that the exuberance of the successful holiday season has worn off, for many merchants the reality of 2013 is setting in – and while they have every reason to be optimistic, they also face a fundamental challenge: how to stand out in the crowd.

The online marketplace is increasingly polarized, as the top mega-brands attract the lion’s share of revenues on one end of the spectrum even as the field of small- and mid-sized merchants becomes ever more crowded. While overall U.S. eCommerce sales grew an average of 14% annually from 2007 to 2011, Amazon’s North American revenues grew by an average of 36% per year for the same time period, according to industry researcher Forrester. And nearly 78% of the total 2011 revenues reported by Internet Retailer’s Top 500 merchants was generated by the 50 biggest names on the list. With over two million online retailers in the U.S. alone, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, merchants must differentiate themselves in order to survive, let alone succeed.

The challenge of creating uniquely irresistible appeal will be at the heart of tomorrow’s webinar examining 2013 trends, which will explore three key themes merchants can adapt to their individual businesses to present a relevant combination of products, offers and services across screens and in new formats. Among the topics MarketLive founder Ken Burke will discuss:

Multi-screen shopping becomes the norm. As merchants have deployed mobile offerings, they’ve largely focused on browsing and researching – activities that support eventual offline or computer-based purchases. After all, just over a third of smartphone users have finalized a transaction on their devices, compared with the 96% who’ve researched products and gone on to make purchases offline or on a larger screen, according to research from Google and Ipsos. But the imperative is growing to focus on driving sales directly from mobile offerings. One key reason: the growing audience of tablet shoppers are more than twice as likely to make purchases on their devices than smartphone shoppers, in part due to the larger screen size that makes it easier to view products and complete checkout forms. But even on smartphones, merchants have an opportunity to better drive mobile revenues, whether by smoothing the path to purchase or tightening the mobile/offline connection so that they can better attribute eventual sales to mobile influence.

The end of the product page as we know it. Rather than seeking out static product information sequestered within a hierarchy of categories and subcategories, increasingly consumers can shop from a variety of online settings that are seamlessly permeated with opportunities to browse and buy. This revolution in content and product presentation is an outgrowth of advances in mobile technology that allow device users to search and identify non-textual content – from visual search tools such as Google Goggles, which delivers search results based on images rather than keywords, to Shazam, an app that can identify songs based on an audio snippet. QR codes that connect consumers to content via scannable codes are also part of the trend; their usage has grown exponentially, with fully one in five U.S. smartphone users scanning a QR code in April of 2012, according to data from comScore. Shoppable videos and artful product-and-text layouts appeal to the same sensibility of being able to “point, know and buy”.

Personalization moves to the next level. Merchants have been making increasingly earnest efforts at personalization, and for good reason: the rewards for tailoring products, content and service are potentially significant. More than one in three consumers say they buy more from retailers who personalize the shopping experience and 34% say they buy more from retailers who send product recommendations based on past buying and browsing behavior, according to research from personalization firm MyBuys and The E-Tailing Group. With an ever-expanding array of information available about individual behaviors, and a growing expectation on the part of consumers that products will be relevant to their specific situation, the bar is being raised on personalization. Merchants should now explore ways to incorporate location-based data from mobile devices and personal details gleaned from social networks as way to add further context to the shopping experience. But personalization in 2013 is also about drawing on shoppers’ explicit input and providing individualized services that make every transaction unique.

Sign up now for the webinar to explore these trends in further depth, complete with examples and more data. We look forward to the conversation!

Filed under Acquire, Convert & Retain, Connected Commerce, Mobile Commerce, Social Commerce

Keeping holiday shoppers engaged: social selling beyond the “buy” button

January 22, 2013 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

As we reported last week, MarketLive Index merchants saw holiday sales soar, thanks partly to a growth in visits of more than 25%. Now that the peak season is over, one challenge for merchants will be to keep engaging those shoppers who first acquainted themselves with their brands during the holiday frenzy.

One critical touchpoint for engaging new brand followers is social media. As of August 2011, about two-thirds of online consumers reported using social networking sites – more than half of the total U.S. population, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, making social networking third only to search and email as the top online activity. And during the holidays, social media networks were abuzz with shopping-related posts: “holiday shopping” received more than 14.8 million mentions on social networks, and Black Friday social media ad campaigns were up 40% over last year, according to SAP.

Maddeningly, though, while brands attract followers by the thousands, in most cases sales and revenue have yet to follow: less than 1% of online purchases from either new or returning customers can be directly credited to social networks, according to industry researcher Forrester. Efforts to replicate eCommerce functionality using Facebook store applications have produced mixed results, causing some merchants to write off social media as a tool for motivating shoppers to buy.

But there are ways to engage brand followers and stimulate sales beyond adding a “buy now” button. For merchants to capture the attention of social media users, they should adapt tried-and-true techniques from their eCommerce sites to the social environment. Of course, that doesn’t mean simply copying eCommerce products and content into a Facebook app; they should take advantage of the unique properties of the social medium to create new experiences that appeal to new brand followers and long-time advocates alike. Just three examples:

Top rated products. Merchants have long used customer reviews as a means of categorizing and promoting products, from offering shoppers the ability to sort on-site search results by product rating to featuring the text of product reviews in email and banner campaigns. Now, on social media, merchants can showcase products that receive the most endorsements — “likes”, tweets or pins — and encourage brand followers to add their own picks. Merchants should go beyond simply displaying items to incorporate users’ comments, giving social media users a means to learn about products from others who share their needs and interests, in their own words. In its collection of “Pinners’ Top Picks” from Diapers.com on Pinterest, the descriptions include personal feedback, such as a note on a toy saying, “I can’t even count how many times this has flown off the high chair and smashed off our tile floor. Love this toy – it is INDESTRUCTIBLE!”

Collection selling. By presenting product ensembles for purchase on their eCommerce sites with a single “add to cart” click, merchants have the opportunity to not only encourage buying multiple items, but to express the personality of the brand and appeal to several target audience types. On social networks, the concept can make even more of an impact if merchants give shoppers the means to share and post ensembles users themselves create. Babies R Us created an interactive shopping environment for debuting its Heidi Klum Truly Scrumptious collection. Brand followers could not only view, click to buy or share individual items, but they could save and share outfits with friends.

Personalization. Increasingly, merchants’ eCommerce sites are able to deliver individualized recommendations based on visitors’ past purchases and preferences. In the social environment, merchants have a built-in opportunity to personalize by incorporating information from brand followers’ social profiles. Building social shopping experiences that factor in gender, age and location, at a minimum, can help connect users with the most relevant possible projects — and keep them engaged with the brand. Party City’s “Brew Your Costume” Halloween game asked shoppers to allow access to their Facebook profile information and then suggested costume ideas based on gender, age and interests; alternatively, picks could be generated based on responses to a brief quiz with playful questions such as “you find a friend’s diary. What do you do?” The results page includes several costume options, as well as buttons for sharing the picks and links to top categories on the eCommerce site.

Did your brand’s social media outposts see an uptick in followers over the holiday season? How are you keeping them engaged?

Filed under Acquire, Convert & Retain, Client Innovations, Social Commerce

Webinar recap: Using social media to differentiate your brand

November 27, 2012 by MarketLive Commerce Strategy Team Leave a Comment

Although the busy holiday season is underway, we wanted to take a moment to recap our recent webinar on optimizing social media. Not only did the presentation contain a bevy of information about how to use social media to serve your business goals, but it included tips and ideas relevant to engaging consumers during this peak selling period.

In fact, the webinar demonstrated that driving engagement with the brand is the primary way merchants can make social media a worthwhile investment. While direct sales derived from social media elude many merchants, there are countless creative ways to showcase what makes their brands unique and connect with shoppers. Merchants should:

Communicate everyday value — and not just by posting promo codes. Any merchant can offer a discount; more worthwhile is using social media to demonstrate how the brand delivers value through its unique selection and deep product knowledge. Online merchant Bulbs.com used its Twitter feed not only to push a discount code (which was available site-wide, not just on social media), but also spotlights everyday low pricing on Ecosmart bulbs – demonstrating that the brand is committed to delivering savings on an ongoing basis.

Deliver customer service excellence. One of the most surprising statistics revealed during the webinar was that nearly half of social media users have relied on “social care,” according to a survey from NM Incite, and fully 30% of consumers prefer to access customer service via social media than the phone. Savvy merchants are catering to this shopping behavior by using their social media outlets to deliver stellar service — starting by proactively addressing shoppers’ questions and concerns, as Land’s End does with its customer service page on Facebook. From a prominent link on its main Facebook timeline, shoppers can access 24/7 customer service chat as well as information on returns, gift cards and more.

Merchants should additionally consider the customer service needs of mobile shoppers when crafting social content, as a third of mobile users visit social sites on their smartphones and tablets. One key element for shoppers on the go is a store locator, which merchants should feature on social media outposts. Lowe’s not only offers a store locator within the Facebook environment, but it includes hours of operation for local outlets so shoppers can better plan their itineraries.

Crowdsource everything. Merchants can put shoppers’ opinions front and center in myriad ways, giving social followers a stake in the brand and giving it an authentic identity. When it comes to showcasing products, merchants can create a compelling collection of items by grouping fan favorites and going beyond simply displaying ratings to include snippets of review text, comments from social media or emailed feedback. This collection of “Pinners’ Top Picks” from Diapers.com on Pinterest includes personal feedback in the item descriptions, such as a note on a toy saying, “I can’t even count how many times this has flown off the high chair and smashed off our tile floor. Love this toy – it is INDESTRUCTIBLE!”

And beyond displaying existing user-generated content, merchants can use social media to solicit further input, taking the pulse of followers on everything from product design and selection to discount strategies and beyond. Walmart uses Facebook to solicit ideas for which charities should receive corporate largesse during the holiday season. The feature not only empowers social followers, but illustrates how Walmart has benefited communities in the past – making an effective showcase of the brand’s corporate responsibility.

For more ideas about engaging social shoppers, download the presentation replay or read the related whitepaper. How are you using social media this holiday season to engage shoppers?

Filed under Social Commerce Tagged with Business Optimization

← Older posts

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives

Other Links

Meta

Connect with us: