90news November 2009

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E-commerce Tips to Optimize the Holiday Season

After a difficult Q3, online retailers are trying to make up for lost ground in Q4. According to comScore, U.S. online retail spending was down 2% in Q3 compared to the same period a year ago. Consumer attitudes are beginning to make a positive shift, but behavior has not yet caught up. Nonetheless, in Q4 online spending is expected to increase - good news for e-commerce players. Online retailers will want to pay close attention to comparison shopping engines, social networks and free shipping promotions in order to ensure a successful holiday season.

In this tough economy more and more consumers are turning to comparison shopping engines before making holiday purchases. Major comparison shopping engines include Shopzilla, Nextag, Bizrate, Bing Shopping, Yahoo! Shopping and more. These engines represent a growing opportunity in the e-commerce arena. Comparison shopping click costs tend to be lower than paid search and could be an effective addition to your paid search strategy.

Consumers using comparison engines benefit from a concise rundown of where the best deals can be found. Comparison engines typically provide shoppers with the best price, preferred return policies, product reviews and deals on shipping. Reputable stores can benefit by having their site listed in comparison shopping engines, because shoppers can review the store and help to build a positive reputation for the retailers that deliver on customer expectations. A Google merchant account allows your products to be listed in Google Shopping results for free.

Online holiday shoppers inclined to use comparison shopping engines are also likely to scour social networks for the season's "hottest deals." According to research conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation and Yesmail, 27% of online shoppers who plan to both research and buy holiday gifts online this year will look for ideas about what friends and family want on social sites such as Facebook. 45% will use these social channels to compare prices and look for special offers. Twitter, for example, is the perfect platform for consumers to share their deal-finding abilities with the world. Similarly, it can be an ideal place for retailers to share holiday promotions with their consumers.

Along with searching social sites for the best deals this season, online shoppers will be looking for one incentive in particular: free shipping. During the 2008 holiday season, 38% of shoppers chose a free-shipping option. And according to comScore, 42% of e-commerce transactions in Q3 2009 included free shipping. In general, there will be fewer promotions this holiday season, because retailers have pulled back their overall amount of inventory. If the majority of your promotions get axed, consider keeping free shipping - consumers not only look for it, they expect it.

This holiday season, savvy holiday shoppers will be looking for discounts, coupons and sales - and they will look to social networking sites, paid search and comparison shopping engines for these deals. In the increasingly competitive online shopping environment you can quickly turn a browsing consumer into a customer by simply offering them one-click access to valuable promotions.

Branded Leads™ - How to Leverage Your Brand for Measurable Results

This is the fourth in a series of articles on the "Branded Leads" methodology by guest author Rich Carvill

Lean It Out
No one has time or money to waste these days, and when it comes to lead generation and new-customer development, it's more important than ever to trim the fat and get the most possible from our limited resources.

In this article, I will share some lean marketing principles to increase efficiency by targeting the right audiences, along with some ideas on how to develop the right offers to convert these prospects to customers.

Where Do We Start?
A client recently asked me to develop some ideas for giveaways to attract traffic to their booth at an upcoming tradeshow. This may sound like a simple enough request, but before reacting to this assignment tactically, let's think it through from a "Branded Leads" perspective. What I mean by this is: how do we take advantage of the opportunity to leverage the unique value-creating capacities of our businesses to attract and then convert the right "brand" of prospects? These are the people who are most likely to connect with our value proposition.

Let's walk through this trade show case, starting with the end in mind. These same principles will apply for the other lead generation tactics in your mix, whether it's advertising, direct marketing, search or social media.

First of all, we need to ask some questions:

Who will be attending this show?
What are the specific titles, companies, industries, geographies, etc. that best define the kind of customers we are looking for?
How does our ideal customer profile overlay with the anticipated attendees of this event? (Note: the answer to this question will define our best prospects.)
What are some of the most pressing issues, problems or concerns affecting these targeted prospects?
Which of our products or services will address their specific needs?
What different kinds of offers can we present in our communications at this show to create the discussion and interaction we'll need to engage and nurture these prospects?

Once we have this important information in-hand, we are almost ready to craft our promotional messaging and offers for this event. But first, we have one more very important question to ask.

What is a Good Sales Lead Anyway?
This really is the $50,000 question and it should always be asked before beginning the creative process for your promotional and lead generation programs.

Here are a few suggestions on how to help define the right prospects and determine what a "good lead" really is for your products or services:

Look at your current customer base.
Which of your customers are growing in their business with you, and which ones are the most profitable to you? All customers are not the same. You will want to focus your marketing efforts on driving business growth with more of the right kind of customers - the ones that see the value in your offerings and are willing to pay for it.
Talk to your salespeople.
Ask some of your best salespeople to help you define a profile of the specific kinds of prospects they would be excited to call on. When you involve your sales team in the lead development process, you not only get a better definition of the kinds of leads you want to create, you also get important buy-in from the sales team in determining what kinds of leads they will be willing to spend their time on.
Do your homework.
Look for new and emerging markets and applications for your products and services. Read the trade magazines. Attend market-specific webinars and webcasts. And, when you go to trade shows, don't just "man the booth." Make it a point to attend the presentations and workshops presented there, and look for any new trends and growth opportunities these may bring to you and your business.

Create the Offer
Based on the answers to the questions above and the insight gained about where we can deliver unique value to the marketplace, we are now ready to create our offer. Hopefully, we have learned enough about what these best prospects look like that we can create an offer designed to filter out the wrong kinds of prospects and attract more of the right ones.

Too often, marketers make the mistake of measuring success simply by the number of leads generated. This is both short-sighted and inefficient. Since so many of us are being asked to do more with less these days, no one has time to wade through a pile of poorly qualified leads to find the handful of good ones that are really worth the time to follow up with. So let's use the "Brand Leads" concept and design an offer that will help us prequalify our leads and attract the best prospects in the first place.

Now, let's go back to our example and the client's request to find some giveaways to attract people to their trade show booth.

Option #1: Do we want to give everyone that comes to the booth a $5 hat, pen or water bottle with their company logo it? Probably not. This does nothing to qualify or capture information from the show attendees.

Option #2: Do we want to invite people to give us their business cards or contact information to be entered into a drawing for a free IPod? While this step is better in that it at least enables us to capture contact data from the visitors to our booth, it does nothing to help us prequalify the right kinds of prospects for the products or services we offer.

Option #3: What we need to do is design an offer to appeal ONLY to those people at the trade show who have the need, the willingness and the ability to invest in our product or service. Some relevant examples might be to offer a technical White Paper, a product sample or a "free consultation" of our services.

Success from trade shows or other lead generation efforts will not be determined simply by how many leads we generate. Our success will ultimately be measured by how much new business we generate from both new and existing customers.

When we do our homework and really understand where our unique value-creating ability lines up with our prospects' needs and pain points, we can develop laser-focused messages and offers that will help us stand out in a world cluttered with noise and mediocrity.

Are the products on your e-commerce site price competitive? If so, consider adding your prices to the title tags of your site's product pages. Shoppers further along in the buying cycle are trying to find the best price for their selections, and they will be more likely to click to your site if they see the best price listed on the search results page.

90octane Hires Nikki Burmaster as Marketing Coordinator

90octane Hires Susan Smith as Marketing Coordinator

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90octane is a conversion-driven marketing agency. A pioneer in response-based interactive tactics such as search engine marketing, online advertising and microsite design, the firm integrates these with more traditional channels to deliver custom, optimized programs. 90octane helps business-to-business companies generate and nurture high-quality sales leads, international nonprofits attract new donors, and top consumer brands enter new markets and increase sales.

90octane
518 17^th Street, Suite 1400 l Denver, CO 80202
720.904.8169 l info@90octane.com www.90octane.com

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90octane 518 17^th Street, Suite 1400, Denver, CO 80202