The Istobe eCommerce Analytics Blog

There is no question that recommendation engines work. If you’re looking for a way to boost order value, items per basket and conversions, adding a recommendation engine to your eCommerce site is pretty low-hanging fruit these days. But how do you evaluate which is the right one for you when all that black magic that goes on under the hood is so complex (and expensive)?

Recommendation engines are not rocket science (though we’d have you belive otherwise)

Most every recommendation engine provider boasts of patented algortihms and legions of MIT grads. Hell, our recommendation engine was created by 3 MIT grads (though (Course XV, not Course VI as you might suspect).  What we don’t tell you, however, is that this is more valuable for marketing than for creating a great recommendation engine.

Why?  The recommendation problem has been solved.  Most recommendation engines use one of a handful of methods that are well understood and detailed in academic literature. We all have our own little twists on the procedure, though, and this is what the legions of MIT grads ultimately patent.  The reality is that, at heart, most recommendation engines aren’t that dissimilar.

So when you’re looking to add a recommendation engine to your site, don’t worry so much about the black box powering it all.  Instead, focus on how well it meets your needs in other areas, chiefly:

• Cost
• Ease of setup and integration
• Customizability

These are the areas that cause the most headaches, though they are often oferlooked by potential buyers. If you find a recommendation engine that works for you in these three areas, you’ve got a good one.  Now go add it to your site and count all that new revenue!

eMarketer has an interview up with Bill Nussey of Silverpop in which he warns against badgering customers with email marketing that is too frequent or irrelevant to their interests.  The phrase he used is to describe this more tailored, moderate approach to email marketing is “keeping it in the green zone”.

The phrase resonated with me — perhaps because the “green zone” is how we visually depict customers who are likely to respond favorably to given email content in our new product.  

Read The Email Marketing Green Zone »

Since I’ve begun talking about twitter analytics, I’ll just keep on keeping on. After all, it’s the most greenfield thing out there right now and it’s interesting to speculate on which metrics will come to rule the roost. In Despite Recession, More Than 50% of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media, Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb notes that social media spending is on the rise. Of course it is; that’s about keeping up with the Joneses. But in paraphrasing the shiny, happy report from our Forrester friend and prolific tweeter @jowyang, Perez drops a bomb in the third-to-last paragraph.

Read The State of Twitter Metrics: Social Media Stumbling Block? »

I’ve been rocking HootSuite now for my Twitter posts for some time so that I can get the “enterprise” bells and whistles that it adds (e.g., a still-needs-work user admin piece). But I do see HootSuite as a useful first step in the evolution of Twitter for retailers. Once Twitter can be better tracked, more marketers will come. Today, I want to specifically talk about 3 Twitter analytics that retailers will need to get excited about Twitter (apart, of course, from more total users on the system and some belief that this is more than just a fad).

Read Just Give Me These 3 Twitter Analytics and I’ll Go Away »

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been watching the fallout from two important conferences taking place on the West Coast (where I would much rather be right now given the latest round of snow in Boston.)  The first annual Predicitive Analytics World ’09 was staged in San Francisco on Feb 18th and 19th and eTail West 2009 took place last week and drew in a host of e-Marketers from around the country. One common theme that I seem to be hearing from the blogs and articles I’ve read from both: make sure you’re using your customer data effectively and, most importantly, keep it simple.
Read Simplicity is Key for Marketing Analytics »

We’ve done our fair share of blogging about using Twitter and Facebook as marketing media.  We have little doubt that social media as a marketing platform will only grow in importance but occasionally even we suffer a bit of Twitter fatigue.

Read Some Twitter Marketing Perspective »

I often feel that email is the neglected step child of retail marketing. We’ve all seen the news articles and blog posts that tout sexier marketing trends like Twitter and mobile marketing. Many retailers have already jumped on the social media and company blog bandwagon and will spend months planning and implementing these changes on their website. Yet, I so often run into marketers that are willing to throw together a weekly sales email in an hour and blast the same message to their entire customer list.  Why? Well, my guess is they are underestimating the “response” they get from email. Catalogers are quick to argue that offline communications drive online purchases, but how is online communication driving offline sales?

Read Why Getting Email Marketing Right is so Important »

For a long while, it seems as though email marketers have followed the idea of nothing ventured, nothing lost when it comes to email marketing. There was simply no reason to get better at email marketing because it didn’t cost all that much more to send out 1000 more emails. So what did it matter if the clickthrough rate could be optimized? It was easier just to buy 1000 more names and blast them all. Extra names = increase. Right? Well, now that every retailer out there is sending more emails, it’s making the forest that much thicker - and the path to your product that much more difficult to navigate. Couple that with the fact that a poor economy is just about the time that acquisition seems too pricey and we have a perfect climate for belt-tightening via smarter use of technology. Behold, the age of product recommendations has come to email.

Read Retail Email Marketing Embraces Product Recommendations »

I was looking through a Coremetrics white paper today entitled Optimizing Your Marketing Mix in a Down Economy and was struck by the sheer amount of website interaction data the Coremetrics platform tracks:

• Every web page viewed by visitors

• Specific paths that visitors take through key site processes

• Web page point of entry, navigation path, and departure path taken by visitors

• Every banner ad, email campaign, affiliate link, search engine keyword (paid and organic), blog, news article, and any other source that brings visitors to the web site

• Every product, room, flight, or merchandise item that visitors click on, view, or interact with, and reserve, book, buy, or abandon

• Every newsletter signup, customer registration, and opt-in identification action taken by visitors indicating that they wish to be contacted

• Every important attribute of the visitor’s browser, including screen resolution, plug-ins, time zone, language, IP address, and domain name

Read Our Next Challenge: Turning a Firehose of Data into a Trickle? »

I am a bit discouraged today. I am surprised that we have not had more takers on our free customer scorecard application. Granted we have not unleashed the Social Media channel on the tool but I figured that after a week of availability we would have 10% more customers. The customers that have used it are overwhelmingly surprised of the results but I still wonder if the tool’s purpose is clear.

One of the leading, and might I say insightful, retail marketing professionals, Kelly Mooney, recently posted a blog titled: “Myths about online Retail Marketing”. In the blog she does a great job of providing an analysis of several marketing myths and there are a couple of takeaways that directly support how we perceive our tools to add value.

Read How Predictive Analytics Optimizes Frugal Environments »