eCommerce 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 »

I just got finished perusing ReadWriteWeb’s series on recommendation engines since, as a recommendation engine company, we have a keen interest in the subject. One thing that is abundantly clear is that recommendation engines still reside in the realm of technology, as opposed to business. Despite all of the success of Amazon and Netflix in using their recommendation engines to drive revenue and customer satisfaction (both companies are in the top 40 in customer satisfaction), the idea of recommendation engines still hasn’t quite caught on. One of the reasons is that old channels die hard and recommendation engines are still perceived as a purely ecommerce play. But they don’t have to be. And following these four suggestions will make recommendation engines more palatable to multi-channel retailers who need to take more time migrating online.

Read 4 Recommendations for Recommendation Engines »

Kevin Hillstrom has an excellent post today entitled Customer Retention: The Myth where he says improving customer retention might sound like a good idea but is actually quite difficult to do. I agree with his assertion that retention rate, average order value, and orders per buyer are difficult to improve in the short term, but I, perhaps unlike Kevin, I think that there can be real immediate gains to be had by trying.

Read Customer Retention: a Tough Needle to Move? »

Seems like you can’t turn anywhere this week without hearing more about the stimulus package currently being debating in Congress. Last night, almost every channel carried the hour-long press conference where the President took questions about the economic downturn and how current actions are supposed to help us going forward. I have to admit that I eventually fell asleep while watching (new baby), but I did stay up long enough to hear Obama talk about how the economic health of the nation is reflected in the economic health of consumers…and if I may expand on his words a bit…with the economic health of businesses. So the question for many of us is how do we stack up – how well are we actually doing?

Read Do You Pass the Customer Base Fitness Test? »

Not sure if you’ve used any of HubSpot’s Graders. Right now the Graders come in three flavors (Website, Press Release, and Twitter) and one in-progress flavor (Facebook Profile). Whether or not the latter two offer anything but ego-validation for single, consumer adherents - as opposed to true metrics by which businesses can assess their efficacy - is still TBD. But one thing is obviously true, the Graders tap into an innate need to contextualize ourselves, to rank ourselves. They also tell us how just a few metrics tell us a lot about how good we are. It’s this aim to simplify the complex, and to do so in a way that still portrays the full story, that moved us to build the Customer Scorecard.
Read Fans of Twitter Grader Should Check Customer Scorecard »

Tags: acquisition, customer health, Customer Scorecard, purchasing behvaior, retention
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