The Istobe eCommerce Analytics Blog

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? »

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 just got finished perusing ReadWriteWeb’s series on recommendation engines since we at Istobe have a vested interest in the development of this market. The 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 »