MediaPost’s eMailInsider today looked at the effectiveness of the e-mail campaigns by a variety of retailers. Neiman Marcus (disclosure: Neiman Marcus is an ATG customer) is lauded as having “the most robust email marketing program.” This is noteworthy because, as I mentioned in my post about eTail, there is research that suggests that email campaigns have higher conversion rates than their search counterparts.

Also of interest in the discussion about the good job Target does segmenting its list and the company’s use of A/B testing with subject lines.

(Disclosure: both Neiman Marcus and Target are ATG customers.)

The MediaPost piece is another good reminder that the view of commerce needs to be a holistic one. Personalization and merchandising should come into play in all touchpoints within an integrated commerce experience – whether it’s outbound marketing, on-site capabilities and transactions or customer service.

[tags] e-commerce, personalization, merchandising, e-mail marketing [/tags]

Last week, ATG exhibited at eTail 2007 Palm Desert. What follows is largely stream of consciousness notes of some of the interesting tidbits I heard.

I started the conference with my mini keynote, talking about how personalization was the key to taking advantage of the Long Tail, which led into my introduction of Chris Anderson. He referred back to my personalization pitch a couple of times – as I’ve mentioned before, I think there is a real synergy of ideas between the Long Tail and personalization. (Which I’m sure Chris will get into when he keynotes ATG’s annual user conference, Insight Live 2007.) One person asked about Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice – the theory in his best-selling book is that people have too many choices. Chris countered that what you need is a “paradise of choice” – this connects back to how personalization helps you find what you want in the Long Tail.

Someone quoted research that 25% of visitors to the top 40 e-commerce sites are driven there by an email blast. 28% are driven there by a search engine.  Email-driven visitors have a higher conversion rate and satisfaction.

There was a panel on ratings and reviews – Home Depot, Smart Bargains and Petco spoke – two are using Bazaar Voice, one Power Reviews. All views were very positive on both vendors.

Organic and Molecular stood out among the interactive agencies.

Gary Briggs, CMO, on how eBay runs marketing:

• Positioning = battle for the mind – Meaning = promise for the heart
• They focus a lot on customer feedback.  They do “voices” = big distribution list for customer feedback, 700 employees on distribution list, he gets several email a day on this list from customers. They also do “views” where they go out and sit with a customer for a full day watching their every move to see how they work with eBay. And “visits” where they talk to consumers (as opposed to customers, who are sellers). Their main metric is “share of wallet” – of the money people spend to sell their stuff, and the money consumers spend on line, how much does eBay get. In marketing, they work on both “drumbeats” (stuff you have to do day in day out) and “rockets” (big periodic programs).

A panel on new projects with Neiman Marcus, Overstock.com, Ice.com, others ended up focusing on “customer experience” as major thrust for new projects. This is a term we’ve used on and off for a couple of years…interesting to see it coming more into vogue. (Disclosure: Neiman Marcus is an ATG customer.)

VP of marketing and development of Jones Apparel spoke on technology innovation – focused on Ajax. He asked “why innovate”, and said ROI was an ok reason, but the best reason was because it was fun for developers. He has 18 developers working on Jones sites. He used GAP as example of cool use of Ajax, also the Amazon diamond finder and Netflix quick pop. He said a trend was to drop support for non-javascript/non Ajax browsers – he said Gap has done this.

These notes only begin to scratch the surface of a very interesting conference. Please add to these observations in the comments!

[tags] eTail, chris anderson, long tail, the long tail, personalization, e-commerce, barry schwartz, paradox of choice, marketing, customer experience, ajax, bazaar voice, power reviews [/tags]
 

Gartner recently released its e-commerce Magic Quadrant (written by Research VP, Gene Alvarez) and we are thrilled with ATG’s placement in the Leader quadrant. ATG’s positioning is the company’s best ever, topping last year’s first-ever entrance into the Leader Quad. This year, we’ve improved drastically in “ability to execute” and we’ve improved substantially in “product vision.” In fact, ATG beat the entire field in that category!

OK, OK, I’ll stop gushing. You can read the report for yourself.

[tags] Gartner, Magic Quadrant, Gene Alvarez, e-commerce [/tags]

Check out the featured campaign on Sephora’s site, which encourages women to take the Valentine’s Day gifting ritual into their own hands. Talk about personalization in the extreme!

(Disclosure: Sephora is an ATG customer.) 

2/13 UPDATE: It looks like Sephora has changed its featured campaign, so the link above will no longer take you to any V-day content. But, you can read about it (and similar approaches from other retailers) here.

[tags] sephora, valentine’s day, personalization, eCommerce [/tags]

Zoli Erdos had a post earlier this week summarizing research that shows that SaaS is not just for SMEs. The post references reports from McKinsey (via Nick Carr) and Nucleus Research that each demonstrate increasing SaaS adoption in large enterprises.

We couldn’t agree more!

[tags] SaaS, software as a service, nick carr, Nucleus Research, zoli erdos, McKinsey [/tags]

OK, so maybe my subject line goes a bit far, but Google’s recent announcement about its enhanced personalization capabilities is another important indicator of the importance Web users are putting on their own individual, contextualized experiences. Nowhere is this having a more profound effect than in the world of eCommerce. In future posts, I’ll look at the “how to” of great personalization, but for now, let’s take a moment to look at the two major factors that are making personalization a “must have” for Web sellers:

The rise of the “Millennials”

This catchy term refers to people born between 1982-2000. Current estimates from Resource Interactive peg their collective spending power at $200 billion, with 5-17% spent online. (Perhaps more immediately relevant, though, is the influence Millennials have on the rest of the household’s spending.) A look at some commonly held characteristics of this group make it obvious why personalization is key. Millennials are:

• Perpetually connected (to each other and the wider world) via the Internet, text messaging, cell phones, etc., which serves to stratisfy communications
• Remember, personalization is about showing the right content, to the right person, at the right time
• Multi-tasking and productive, which means they are constantly filtering out “non-relevant” content and messages
• Optimistic and entitled. This group assumes success (in the case of eCommerce, this can be defined as quickly finding and buying exactly what they are looking for) and demands involvement in achieving that succes
• Fickle. If you don’t immediately meet their needs, they are looking for somebody who will
• Driving other generations’ behavior. Not only do Millennials influence purchasing decisions now, but they also serve as the model for how others may soon expect to be treated

Clearly, these characteristics are already driving behavior online. According to Forrester Research “Nearly half of consumers who visit a landing page leave in under 8 seconds. To build relevance, brands must start with segmentation models that enable personalization and deliver targeted function, content and images.”

Chris Anderson’s Theory of the Long Tail

I cannot do this theory justice in the space of one blog post (plus, I’m sure you are quite familiar with it anyway!), but the relevant highlights include:

• Demand for products available only online is potentially as big as for the biggest sellers available in physical stores
• Unconstrained by shelf space and distribution, narrowly targeted goods are now economically attractive
• Online, one size need not fit all

So if we are to have more and more selection in an online store, targeted and narrower niches, viewed by people who will leave quickly if you show them irrelevant content — the only answer is advanced personalization.  That is where Google is going, and that is where every ecommerce platform provider must go, and where every online seller must go, or risk becoming quickly irrelevant themselves.

In future posts, we’ll dive further into the attributes that contribute to an optimally personalized experience.

[tags] eCommerce, google, chris anderson, the long tail, long tail, millennials, personalization [/tags]