February 2010 – Cover Story: Make Site Search More Personal

Subjectivity is the Key to Driving Site Search Success

By Dr. Scott Brave

If your site search is failing both you and your customers, you aren’t alone. Marketers, website managers and search professionals across all types of organizations struggle every day to produce sets of meaningful search results that truly help their user base–rather than inundating them.

Enterprise search has long been the de facto standard for websites and corporate knowledge databases, predominately employing text-matching algorithms. While statisticians might be impressed with the outcomes, users who initiate searches find themselves drowning in a sea of homogenous data.

Search professionals and merchandisers are in no better position, with product catalogs and content that is constantly growing and changing.

Site search has come a long way over the past few years, and some traditional vendors are even making impressive strides to improve relevance without having to rely as much on manual tuning. Even so, the single most important ingredient to produce relevant search results is still often lacking: subjectivity. In other words, typical search engines still have no reliable way of accurately interpreting users’ intent or determining what results are actually useful in your ever-growing sea of content.

“What exactly is so wrong with objectivity?” you might ask.

For one, the critical information needed to determine relevance is simply not in our content. The content that makes up our websites–whether HTML, flash, video, PDFs or some other type–seems like the best place to discover a match to a user’s search terms, but often it’s not. Frequently, there’s a mismatch in how a user phrases his or her query and the words content creators use–and that’s just for content that the engines are able to spider.

If we make an assumption that the content is in a format that’s spiderable and that it contains the user’s search terms, it still doesn’t mean that the documents that are returned in the results are truly relevant. The key is to understand what content is useful, when it’s useful and who it’s useful for. However, that critical information is in users’ heads, and it’s based on their experiences and needs. That’s why introducing subjectivity into search is so important.

The best approach for surfacing this subjective insight might seem to be to explicitly ask the users. This approach seems good on the surface, but upon further scrutiny it’s flawed from a standpoint of coverage, bias and inaccuracy. Some enterprise search providers are beginning to move in this direction, but have generally failed to recognize a fundamental rule: actions speak louder than words. As social science has taught us all along, if you really want to understand people, you need to watch what they do, not what they say.

A few players in the enterprise search space have even figured this out. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they neglect to look beyond search. What users are doing in search only skims the surface of what’s really going on. Anytime someone comes to your website, they are looking for something. Many times they will have done a search on Google before they came to your site. Their Google search terms are your first clue. Once they get to your site, not all users search. And even if they do, there are many steps and actions that they take after the search is performed. Every action, be it search, navigation, engaging with content–or even all of the above–is providing you with valuable clues about what’s useful, why it’s useful and who it’s useful to.

Consequences of Objective Search
Site search is one of the single most important features on websites, and a primary method for your users to find the products and content they need. The consensus among analysts is that while there have been great improvements in site search technology, the current options aren’t making the grade–on the user experience side or the search manager side. To really move the needle on the search experience, companies will have to look at new methods that fall outside of the traditional search technology realm. Independent analyst firm Gartner predicts that by year-end 2013, more than 30 percent of the most popular websites will use search technology to better target content by adapting to the user’s context.

Poor search experiences aren’t just an inconvenience for users, they are also costly. Marketing budget is spent attracting visitors to your site. Opportunity cost is sunk into the hours spent manually tuning search results and content. Customer service costs rise as users pick up the phone or send e-mails. Revenue is lost as prospects and customers abandon your site in frustration. This clearly isn’t lost on companies. A recent study by Internet Retailer reports that 35.9 percent of online retailers have plans to upgrade their site search.

Creating a Personalized Search Experience
Improving site search isn’t just about producing better search results. It’s about personalizing the search experience to each user based on their specific needs. It’s about making search subjective.

If continuing on with the status quo is no longer an option because of both the negative impact on customer experience and the high associated costs, then you need some concrete, objective points to consider when looking for a solution to the search problem:

Think not only about content, but also about context - Users come to sites with intent. That intent might be indicated in a Yahoo or Google search that brought them to your site. After reaching your site, they might then express intent or context in the pages they visit and engage with, the links they click and maybe the site searches they perform.

What else are they doing to express intent and even engagement on the site? Consider how long their mouse hovers over a piece of content. Are they engaging with multimedia content? Do they spend time comparison shopping, hopping back and forth from one document to the other? This expression of interest may span multiple searches and actions, and finding content that engages them and holds true value for the user’s specific intent or context may also take multiple steps.

By paying attention to the context of users’ visits, you can begin to fine-tune their search experiences and identify what web pages and content will be most relevant to them.

Make search social - In recent years, explicit user actions such as click-throughs, ratings and feedback were introduced to solve the issue of search relevancy. We’ve seen this on the likes of YouTube ratings, Yelp reviews and Amazon product commentary.

However, today’s advanced social search techniques have evolved to take into account how humans search for, find and consume information and products in the physical world. In this sense, the implicit feedback users are giving you as they navigate both the web and your site are much more important and telling than explicit feedback–on many levels. These implicit actions take into account all traffic, not just a small percentage. They also include information such as how a visitor arrives at a site and every action they take once they arrive, including navigation patterns, search behavior, browsing behavior and even interactions with non-spiderable content like video and PDFs.

Remember, actions speak louder than words or, in this case, search queries as well as navigation on the web and throughout your site. It’s amazing what a little listening will tell you about your visitors and what will interest them.

On a larger scale, you should also consider the macro data that can be collected and analyzed from all your website visitors. As this data is continuously distilled, virtual communities of like-minded visitors begin to emerge. Actions, patterns and tendencies associated with these communities form the basis of a collective prospective that you can use to deliver better search.

Automate the fine-tuning process - When companies do find flaws in their search results, the approach most take is to manually tune and tweak the search algorithms or the content. With this approach, companies can only focus on the most popular products and content, and they miss out on the highly profitable long tail. Simply put, it isn’t timely, scalable or all-inclusive.

Furthermore, search administrators are rarely subject matter experts and possess little knowledge about how visitors think about a company’s products and services, making it difficult to establish rules to actually help users. When subject matter experts are deployed to tune the content, it takes valuable time away from more high-value activities they could be focusing on, and still only addresses the most popular searches.

Companies need a solution that automates the fine-tuning of results in real-time, and allows the site to change the results as the behaviors of visitors themselves change, continuously optimizing the conversion potential of search.

Give online marketers “community plus control” - If we rethink how we approach fixing search and let our users or online community automatically surface the right content in the right context in real-time, we can really take our sites to the next level. Yet with that automation, companies still need the capacity for control.

Automation should do the heavy lifting for marketers, but it must have flexibility built into it. Online marketers and merchandisers will still need to create business rules to augment and sometimes even override what the community is doing.

Think outside of the box engine – Remember, search should be more than just a box. The engine is just one piece of the navigation framework that guides visitors to your products and content–no matter where the content lives or the format it takes. Perhaps it’s on the homepage, internal product pages, customer support areas, a microsite or elsewhere. It could be HTML, multimedia, a PDF or even some other format.

If companies begin to accept the limited nature of search engines and the concept of intent, they can do much more than fix search. They can start recommending products and content the second they see users expressing intent. When companies create these personalized experiences–be it personalized search results or personalized product and content recommendations across the site–they create a user experience that is engaging at every touch. And driving users to the best content every time they visit ultimately improves sales and reduces costs.

Dr. Scott Brave is co-founder and CTO of Baynote. He holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford University. Dr. Brave can be contacted at scott@baynote.com.

January 2010 – Online Insights: Conversion

Live Chat: No Longer a Novelty

I’ve heard time and again that live chat tips the scales of success for e-commerce businesses. I’ve spoken with e-retail entrepreneurs about how the technology catapults conversions and I’ve participated in management conversations with multinational corporations about how live chat delivers superior customer satisfaction at a fraction of historic costs. But I still talk to companies that aren’t convinced–that still believe live chat software is a novelty, a cute feature to be filed in the “nice to have” column.

Until recently, my only retort was to summarize what I’d heard from our customers. But now I say something different. Something like this: “Quantitative data from the industry’s first benchmarking report shows that by adding live chat to your website, sales will go up by anywhere from four to 86 percent. What other initiatives are you working on that will deliver that kind of return?”

This is the story of how a few anecdotes have led to an industry standard.

THE ANECDOTAL
Live chat has grown over the last decade and is finally becoming recognized as a critical customer communication channel. Initially thought of as strictly a customer service tool and relegated to the bottom of “Contact Us” pages, live chat has evolved into an important sales channel appearing at the top of leading e-commerce websites everywhere. Website visitors use live chat to ask questions, find out more information and seek advice. They ask FansEdge.com about color and size selection for the perfect ball cap. They ask Allergy Buyer’s Club about the most space-saving air purifiers. They ask ApplianceZone which water filter fits their LG refrigerator. They want to know whether the Dean and DeLuca tote bag comes with the “Road Trip” gift basket.

These interactions aren’t just simple pleasantries; they have a real and significant impact on the bottom lines of e-commerce businesses.

Abt.com has informed us that chatters convert at 20 times the rate of normal website visitors. A long-time customer of ours, Exent Technologies, tells me they reduced support costs by more than 25 percent. Jim Allen, the CEO at ApplianceZone, is riding a rocketship of growth by engaging more than 11 percent of website visitors in chat. Credit Alliance Group is using live chat to help people who are facing mounting debt and has increased sales by 22 percent. The Source, a Canadian electronics retailer, proactively invites website visitors to chat when they enter the shopping cart–more than 20 percent accept and engage in conversation with an agent.

THE ACTUAL
While the results these customers have experienced are impressive–if not downright enviable–they are admittedly anecdotal. One thing they are not, however, is rare. I used to go on and on describing similar examples from other Internet retailers, but often, it didn’t matter. Prospective customers still wanted to know, “what will live chat do for me?” We’ve spent the last 18 months tackling this question and putting statistically relevant arrows in our quiver. Some time was wasted trying to find secondary sources that proved live chat’s efficacy. When it appeared that nobody was looking quantitatively at live chat, we decided to.

Many companies dismiss live chat under the assumption that if a visitor wants to communicate, they’ll just pick up the phone. For our first foray into this investigation, we went directly to the source and asked the Internet shoppers themselves. Our quantitative project with over 250 regular e-commerce buyers revealed several findings, including some that surprised us.

Under several shopping and customer-care scenarios, we asked respondents to indicate their preferred method of communication. To be honest, we thought the phone would win; after all, it does have a 130-year head start. We were shocked, however, that in every scenario presented, the phone was never the number-one choice. It was, we admit, a close race. But the fact is that live chat won every time.

We learned some other things, too. For example, while 58 percent of the entire sample said that live chat positively influences their purchase decisions, the percentage rises significantly with more regular shoppers.

WE’VE SEEN LIVE CHAT FROM BOTH SIDES NOW
Despite everything we learned, skeptics remain. There are those who criticize our research based on the assumption that what consumers say and what they do are sometimes quite different. So we ventured into new territory. Because our products are provided through a software-as-a-service model, our infrastructure includes aggregated data from one of the world’s largest live chat user communities. We decided to interrogate this data in order to illuminate the real experiences of businesses actually using live chat on an everyday basis. What we found is quickly becoming the de facto standard in the industry.

Here is just a sample of what we uncovered:

• Adding live chat to a website increases purchase conversions by between four and 86 percent.
• The average website can expect to have six percent of their proactive invitations accepted.
• The average website can expect to engage between one and 21 percent of its visitors in chat. One of the biggest determinants is the overall traffic volume of the site in question.
• Placing a chat button on multiple pages increases chat volume by 53 percent.
• Repeat visitors are 64 percent more likely to engage in a live chat.
• Seventy-nine percent of visitors fill out post-chat surveys and, overwhelmingly, live chat interactions are given high satisfaction ratings.

BEATING THE BENCHMARKS: ALLERGY BUYER’S CLUB
Allergy Buyer’s Club is an online retailer of healthy-home and allergy-relief products such as air purifiers, specialty vacuums and dehumidifiers. A long-time believer in live chat, the company has spent years measuring and tweaking their implementation in order to turn it into a major sales channel. Robert Scott, the company’s chief operating officer, has led and managed the effort with results that, by and large, exceed the benchmarks. In November 2009, the beginning of their busy holiday season, we pulled some interesting data:

• Live chat increased conversions by about eight percent for Allergy Buyer’s Club.
• Visitors who engaged in live chat with a representative during this month were about eight times more likely to buy.
• Allergy Buyer’s Club’s use of rules-based proactive chat increased their overall chat volume by a multiple of five in November.
• During this same time, repeat visitors were 70 percent more likely to accept invitations from Allergy Buyer’s Club agents.

Scott and his entire team are able to beat the benchmarks for two primary reasons. The first is their impressive and continuous improvement processes. Allergy Buyer’s Club is constantly applying and re-applying website analytics in order to maximize chat’s effectiveness.

The second explanation for their success is due to their superlative focus on customer service manifested by their extensive live chat agent training. Their focus on developing an implementation that is customized and works specifically for their needs has truly paid off.

I like to believe there’s a third reason that Allergy Buyer’s Club succeeds so impressively. It’s the fact that for them, live chat isn’t a novelty but a primary sales channel worthy of considered measurement and executive-level support.

Ross A. Haskell is director of marketing for Bold Software, a web communications solutions provider. He can be reached at ross@boldsoft.com.

January 2010 – Online Insights: Merchandising

Next Generation Recommendations

Now that we’ve entered the New Year, online retailers are taking a close look at their holiday sales and overall business results from 2009. And with new 2010 budgets in place and a more promising economic environment ahead, retailers are likely evaluating what new e-commerce technologies they need to meet the growing expectations of today’s savvy online shoppers and to outperform their competitors in 2010.

What’s on your “must have” list for 2010? Is it social network integration? Marketing or site optimization? Better ratings and reviews?

What about personalization?

It’s certainly not a new topic. Personalization has been around for many years and has many types and nuances, including both “explicit” (user-controlled) and “implicit” (automated). It is the automated variety of personalization–the technique of personalizing the shopping experience for each shopper automatically based on his or her unique interests–that has caught fire of late. Also called “predictive analytics” or “micro-targeting,” the goal is to harness available knowledge about each customer to automatically show the right products to the right shoppers at the right time. The benefits? More engaged shoppers, higher conversion rates, increased order values and rich behavioral analytics to help inform merchandising strategies.

The good news for online retailers is that automated personalization technologies have evolved and matured. The bad news is that there are dozens of approaches and solutions to consider, each with strengths and drawbacks. The goal of this article is to explore automated personalization–how it has evolved and where it is today–to help you decide whether it should make your wish list for 2010.

Initial attempts at personalization began early in the decade with online cross-sells. Online merchants–using their in-depth knowledge of the product catalog and consumer purchase behavior–added cross-sell suggestions to product detail pages and to the shopping cart.

Yet merchants quickly realized that cross-selling in the online world–while valuable–was difficult and time-intensive. With large, rapidly changing catalogs, constant inventory changes and lean merchandising teams, most online retailers could only realistically apply cross-sells to their most popular products. Even then, cross-sells were not personalized to each shopper’s tastes or current interests.

Over the past few years, automated recommendations engines burst onto the scene. The first true implicit personalization technology to use real-time data analysis, recommendations engines were marketed as smarter, more efficient alternatives to “one-size-fits-all” cross-selling. Using click-stream analysis, collaborative filtering and statistical modeling, recommendations engines automatically display personalized cross-sells and product suggestions for each shopper, making it possible to cross-sell the entire catalog or the “long tail.”

As recommendations engines matured, online retailer adoption increased. Analyst estimates vary, but most suggest that 20 to 30 percent of electronic retailers today employ some type of automation for product cross-sells (either their own technology or a commercial solution). Sites like Amazon and Netflix have brought recommendations to the forefront and a growing number of commercial solutions have made the technology available to virtually all online retailers, regardless of size.

So where does that leave us today? Are automated cross-sells the end game, or just the beginning? Why aren’t more retailers utilizing recommendations? And can the predictive targeting technology underneath recommendations engines be applied to other aspects of online merchandising across the site and beyond it?

THE FEAR OF AUTOMATION
One reason for slow adoption of recommendations may be the “fear factor.” Many solutions rely solely on click-stream analysis or past-purchase behavior to recommend items. As a result, their relevancy is often off the mark. Suggesting items shoppers aren’t interested in buying is a waste of virtual shelf space. Other solutions can’t easily be controlled and often unknowingly violate merchant strategies, such as showing a certain brand of product with a competing brand, or showing an out-of-stock item.

Here’s a simple analogy that helps explain this fear of automation. Ask yourself if you’d trust an in-store associate to recommend products to shoppers solely based on what similar shoppers in the store looked at and ultimately bought. Or, would you ensure that the associate fully understood your products and merchandising goals, so that the products he or she showed and recommended to each customer matched the customer’s interests as well as your business’s interests? Most online merchants want the latter if they are to automate recommendations–and rightly so.

Fortunately, automated recommendations technologies have matured. Next-generation solutions have more predictive relevancy, deeper catalog understanding and more fine-tuned control. As a result, the products they show to each shopper are both more relevant and more aligned with merchant strategies.

AUTOMATION PLUS MERCHANT CONTROL
Innovative online retailers are using these next-generation technologies to push the personalization envelope and exploit their recommendations engines in new ways. They are building sophisticated, automated merchandising “campaigns” that blend the power of automation with merchant control and strategy.

One top-100 retailer, for example, has more than a dozen, finely tuned, automated cross-sell campaigns on its site. On certain product detail pages, recommendations are limited to products that cost less than 50 percent of the price of the product in view. When a shopper’s gender is identified, recommendations are limited to items only for that same gender. When a shopper is browsing in certain categories, recommendations are focused on that category, or from like categories; when a shopper is looking at a sale item, recommendations are limited to other sale items. In all of these campaigns, out-of-stock products are excluded automatically, and some high-inventory products are pushed more than others. Clicks, conversions and cart values resulting from each campaign can be analyzed to optimize results.

Another retailer is using its recommendations engine to automate its online best-seller and gift-guide sections. Sophisticated, automated merchandising campaigns instruct the engine to select and display the best-selling products or gift suggestions most relevant to each shopper. If I were shopping on this site, I’d see best-selling products and gift suggestions more tailored to my tastes and needs, while you would see products tailored to yours–making both of us more likely to find and buy the right product or gift. In addition, the site’s merchandising team has more time to focus on data analysis to make sure its assortment and gifts are relevant to customers.

If implicit personalization, micro-targeting or automated recommendations are on your list for 2010, you understand the value and importance of differentiating your online store by personally engaging each online shopper. As you begin your evaluation, keep an eye out for solutions that don’t just automate, but which also give you the power to control and guide that automation to align with your strategies and meet your business goals.

Ryan Hoppe is the director of marketing for ATG’s e-Commerce Optimization Services. He can be reached at rhoppe@atg.com.

December 2009 – Online Insights: Paid Search

Reaching Post-Holiday Shoppers: The Search Begins

The holidays may be “the most wonderful time of the year” for retailers, driving 25 to 40 percent of yearly profits in just one month, but that doesn’t mean the sales boom has to stop on December 25th. In fact, if you plan your post-holiday online marketing strategy correctly, the weeks after Christmas will bring a second boom in sales as gift-card shoppers and deal hunters flood websites in search of bargains. Over two-thirds of consumers take advantage of post-holiday sales, making these critical days in December and January a great time to clear out your remaining winter inventory and expose new buyers to your brand for the very first time.

One of the best ways to maximize post-holiday sales is to use paid search to drive traffic to your site. Google found in its 2009 holiday e-commerce study that 82 percent of Internet users find search engines “extremely or very useful” in making their purchases.

Who are Post-Holiday Shoppers?

Let’s step back and think about what consumers expect from the post-holiday shopping period. First and foremost, they want deals. Generally, people who are shopping a few days after receiving tons of gifts will be motivated only by great bargains; they don’t “need” to buy anything. Second, millions of shoppers will redeem gift cards or exchange unwanted gifts for credit to choose new items. Third, unlike the frenzy of buying for other people leading up to the holidays, in the post-holiday period, shoppers are mostly shopping for themselves—looking to pick up those items they wanted but didn’t receive, or to stock up on family essentials.

Also, think about your post-holiday goals. Of course, you want to get rid of excess winter inventory left over from the holiday season. But do you also want to promote some of your back-catalog or long-tail items? What about increasing sign-ups for your e-mail list or rewards program? Are there ways that you can capture these shoppers again and again, for example, by offering in-store credits for online purchases of over $100?

Thinking about your post-holiday marketing plan from both the consumer and the retailer perspective is a great way to get a head start on your post-holiday search marketing strategy.

SEM Tips for Boosting Post-Holiday Sales

Once you’re ready to create a post-holiday paid-search campaign, consider the following best practices to boost both sales and ROI performance:

Recalibrate your bids for non-holiday traffic. During the holidays, online merchants typically see increased traffic, conversion rates and sales, as well as higher-than-normal average order values. As a result, competition and bids for popular keywords usually increase during the run-up to the holidays. In the post-holiday period, you need to anticipate the shift downward in terms of conversion rate and average order values that results from consumers returning to their everyday habits. If you don’t, you may find yourself bidding more than you should for keywords based on ROI data from the period of holiday over-exuberance. An easy way to avoid this problem is to either look back to the period one year earlier to see how keyword prices changed as a guideline, or simply to exclude the most recent data from your bid calculations. While this means starting over, if you are using a tool which factors recent data heavily into bid calculations, you will be able to adjust your bids within just a day or two to quickly take advantage of the change in season.

Factor in costs of goods sold to make accurate bids. During post-holiday sales, consumers expect big discounts. Combined with the fact that most retailers are trying to clean out seasonal inventory, prices on many goods will hit rock-bottom levels. That means if you don’t factor in your cost of goods sold to calculate a net profit margin, you may be overpaying for some of your keyword terms. Use a paid search management application that captures your true profit margin, and then bid based on those findings. To take it a step further, consider grouping your keywords and building bids based on profit-margin targets. This will allow you to maximize your profits and deplete seasonal inventory by aggressively bidding on keywords for heavily discounted products, while still reserving a reasonable margin for the products you are introducing in the New Year.

Update your keywords and ad copy to reflect post-holiday sales. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s important to point out that you should bid on keywords and write ad copy that directly reflects your post-holiday promotions and discounts. Bid on keyword terms such as “After Christmas Sale” and “Post-Holiday Sale,” and include copy in your ads such as, “Sales Starts December 26th” or “Up to 75 Percent Off Starting December 26th.” Get creative with your keywords and ad copy, keeping in mind the typical consumer post-holiday behaviors discussed above. Try creative such as “Now Get the Presents You Really Want: Post-Christmas Sale” or “Gift Cards Burning a Hole in Your Pocket? Sale Starts Today.”

Watch out for stock-outs and adjust the keyword mix accordingly. In the post-holiday period, stock-outs are commonplace, especially as you clear out seasonal inventory you don’t plan to replenish. Monitor inventory levels closely to turn keywords off as soon as associated products fall below a certain inventory threshold. Sophisticated paid search management applications automate this process for you by analyzing a feed from your product catalog and inventory levels, and correspondingly adjusting or eliminating bids.

Clean up your campaigns for the new year. The shift from holiday to post-holiday is a tremendous opportunity to clean house and start fresh with search marketing. Take this opportunity to remove inactive ad copy that resulted from holiday testing, and identify ad groups that are missing creative altogether and associate new copy to them. Typically, after months of testing and optimization, your campaign structure may have grown unwieldy, and will need to be reworked. Review your ad groups with an eye toward relevance and the number of keywords per group. As a rule, you should have no more than 50 keywords per ad group. Restructure your ad groups to ensure associated copy is highly relevant. This will not only help your quality scores, but it will also make it easier to perform testing and optimization in the new year.

Just these few adjustments to your paid search marketing program can have a tremendous impact on your bottom line. One large retailer we work with followed many of these best practices last year with great results. The retailer excluded holiday-specific click and sales data when calculating bids on keywords, and used our bid-management solution to calculate and update bids daily using their most up-to-date performance data following the holidays. The retailer also tweaked keyword buys based on shopping trends and modified creative to reflect promotions. The result was a double-digit increase in post-holiday ROI year-over-year, with comparable spend on paid search. In this case, the end of the holiday season gave them a great reason to celebrate!

Matt Lawson is director of marketing at Marin Software, a leading provider of enterprise-class PPC management applications. He can be reached at mlawson@marinsoftware.com.

November 2009 – Column: Editor’s Perspective

Customer Experience and Conversion

Last month in this column, I highlighted an educational session on customer service and usability that I had the pleasure of attending at the eTail East conference in Baltimore late last summer. Delivered by Megan Burns, a senior analyst from Forrester Research, the presentation emphasized that focusing on and improving the customer experience is anything but an altruistic act on the part of the marketer. Rather, enhancing the customer experience is one of the quickest, simplest and most impactful ways to improve conversion rates and build customer lifetime value. Often, the results are immediate, tangible and trackable.

Burns provided 10 simple ways to enhance the customer experience and drive conversion. Last issue, I focused on the first five–giving customers all the content they need to move forward toward purchase, removing your site of unnecessary content, eliminating “no results” site-search responses, using your customers’ language and removing unnecessary steps in the task flow while providing a progress bar to let customers know where they are in the process.

Now for the Last Five
Perhaps you’ve heard this one before, but it bears repeating: do not require a customer to register in order to complete a purchase. This might be an effective way to learn more about your customer and build an e-mail database, but it’s an even more effective roadblock to purchase: a full 25 percent of customers abandon when faced with forced registration. Burns “did the math” to illustrate what sort of impact this can have on a retailer’s bottom line. It varies greatly with volume and pricepoint, but it can easily get into the tens of millions annually.

Always test the location and appearance of buttons. Some of the lessons you’ll learn may have you scratching your head (”why does green work on this page when red works on another?”), but the results are real and it’s a simple exercise. Burns pointed to a recent example she came across where the button copy “please submit e-mail” boosted conversion 6.5 percent over “submit e-mail.” It pays to be polite, I suppose.

Err on the side of providing your customers with too much feedback, especially during multi-step processes or when your site is processing a request. Your customers want to know where they are in the task flow.

Help users recover from mistakes. Write your error messages in easy-to-understand, plain English; you might want to take the error message copywriting task away from the IT staff. Also, integrate the error or help message into the page so that it remains there. Many use a pop-up window or drop-down bar that goes away when the user attempts to implement the fix–forcing your customer to try to remember what the help message was. If they forget, chances are they’ll not try a second time.

Finally, don’t make your order review page look like an order confirmation page. It’s a problem that’s more common than you might expect and causes customers to bail, thinking the transaction is complete when there is actually one additional step.

Easy changes to implement, all, and each with the potential to ratchet up your conversion rate a precious few points. And in aggregate, the results could be a true game-changer.

November 2009 – Feature: The Online Holiday Shopping Experience Done Right

Presenting shoppers with personalized offers is the best way to boost sales: try these three insider tips this holiday season–and beyond

By Darren Vengroff

Industry watchers predict that overall holiday sales this year will be down, but that a larger percentage of those sales will take place online. According to a recent survey by Burst Media, some 85 percent of consumers will shop online this holiday season. That means if you’re not doing everything you can to boost sales in the online channel, you’re leaving revenue on the table.

One of the best ways to boost online sales is to personalize offers; research shows that if shoppers are presented with products that interest them, they convert 10 to 30 percent more often than those presented with one-size-fits-all offers. By personalizing offers for individual shoppers based on real-time data like clicks, shopping preferences and browsing behavior–and automatically modeling that real-time knowledge against CRM data, a customer’s individual past purchase information, top sellers, commonly purchased pairs of products and other historic data–you’ll present shoppers with highly relevant offers that interest them in that moment, increasing per-session conversion rates by 10 to 20 percent.

What’s more, research shows that customers who see personalized offers online buy more offline as well–boosting in-store sales during the holidays, too. Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren recently claimed that every dollar spent by a shopper online drives that person to spend an additional $5.77 in-store in the following two weeks.

Personalization, then, seems like a no-brainer for the holiday season, when you’re looking to boost sales as much as possible. The good news is, you can leverage software-as-a-service recommendations platforms to start offering personalized recommendations almost immediately. That said, personalization during the holidays can be tricky. For one, unlike the rest of the year, shoppers aren’t buying items for themselves. So if you’re relying solely on shopper profiles built over months or years, you’ll be delivering the wrong content and suggesting the wrong products to consumers during the holidays, because they are likely searching for completely different types of items than usual. For example, a female shopper who usually buys lots of trendy clothes and shoes may be looking for toys for her kids, men’s clothing for her husband, housewares and small gifts for friends and women’s styles more suited to her mother. Then, come December 26, she’ll be again looking for bargains on trendy apparel for herself. The four to six weeks around the holidays is the only time of the year when people’s shopping behavior radically changes–so your recommendation systems should adapt on the fly to these micro-trends.

By following a few simple steps, however, you can deliver a user experience that drives sales during the holidays–and long after.

Recommend Gifts
The key to getting recommendations right during the holidays, as discussed above, is to recommend products that people will want to give as gifts. It’s not enough to recommend common gift items like gift baskets, ties, top-selling toys and jewelry; that’s just a start. Instead, make product recommendations that account for users’ present behavior, and not simply based on past purchases. A best-practice approach is to leverage real-time click and browsing behavior, analyze it against past purchases and historical data and come up with product recommendations that suit a shopper in the moment. Make sure you analyze both past purchases and real-time online behavior–and leverage sophisticated algorithms to connect the dots between these data points.

Get Local
Identifying a shopper’s location based on his or her IP address and other information allows you to recommend products apt to sell well in that person’s particular location. Sophisticated retailers are able to set up parameters to recommend certain products to shoppers in specific locations, based on collective purchase data in those areas. For example, you don’t want to recommend down parkas to people in San Diego even if, on the whole, they are your top-selling products of the week. You can also use geo-targeting to capitalize on local micro-trends. For example, if a local celebrity is seen wearing one of your jackets in Chicago, you can set up your recommendations system to promote that jacket to people in the Chicago area for a short period. Or, if a snowstorm hits the Northeast, your recommendations system should recognize a flurry of purchase activity for snow blowers or snow boots, and then recommend those products to people visiting your site from that locale.

If you have a system in place for analyzing real-time user behavior and making recommendations based on up-to-the-minute patterns, you can actually detect and react to events like these without explicitly tracking the media or the weather and then trying to tell your recommendation system what to do. As shoppers begin to react to external events, you detect that change of behavior and put it to use immediately in recommendations you make to the next users who visit.

Go Multichannel
Geo-targeting goes hand-in-hand with multichannel analysis. By automatically analyzing both parameters, you can make extremely accurate product recommendations to holiday shoppers. For example, if you automatically analyze purchase trends at local stores and find that a certain item is sold out, you could then set up your system to recommend that shoppers coming to your site from that zip code buy the product online, mentioning that it’s sold out in stores. Alternatively, you could recommend a similar product that’s still in stock if your purchase data shows the majority of shoppers complete their purchases in-store. In addition, use geographical sales data gathered online to print in-store circulars recommending top-selling products in that zip code. There are sophisticated recommendations platforms that analyze POS, CRM and purchase data–and measure this against zip-code-level geographical trends–to recommend the best products for shoppers in certain areas.

When it comes to the holidays, many shoppers sit down at their computers in hopes of finding “the perfect gift.” Help them easily find it by recommending the right products based on their real-time preferences, location and behavior.

Darren Vengroff is chief scientist at RichRelevance. A renowned computer scientist and technology industry veteran, Vengroff is responsible for the company’s analytical and machine learning development–from high-level strategy and analytics, to strategic implementation plans. Vengroff has designed and built a variety of world-class customer-focused, scalable applications for startups as well as industry leaders like Amazon.com and Goldman Sachs.

November 2009 – Cover Story: Online Video: Blocking and Tackling

Tricks, techniques and best practices for producing professional online video

By Timothy R. Hawthorne

For every well-made, professional video on the Internet right now, there are literally thousands of grainy, poorly formulated clips floating around, hoping to score some eyeballs. A percentage of the latter can be attributed to the do-it-yourselfer who is sitting at home, relishing in the fact that he has an online audience who just may care about what he’s publishing, but many of these shoddy online clips are produced by companies that allocate big bucks to traditional advertising and marketing, however pay no mind to the professionalism of their online video.

With the total value of subscription- or ad-supported online video expected to surpass $15 billion by 2012, the medium has become an important component for marketers looking to add new dimensions to their online strategies. And while rudimentary clips can attract a small audience online, the time and effort put into online videos will never pay off if these shows are lacking in quality. After all, cybersurfers are a discerning bunch who can tell the difference between a cheap effort and one that took some time and money to put together.

To buck the trend and produce a professional video requires some basic blocking and tackling techniques, starting with the video-production process. Whether your videos are as basic as a vlog, user testimonials or a “how to” video, or as sophisticated as a TV commercial or fictional series (”webisodes”), here are 16 points to consider before sending your videos into cyberspace:

Create an Excellent Video Concept
Video production doesn’t start when the camera rolls, but rather when the people charged with creating it sit down and come up with a concept for the video. You wouldn’t slap together a concept on the fly for a $1 million television advertising campaign, so why would you do it with your online video, which conceivably could reach just as many eyeballs as your TV efforts–if not more? To create the best possible concept, take a step back and consider exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with the video, whom you want to target and what value the show will deliver to that audience. Consider the different ways in which the information can be presented–on the ‘net you’ve got a number of concept formats from which to select, ranging from basic to complex (see sidebar).

Focus the Content and Message
Generate ideas that jibe with your online video goals; engage viewers and make them come back for more. If you decide to produce the “minimercial,” the strongest direct response video format, be very specific and communicate your message clearly. What are the three to five key points you want to communicate? How should this content be organized and communicated? Get to the point quickly, and always include a call to action that prompts the viewer to take the next step. A company looking to increase the distribution numbers for its monthly e-newsletter, for example, could produce a two- to three-minute video that shows people what the firm is about, what type of content the publication carries, the value it delivers to the reader and a call to action. By using video to get those points across, you can come up with an affordable, compelling and persuasive message that meets business objectives.

Use a Script
Script writing isn’t for amateurs; be sure to hire a pro. When properly developed, the script will give you a clear idea of what you want to show and tell your viewers, and will serve as the very foundation of your online video. It needn’t be lengthy or complicated, but the script must tell the story that you’re trying to get across. Keep it succinct. Write it in a two-column format (video on left; audio on right) that will be usable when it comes time to shoot the video. Consider word count when writing. A person speaking formal English will typically talk at a rate of 100 words per minute, which means you’ll need a 500- to 600-word script to fill a five-minute video.

Select the Right Camera
Select a video camera that not only produces high-quality pictures, but also produces good sound. With a huge range of choices, as little as $300 can get you great images and audio. And don’t forget to purchase a tripod to avoid shaky images in the final cut–and spend a few extra bucks for one with a leveling bubble, for no-hassle setup. With steady, level images, you’ll immediately vault to the 95th percentile in quality for online video. Eric Rusch, owner of Fairfield, Iowa-based Breadtopia (www.breadtopia.com)–a developer of instructional videos–says he started with a low-end video camera that lacked a microphone jack, and later upgraded to a $600 Canon that shoots in HD and has low-light capabilities and a jack. Now he uses a lapel microphone, producing much better audio than the standard on-camera mic. “When people see my videos,” says Rusch, “they think I’m shooting with high-end equipment.” (Check out camera reviews at: http://reviews.cnet.com/camcorders/.) And take note that, while loads of fun, the Flip and Zi6 tiny, pocket-sized cameras rarely are suitable for professional results.

Choose the Best Talent
Male or female, professional or not? When the company CEO or president isn’t the right person for your latest online video, and when no one else in the company fits the bill, consider the fact that outside help is just a click away. For example, online talent scout Plentitube (www.plentitube.com) has positioned itself to serve as a matchmaker for the online video generation by matching producers with actors and actresses who are paid to star in the online clips. Or call local modeling and talent agencies; you can often find excellent, attractive talent for $300 to $500 a day. Key advice: don’t skimp on talent–they can make or break your video.

Find a Good Location
Many online videos are shot at a desk or in a storage room, with little regard given to the background that the cybersurfer is going to be watching–or worse: distracted by. Consider the location carefully, and don’t be afraid to get creative. To keep viewers interested, for example, you might use two or three different locations and then weave them into one cohesive video clip during the editing process. Remember that your goal is to avoid cheesy, unprofessional videos that scream, “Check this out–we did it ourselves!”

Invest in Lights and Props
No one wants to watch a poorly lit video of someone sitting at his or her desk, talking to the camera. To make your shows engaging, you’ll want to use the proper dose of lighting and an adequate number of props, without going overboard on either one. Rusch says he uses natural spectrum light bulbs screwed into shop lights and covered with tracing paper (to diffuse the light and cut down on glare). “I use a couple of those set-ups in the studio so there are no shadows,” says Rusch. “It’s a $20 solution that works very well.” Or find an array of inexpensive professional lighting kits at: www.tubetape.net.

Consider a Teleprompter
Just like the ones that anchors use on nightly newscasts, teleprompters fulfill a valuable role in the production process by scrolling the scripted text on a dedicated display for use in front of the camera. This piece of equipment cuts rehearsal time and embarrassment if your talent has mediocre memory. Thanks to advancements in technology, producers have several new options when it comes to teleprompters. Vara Software Videocue (www.varasoftware.com), for example, has developed a desktop video teleprompter for Mac-based computers, while CuePrompter (www.cueprompter.com) offers a free online teleprompter application.

Hone Your Camera Technique
You’re not going to become a Hollywood cameraman overnight, but there are some quick-and-dirty tips that you can use to shoot great online video. Make each shot 10 to 15 seconds, for example, and use your tripod and earphones (in order to hear the sound quality) whenever possible. Leave about 20 seconds at the beginning of the tape, and get as close as possible to your subjects when shooting. Avoid pans (horizontal movements of the camera) and zooms, neither of which translates well on the Internet. In your mind, divide up the frames into three vertical strips and put your subjects within each of those strips in order to create screen balance.

Find Testimonials That Add Punch
The television infomercial industry has been using real-life testimonials with great success for decades. There’s nothing quite like hearing from someone who has actually tried the product or service, and who is willing to talk about it. When selecting individuals to tell their stories, choose only those who look and sound believable–and who won’t “oversell” the concept and turn viewers off. A rule of thumb: out of 20 good written user testimonials, you’ll only find two or three that look and sound great on camera. Do your research–or watch your awkward video testimonials go viral for all the wrong reasons!

Get the Editing Right
Once the footage is shot, sit down and edit your video into a short, compelling show that viewers will enjoy and respond to. Top editing software options include Windows Movie Maker, iMovie (for Macs), Adobe Premiere Elements, Final Cut Pro, Cinelerra and Animoto, the latter of which allows users to pick the imaging, select the music, add copy and sit back while the program does the rest. Don’t despair at the high price tags on some editing packages; you may be able to get the same functionalities from a lower-priced option. To edit Breadtopia’s videos, for example, Rusch uses Windows Movie Maker because it’s simple and cheap. “My needs are pretty basic,” says Rusch, “and as long as it’s working for me, I’ll keep using it.” Edit your video much like you’d write an article or whitepaper: grab your audience in the first 10 seconds with something notable or surprising, keep your shots brief and varied, wrap it all up at the end so it makes sense and don’t forget your call to action!

Don’t Overlook Music and Narration
What your viewers hear when they watch your online video is just as important–if not more so–as what they see. To attain the best outcome, you’ll need to dedicate some time to laying down a vocal track that includes music, narration and any other sound elements that you want cybersurfers to hear when they watch your show. Be sure to test the sound, make sure it flows evenly and naturally and that there aren’t any unexpected decreases or increases in volume, either of which can quickly send a viewer packing. Investing in a professional narrator is just as important as your on-camera talent. Call your local radio stations; their DJs often do narration on the side for as little as $200. And remember, you just can’t insert your favorite Black Eyed Peas song into your video without expecting a call from RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). But there are many inexpensive, royalty-free music options online. Check out: www.royaltyfreemusiclibrary.com.

Keep it Short
Stick to videos that are three to five minutes long, advises Rodger Roeser, president at Cincinnati-based public relations consultancy Eisen Management Group, Inc. “Make them any longer,” he says, “and your customers will lose interest and move on to another site.” The idea is to edit the video down to a size that online viewers will sit still for, and to avoid rambling, convoluted messages that confuse viewers and drive them to other, more interesting options. “If the video isn’t concise, and if it doesn’t ask viewers to take a specific action,” says Taylor, “you’ll lose them.”

Avoid the “One-Size-Fits-All” Approach
Your viewers aren’t always going to be sitting in front of a computer, not all cellular phone models support the same video format and all video does not appear correctly on the thousands of different mobile phones that are available on the market today. Be sure the footage you shoot is supported by the audience you’re going after; you don’t want to create content for an iPhone audience in a format that the phone can’t play.” (Test your content before publishing it by going to http://deviceatlas.com).

Put Your Videos Out There
Once your videos are ready for prime time, online venues like YouTube and Google Videos will serve as the platforms where viewers can access, view and provide feedback on them. You will also want to place the videos on your company’s website. Consider carefully whether you’ll want them to “auto load and play” (immediately start upon opening the page). This feature upsets many web surfers, but it’s been proven to drive more response than the alternative. While there’s an obvious “cool” factor to having your videos on YouTube, remember that you have more control over your message, and how it’s presented, on your own site.

Add Fresh Videos Regularly
Companies like Quiksilver and The Home Depot already know that their online visitors want fresh content on a regular basis. You needn’t stick to a daily, weekly or even monthly schedule, but you also don’t want too much time to lapse between videos. Viewers will lose interest and move on to one of the million other websites that does post fresh videos. A good strategy is to create a few videos at once on relevant topics, and then post them on a regular basis throughout the month or year.

As you can see, there’s a lot more to online video production than simply shooting a few hours of footage, picking the best snippets and uploading the final product to YouTube. Teenagers looking to get some attention on MySpace or Facebook may be able to get away with this strategy, but no professional marketer should take this approach. By incorporating good scripts, cameras, editing tools, lighting and sound into the mix, you’ll earn a spot in that very small pool of marketers who get online video right.

Timothy R. Hawthorne is founder, chairman and executive creative director of Hawthorne Direct, a full-service DRTV, print, mail and digital ad agency founded in 1986. A 36-year television producer/writer/director, Hawthorne is a cum laude Harvard graduate.

October 2009 – Online Insights: Channel Integration

Direct Digital Marketing

By Brian Deagan

There are millions upon millions of ways to effectively combine the respective strengths of the various digital communications channels to improve customer relationships and increase sales. In fact, simply contemplating where to start is enough to intimidate some marketers from seeking the new innovations necessary to keep their businesses ahead of the competition. However, these marketers will miss out on huge segments of the ever-evolving pool of consumers and prospects by failing to employ a multichannel strategy in their direct digital marketing.

Direct digital marketing–digital marketing that is addressable to a specific consumer with an e-mail address, a mobile phone number or a web browser cookie–is the best way to unlock new opportunities and improve key loyalty and sales metrics.

Getting the most out of a multichannel direct digital marketing strategy first requires the ability to leverage the massive amounts of valuable data available to advance business goals. Having a universal profile management system enables marketers to bring known customer attributes–like past purchase history and enterprise customer data–together with online behavioral data points like keyword search activity and–most important–e-mail, mobile and website activity. Combining data from multiple channels unlocks entirely unique segments. For example, it becomes possible to create a segment of customers who have not made a purchase or opened an e-mail in the last six months, but who have used a mobile coupon. Understanding a customer’s multichannel lifestyle opens up enormous opportunities for growth.

While many attractive multichannel strategies exist, here are a few effective and cost-efficient tactics that use multiple data points to create previously unattainable segments and best-in-class results.

Multichannel Tactic #1: New Product Launch (Channels: Web, E-mail)
When launching a new product exclusively online–using the e-mail and web channels–it is important to use the data points from each channel to shape overall strategy. For example, if a company chooses to send an e-mail announcing a new product, the content on the website should reflect information gathered from the e-mail channel. Onsite targeting technologies–using the web browser cookie as a customer “address”–can leverage data points like e-mail opens to create rules that rotate dynamic content on a homepage or landing page.

This way, when a customer opens a new product e-mail and clicks through to the homepage, they should see the new product again. (Remember those old advertising clichés about frequency and consistency of message?) If a customer who has not received the new product e-mail visits the homepage, it is better to display legacy product that the consumer is familiar with in order to create the conditions for an immediate purchase. A recent study showed that this exact tactic showed a potential increase in sales of 25 percent.

Good onsite targeting solutions also include built-in testing and optimization tools that ensure the most effective content is always in market. This is an elegant, but simple multichannel approach currently employed to great success by direct digital marketers.

Multichannel Tactic #2: Customer Communi-cations Preference Center (Channels: Mobile, Web, E-mail)
The consumer is clearly multichannel, but marketers are lagging behind. One way to make communication with consumers more convenient for them–and more profitable for you–is to create a customer communications preference center. For example, every direct digital marketing program includes some form of e-mail marketing. But is each e-mail newsletter available for consumers to receive in the form of a mobile webpage, an SMS message or a mobile e-mail? If not, it is limiting the consumer’s capacity to interact with your brand, and limiting your brand’s ability to create the conditions for a purchase. Consumers want choice in how they receive communications, and marketers who fail to take advantage of the multichannel environment are leaving sales on the table.

Multichannel Tactic #3: Sales Event Reminder (Channels: Mobile, E-mail)
Every direct digital marketer knows that the majority of e-mail opens happen within the first 72 hours of a campaign’s launch. But if a sales event is planned for Friday through Sunday, and the e-mail campaign was sent on Monday, it is likely many customers and prospects will completely miss the opportunity. As proven and historically reliable as e-mail is as a channel, it is still rather imprecise and sometimes verges on impersonal. These traditional drawbacks to e-mail create the perfect opportunity for including mobile in a sales event reminder campaign. Because mobile is as precise and immediate as it is personal, a reminder for a sale can be sent anywhere from two days to two hours before the event. Using both the mobile and e-mail channels to inform customers about an event opens the door to additional viral, word-of-mouth activity and helps maximize potential sales.

Multichannel Tactic #4: Re-marketing with Triggered Messages (Channels: Mobile, E-mail, Web)
Understanding the customer’s website browsing behavior unlocks myriad new and exciting segmentation and targeting strategies. Recognizing a website browser as an e-mail subscriber immediately allows the marketer to understand what content and information has already been presented to the customer and display more aggressive offers designed to capture a sale. However, when that e-mail subscriber, mobile subscriber or return website visitor browses product pages without purchasing–or abandons a shopping cart–it can be difficult to re-engage that customer in a meaningful way to entice a purchase. Re-marketing is an extremely effective tool for re-engagement, and mobile and e-mail are the ideal channels.

Sending a targeted message with a more aggressive offer to an e-mail or mobile subscriber hours after they abandon their shopping is a proven tactic for increasing sales. A tactic as simple as requesting feedback with a brief survey or form also provides additional insight necessary to complete immediate sales opportunities and create more successful marketing programs in the future.

While multichannel strategies may seem expensive and complicated, they are quite cost-effective and surprisingly simple if the right solution is available. Software solutions that combine multichannel capabilities with a marketing datamart specially designed for developing cross-channel, targeted segments is ideal.

With the ever-increasing popularity and ease of software-as-a-service marketing solutions, marketers have more tools at their disposal to create and execute simple multichannel direct digital marketing strategies that appeal to consumers and increase sales.

Brian Deagan is the co-founder and CEO of Knotice, a direct digital marketing solutions company. You can reach him at bdeagan@knotice.com.

October 2009 – Online Insights: Customer Centricity

Drive Revenue and Loyalty With Online Surveys

By Mary Crogan

Every business owner understands that knowing what your customers want is a critical part of your success. But customers simply don’t volunteer this information; in fact, the National Business Research Institute reports that only four percent of unhappy customers proactively complain. So, how do you find out what your customers want or need? You ask them, of course.

Online surveys are an easy, affordable way to help you start a valuable dialogue with your customers, capture feedback they might not otherwise be comfortable sharing and help you meet their needs better than ever before. By inviting your customers to participate in the conversation, you’re also showing that their opinion and satisfaction are important to you.

The Survey Says
As a business owner or marketer, you probably spend significant time communicating to your customers through advertising, promotions, e-mail marketing and other channels. But this kind of communication–while important–is one-sided and excludes your customers’ valuable feedback.

Perhaps you’re considering adding new products or opening a second location, or you’re just wondering how satisfied your customers are. Online surveys allow you to ask your customers for input at their convenience. The responses you receive will not only provide quality guidance to help you with these decisions, they will also give you useful insight into your customers’ shopping habits, personal interests, future needs and much more that is of great value to any business’s success.

Conducting a customer survey is an effective way to increase engagement and loyalty while gleaning invaluable information that can help your business today. This is especially important in a challenging economy, where you simply can’t take your customers for granted.

Five Steps to a Great Online Survey
Today’s online survey tools are designed for ease of use, and most provide templates or wizards to help set up your survey, but there are a few other factors that go into making your project successful:

1 Define your goals - To begin, think about what you want to accomplish. Do you want to fix a problem, add new services or products, or simply gauge customer satisfaction? Know what your end goal is in advance to ensure you get the type of feedback you need to achieve it. It’s also important to keep it simple and focus on only one goal with your survey. Attempting to address too many concerns can result in a chaotic survey experience for your customers–and less valuable feedback for your business.

2 Develop your questions - Focus on what you need to know–not just what you want to know. The purpose of a survey is to receive honest feedback that will help you improve your business and accomplish your goals. Organize your questions in a sensible manner. Begin with general questions such as, “What is your overall level of satisfaction?” to provide the sense that your survey will be a quick and interesting use of respondents’ time, and then move on to more specific questions.

3 Be inviting - To entice customers to take your survey, write a compelling e-mail invitation and tell them what they will receive for completing it. Offer incentives–such as a discount or gift certificate–to help drive responses. Provide a few honest and transparent details about what you are trying to learn and why. Also, be sure to thank them for their business. Most important, indicate that this feedback will help develop better service and shopping experiences.

4 Evaluate - Once your survey is complete, evaluate the results. Does the feedback help you with future direction? Were there any surprises? Maybe your customers prefer your original website design or perhaps they’d like more options or require a more tailored service. Before making any changes, be sure to balance customer requests with your own expertise. Don’t blindly follow costumer suggestions that your experience indicates would not make sense for your business.

5 Take action - Spend time determining what changes can be made and when, and be sure to share the upcoming changes with your customers. They’ll enjoy knowing their feedback was put into action and will feel more connected to your business.

Time Your Surveys for Success
It’s more important than ever for businesses to keep their fingers on the pulse of their customers. However, many businesses shy away from repeat surveys for fear they’ll annoy their customers. How frequently a business conducts a survey is a matter of preference, but if you limit surveys to just once a year, you’re missing out on opportunities to learn critical information that can help your business today. And by surveying different groups following an experience, you will be able to uncover points of dissatisfaction immediately and quickly make improvements.

As long as you communicate the purpose and value of your surveys, most customers will look at them as opportunities to voice concerns, make recommendations and help you grow your business in ways that are ultimately to their benefit.

Regularly surveying customers and making incremental improvements based on their feedback can help you stay competitive and will show your customers you value their opinions. Responding quickly to your customers’ feedback has the greatest impact on driving loyalty–and customers who have had their issues resolved satisfactorily will tell, on average, five people about the treatment they received. Word of mouth leads to new customers.

Here are three good times to do a survey:

After a sale or purchase - This survey doesn’t need to be long or involved, but is a great opportunity to glean specific, valuable feedback from your active customers. You might ask how satisfied customers are with the product/service they just purchased, whether they think the price point was right and what other products or services they might want to buy from you.

Before or after an event - Before an event, survey your customers about factors that may prevent them from attending–such as the date, time, location or agenda–to help ensure a more robust turnout and a more successful event. After the event, ask them what they enjoyed the most and what you can do to improve the next one.

Before you make any big changes to your business - Don’t make any major changes to your business without consulting the most important people of all–your customers. Before you add or discontinue a product line, change your service offerings or offer products and services at reduced price points, survey your customers and find out what they think.

Remember, any good relationship involves two-way communication. Oftentimes, it is easy to simply talk at your customers. But for true success, you need to talk with them–give them a voice and listen to what they say. Online surveys are a fast, easy and affordable way to start that conversation.

Mary Crogan serves as senior business and marketing manager for online survey at Constant Contact. She has more than 18 years of experience marketing products and services to the small business market. She can be reached at mcrogan@constantcontact.com.

September 2009 – Online Insights: Video

Make Your Online Video Shine

By Timothy R. Hawthorne

The online video arena has achieved official “cluttered” status, with companies across all industries uploading moving pictures to the web at lightning speed. Some get it right; others don’t.

Companies like Quiksilver, with its weekly international surf/skate/snow­boarding rock star videos; The Home Depot, through a lineup of do-it-yourself home repair and renovation shows; and NikeFootball, whose online campaigns includes fanatical British soccer hooligan clips are some of the best and brightest in the field, consistently proving the value of creative, targeted online video.

But far too many companies miss the boat entirely by throwing poorly produced, non-targeted material on sites like YouTube, hoping that it will stick. Don’t be one of those companies. Instead, consider these eight tips to make sure your company’s online videos have an impact:

Demonstrate a Product or Service
Give customers a reason to watch and react to your online videos by showing them how to tackle a complex home-improvement project (step-by-step) or how to spot antiques whose value will increase over time. Limit these how-to videos to three to five minutes in length, advises Rodger Roeser, president at Cincinnati-based public relations consultancy Eisen Management Group, Inc. “Make them any longer,” he says, “and your customers will lose interest and move on to another site.”

Use the “Man on the Street” Approach
Did you recently put up a new display in a store, launch the latest product line or begin selling a delicious new type of healthy snack food? Get out your video camera and recruit a few customers or passers-by to react to the most recent addition. “Go around and capture their reactions,” says Roeser, who has used the strategy successfully with various restaurant and retail clients. “This is your chance to create entertaining, engaging video content that customers don’t usually get to see.”

Maximize Video Effects
Real estate agents and large retailers have already discovered the value of the “walk-on” website spokesperson (that tiny person that pops up and talks to you when you pull up their websites). Now it’s your turn. “The walk-on video effect is a great way to add uniqueness to your site and ‘speak’ to your visitors as they browse,” says web marketing guru Ed Taylor, founder of Ashland, Ore.-based Internet Marketing Group.

Use Pop-Up Videos:
Design your company’s website in a way that “triggers” individual videos to pop up when a customer clicks on a specific link. If you’re selling apparel, for example, use a pop-up video to show what specific outfits actually look like on live models. “This is a great way to give someone a tour of your product or service via a fast-loading web video demo,” says Taylor.

Re-create Yourself
If the idea of getting in front of the camera doesn’t appeal to you, or if the concept doesn’t fit well with your product line or marketing goals, a good alternative is to create video out of a PowerPoint presentation. A program like Camtasia Studio will do the job quickly and affordably. “This software will record everything that happens on your computer screen,” says Taylor, “from the movements of your mouse to your voice (when connected to a microphone).”

Use the Videos as “Bait”
Online video watchers are a fickle bunch that are more likely to move on to another clip than to research more information about the one just viewed. Make it easier for them by mentioning your firm’s website, Facebook handle or blog–preferably at the beginning and the end of the clip–and invite them to learn more about your company and its offerings.

Upload to Popular Sites (Not Just YouTube)
YouTube is still all the rage these days, but you’ll also want to check out Google and Yahoo’s video sites, both of which are gaining in popularity. “Uploading to these sites gives your product additional, free publicity,” says Taylor. “You can even use those websites to host your video for you, and link to it through your website (thus saving yourself the cost of additional bandwidth).”

Publish Regularly
Companies like Quiksilver and The Home Depot already know that their online visitors want fresh content on a regular basis. You needn’t stick to a strict daily, weekly or even monthly schedule, but you also don’t want too much time to lapse between videos. Viewers will lose interest and move on to one of the million other websites that does post fresh video. A good strategy is to create a few videos at once on relevant topics, and then post them on a regular basis throughout the month or year.

Finally, don’t rely on the “post it and they will come” philosophy, because we all know that doesn’t work in today’s Web 2.0 world. Once you’ve uploaded your video, you’ll want to post it in multiple places and promote it through your website, blog, e-mail newsletters, marketing materials and anywhere else you can think of.

Follow the steps outlined in this article and it won’t be long before you’re reaping the results of your online video efforts.

Timothy R. Hawthorne is founder of Hawthorne Direct, a full-service DRTV, print, mail and digital ad agency. He has 36 years’ experience in television production, writing and direction and is a cum laude Harvard graduate.