Follow these guidelines to build a successful ecommerce website

There are six key things that you can do to ensure that you build a powerful and effective ecommerce website.

Ask your customers to help you design your ecommerce website

This may sound like a crazy idea, but it works.  I wish I had followed this advice before spending months building an ecommerce website that our customers really didn’t like.  We thought we did everything we needed to in order to build the best site. We benchmarked our major competitors who had significantly more web traffic than we had and rebuilt what we thought was a better website than our competitors.    After we launched our new site, our sales were flat.  We solicited customer feedback and the customers kept saying “I wish your site was more like competitor X, Y or Z.”  What exactly does that mean?  I was determined to find that out.  We contacted every customer who sent us feedback to find out exactly what they meant.

Our customers didn’t want a clone of our competitors’ sites.  We quickly discovered that our new website wasn’t what the customer wanted or needed.  They wanted to find products on the website quickly and easily.  They didn’t really care about promotions and specials. Benchmarking told us what our competitors were doing, but it didn’t tell us what our customers wanted in an ecommerce website.  We completely rebuilt the new website we just launched based on what our customers wanted, not what we thought they wanted.  We also made our customers beta testers of our newly rebuilt website.  They had ownership and a vested interest in making our site successful.  Our site became their site.

Make it extremely easy to use

There is nothing more frustrating than going to a site that you know has the product that you want, but you can’t find it.  In an ecommerce world where every second or millisecond counts, build a site that is logical, intuitive and very easy to use.  You want your customers to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible.  That means that your product names and descriptions need to be accurate and what the customers call the product.  I have found that many manufacturers call their product “X” but the customer calls it “Y”.  Kentucky Fried Chicken discovered that their customers called their company “KFC” not “Kentucky Fried Chicken” so instead of “re-educating” the customer, they changed their signage and promotional materials to mirror their customer’s perceptions.  That was a very smart move. When customers Google a product that you carry, you want your products to show up in their search results.

Be price competitive

Do your homework.  Make sure your products are the ones that the customers want and that they are competitively priced.  Competition is tough in the ecommerce world.  Your value proposition should include competitive pricing.  Don’t let price be a hindrance for customers to buy from you online.  That doesn’t mean you need to be the cheapest online, but you do need to be competitive.

Optimize your site

Before you launch your site, make sure that it is search engine optimized.  You want Google and the other search engines to index your site because you have great content with keywords that reflect that you are an expert in the products that you carry.   When I was hired at one company, we had 6 optimized pages on Google.  Within the year, we had over 3 million optimized pages and our products showed up many times on page 1, position 1 in Google search results.  SEO works when you do it correctly.

Market your URL everywhere and build credibility

You can have the best ecommerce site in the world, but if your customers don’t know about you and the products that you are selling, you won’t be very successful.  New customers are much more likely to check out your ecommerce site if they know more about you.  With all of the fraud that takes place online, people need to believe their credit card information is safe on your site.  I strongly recommend advertising online (on websites and social media) and in print, as well as sending out email messages about your company and your new website.  The more visible your company and URL become, the more likely your online sales will increase.  People like to do business with people they know and trust.  Building credibility with the marketplace is very important.

Manage your expectations

We would all love to build a successful ecommerce website like Amazon.com, however Amazon hasn’t made a meaningful profit in the nearly 20 years it has been in business.  It takes time to get your ecommerce site to take hold in the marketplace.  Be patient.

If you…

1. Have your customers help you build the ecommerce website that they want,
2. Make it very easy to use,
3. Ensure that your product names are what your customers call your products,
4. Be price competitive,
5. Optimize your site so you are indexed well with major search engines and
6. Get the word out in the marketplace about your products and services on your ecommerce site using effective advertising to build awareness and credibility. If you do all of these things, your site will be successful.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Ecommerce Image provided by Maria Elena.

Customer Segmentation – Leveraging Your Data For Success

In my post “Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold”, I talked about the importance of customer and product data hygiene and maintenance.  In this post, I would like to take you through the next steps with your clean customer database… customer segmentation. 

The first step in customer segmentation is to analyze your customer data.  Any marketer will tell you that you need to collect as much information about your customers as possible.  The more data you have, the more segmentation you can do.  One of the key things you look for are patterns – similarities and differences in the data that you collect.  Here are some things to look for.

• Geography
• Lead, prospect or customer
• Gender
• Age
• Method of entry to your company (email, print, banner ads, Adwords, social media, call center, fax, walk-in)
• Method that your customers purchase (phone, web, walk-in)
• Products purchased
• Frequency of purchases
• Products viewed but not purchased (You might detect a pricing or product content issue)

 The next step is to group and flag this information into your database.  You can create and name categories that your customers fall into.  For example, if you segment your database by “XYZ widget buyers”, then you can target market to that group only and upsell certain accessories to those customers.

The next step is to segment your customer database.  Be careful here.  You don’t necessarily want to pigeon-hole customers into one group.  You will find customers overlap into multiple categories.  Make sure that you don’t hit the same customers that fall in different groups at the same time.  Verify that the simultaneous marketing campaigns you are launching include different customers.  Over-marketing is easy to do if you aren’t careful.

Once you have flagged your database with the appropriate segments, do some A/B testing of your marketing campaigns.  See what works for those segments and what does not.

Measure everything you do and make adjustments to continuously improve your campaigns.  Implement the programs that work and stop the ones that don’t.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Email Marketing – The List, the list, the list

There are a few things that I have learned in my career about email marketing that I would like to share.  I have purchased email lists from list providers, partnered with trade advertisers to message their email database, imported lists from trade show attendees, and built our own email database to brand our company and market our products.  I will touch on each method and discuss the pros and cons for each.

Purchasing email lists from list providers is one method of hitting a very large list for a small amount of money.  The challenge here is making sure you are hitting the audience who is purchasing your products.  We did several eblasts with a large list provider who promised us that their list was outstanding and the emails were correctly categorized in the proper SIC/NAICS codes.  I found out very quickly that two things were untrue.  First, the list wasn’t properly categorized and second that the list wasn’t good to begin with.  We received “customer” inquiries from email recipients who were supposed to be manufacturing companies. Some were marketing companies that would never purchase our products.  Others were emails of retirees that haven’t worked in manufacturing for over 10 years. And of course, some of them were dead. It’s hard to get ROI from a dead person unless you own a funeral home.  When purchasing lists, be careful that you don’t get sucked into the hype of how good their lists are.  The reality of the situation is that people add and change email addresses frequently.  Ask yourself, how many different email addresses do I have?  Our customers are like us.  You probably have a personal account or two, a work account, and possibly a family email address. Keeping email databases clean, categorized correctly and up-to-date is quite an investment.  Test samples of the list to see if they convert before you purchase.  $.03 – $.05 per email sounds appealing, but if you get 0.00% conversion like I have in the past, what have you gained?

I have also utilized trade publication’s email databases.  It has been my experience that the conversion rate on these databases is better than huge list providers, but they are more expensive.  Think about it.  If you advertise in a trade publication that is read by your customers, you know already that the list is at least targeting the right audience.  They still may not purchase from you, but at least you have a fighting chance with the right list.  Your advertising partners will probably not sell you or give you their lists, but they will blast your custom email with your message to their list.  Like the purchased email list providers, test the list and see if it works for you.

You can also import trade show sign-up or attendee lists and market to them.  The lists are usually reasonably priced and you can import them into your house lists.  The challenge here is not everyone who signs up for a trade show attends.  We have found that sometimes an administrative assistant signs up his or her company on their behalf, but doesn’t attend and probably won’t buy your products.  Purchasing an attendee list is probably a better idea, however sometimes high schools take field trips to trade shows and the attendees might be 14-years-olds and may not purchase your products unless you sell PlayStation or XBox video games.  These types of lists  have worked well for me in the past.  Make sure you de-dupe the list as you might already have them in your database.

I prefer building and maintaining my own email database, however I do supplement with outside lists to expand my market penetration.  It doesn’t take long to build your own database if you include your existing customers with their permission (opt-in or opt-out).  If you regularly provide white papers, webinars or CAD drawings for downloading, that’s another effective way of building a customer or prospect database.  The key to this method is to make sure you have dedicated staff that cleans, de-dupes and updates the database.  Email databases are dynamic and ever-changing.  If you maintain your email database, you will be pleased with your results.

Remember, whether you purchase large email lists, work with advertising partners to blast your message to their list, import trade show attendee lists or build your own, the key is your email marketing is only as good as the list that it’s targeting.

Does business intelligence on the web increase sales?

When Amazon launched, everyone seemed to be amazed with their business intelligence system that offered other products they might want to purchase.  This isn’t rocket science and anyone can build a database that offers related products.  If you purchase a hammer, the upsell could be nails. What the business intelligence system and the company of the same name that they originally implemented was called Net Perceptions or Net P.  This system did not offer related product, although it could. The system would analyze purchasing data of customers and provide recommendations of products that are purchased when certain other products are purchased.  I’m not certain if Amazon is still using the Net P engine or something else today, but they still use upsells, bundles and product referrals.

Using the same example as above, customers that purchase hammers might also purchase men’s dress slacks.  They have nothing to do with each other, but they are often purchased together.  If you think about it, it makes sense.  When you go to the grocery store to buy milk, you don’t always buy cereal, although they go together.  You might buy tomato sauce, apples and hot dogs.  The Net P engine would offer those products.  This technology is called “collaborative filtering”. There were some other whistles and bells included in the software like monitoring purchases of customers and when they were due to reorder, the engine would alert the sales rep so they could ask the customer if they wanted to reorder product.

At one place where I was employed, we integrated Net P into our web site, call center and direct sales smartphones.  We increased sales by $4.5 million dollars that year due to upsells.  It wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds.  We also had a unified effort to get more customers purchasing online, offered incentives for the customer service and sales personnel and our executive management “encouraged” everyone to be on board.

I moved on in my career and had another opportunity to integrate the same technology at another place of business several years later.  The businesses were similar, but not the same. Interestingly enough, the business intelligence engine failed miserably the second time.  Why? One reason was the economy.  When we implemented the BI engine the first time, the economy was doing very well.  Spending money on upsells wasn’t a problem.  Also, upselling on  the web was a relatively new thing.  Not many companies were doing it well, so we took advantage of the new technology.  The second implementation had not as favorable economic conditions, customers were getting upsold every place they went and customer fatigue became a factor.

Does business intelligence work on the web?  Absolutely.  Just ask Amazon.  Does it work all the time?  No.  You need to keep all of the factors in play including the economy, customer buying sentiment, and upsell fatigue when deciding to invest and implement online business intelligence. There are newer, more sophisticated toys in the business intelligence toy box today.  If you look at all of the economic implications and customer buying behavior, you can increase your sales using business intelligence.

Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold

You can have the best marketing plan with powerful social media, outstanding print and online advertising, great press releases, a speedy ecommerce website, but if your customer and product data isn’t clean, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t know who is visiting your site or placing orders, it’s difficult to market to them. Think of customer data as your pot of gold…your treasure. Without your customers, you have nothing.

I have worked at several organizations and even our own customer data was outdated in large corporate databases like D&B. We were doing some data hygiene and I asked my colleagues to look up our own company information on D&B. The President listed hadn’t been President in several years. Every one of the executives listed weren’t even employed there anymore. Unless you keep customer data up-to-date, contact information and addresses might be wrong. I have worked at organizations that have undergone corporate acquisitions, moved physical locations, had subsidiaries bought and sold. I have yet to find any organization that is totally accurate on their company databases.

As marketers, it is our responsibility to keep our customer databases clean. It is extremely important to have the correct company name, address, city, state, zip, contact information, phone numbers, fax numbers and if possible email addresses. I worked for a company that had very poor data cleansing practices. When asked to de-dupe a 600K record database for a mailing, over half of the addresses were either duplicates or undeliverable. Keeping customer data clean is a ton of work, but it’s a necessary evil.

The same holds true for product data. If a Customer goes to your website, but can’t find what he or she is looking for because the keywords and product descriptions are weak, they won’t waste their time and they will leave…often never returning.  The cleaner your product data is on your website and in your catalogs the better. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Try to find a specific product on your website using a keyword that a customer would use. This is a trap that many marketers fall into. Just because a marketer or a manufacturer calls a product a certain keyword, that doesn’t mean that’s what the customer calls it. Kentucky Fried Chicken had tried to market themselves as that for years, but their customers kept calling them “KFC”. I was working with KFC during this transition time. Instead of trying to change customers’ behavior, KFC smartly changed their advertising approach. Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC. Packaging, signage and advertising all adjusted to what the customer wanted. Learning how the customer finds your products and what they call them is critical. If you can’t find your products easily, neither can your customers or Google for that matter.

It has been my experience that having a team dedicated to keeping your customer and product data clean and accurate is critical to future success. It’s an investment well worth the money and time.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile and my website.