FREEDyourMind

E-Retail Lessons Learned for Holiday Season 2008

I know, I know, it's only July! But for e-retailers out there, there are only about three months before they go go into lock down for the holiday season. So any changes that will be in place for holiday 2008 need to be happening now, and any lessons learned from 2007 need to be firmly ingrained in your planning for 2008!

We have so many e-retail clients, a huge e-retail benchmark, and do regular e-retail holiday research, so I end up watching the space pretty closely. Here's a list of key lessons that I recently presented to a group of retail analysts: 

1. Given the low-switching costs and almost nonexistent barriers to switching, consumers are in charge! Don't forget it!
2. Standards and expectations are always rising. In the offline retail world, expectations remain flat or even decline over time (haven’t you come to expect surly customer service, long lines, and terrible parking at many of your favorite brick and mortar retailers?). But in the online world, since the best of the best are always improving, ALL retailers are constantly held to higher standards.
3. There are several things all retailers pretty much have to have in order to compete at the holidays: free shipping, customer reviews, and various payment options.
4. Pure-plays need to watch out. Companies that do business only online used to far outstrip multichannel retailers in terms of satisfying their customers, but in the past few years, multichannel retailers have closed the gap.  
5. The most valuable long-term acquisition source is brand strength. But since that can be hard to easily change or impact, the best proactive acquisition source is promotional emails, which drives more site visitors and results in visitors that are more likely to buy than visitors that come from ads or shopping search engines.
6. Satisfaction is of the essence, especially during the holiday season. Customers will only return throughout the year if they are satisfied.
7. High customer satisfaction was also proven to be a predictor of online purchase behavior.
8. You should measure customer activity constantly so that you can be instantly aware of issues that arise, and so you can compare trends over time.
9. Have testing methodologies in place before the holiday season so you can get accurate, actionable feedback during the busiest time of year.
10. Avoid “garbage in, garbage out” scenarios that result from spurious data inputs and analysis by using time-tested metrics.

We have a few of our retail reports available for download:

Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index: Spring 2008 (including special reports for apparel/accessories and computers/electronics e-tailers)

Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index: Holiday 2007

Top 30 UK Online Retail Satisfaction Index: Christmas 2007

I'll try to post a few more things for e-retailers to use in preparation for the holiday season in the next month or two.

Web Analytics in a Recession?

I'm just catching up on all the blog entries I wanted to write and never got to over the holiday weekend.

I liked the guest post over on Eric Peterson's blog by Corry Prohens of IQ Workforce. IQ Workforce is an online marketing and analytics recruitment firm that does a few surveys a year. Corry's latest survey, which he wrote about on Eric's blog, is a survey of web analytics professionals on how they think the recession will impact their job:

• 74% of practitioners expect that spending on web analytics will increase at their company during the recession (40% said it would increase a bit / 34% said it would increase significantly)
• 60% of practitioners said that the recession would either increase the likelihood of hiring additional web analytics resources or have no impact
• 17% said that their company was either somewhat or very likely to reduce web analytics headcount during the recession
• 2% thought that the recession would have a major negative impact on their career

These findings are in line with my instinct  (and experience, based on how business is going for us right now) that web analytics will be more important than ever in a down economy. When things are going well, a lot of companies can be successful. When consumers start to tighten their belts, companies will have to compete harder to earn their business, and that is where the web analytics come in.

Comcast Cares About You and Your Twitter

Another interesting anecdote from the cutting edge of Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 . . .

I've been reading a lot about Comcast's use of Web 2.0 to respond to the now infamous customer complaints. There was another article yesterday in the Boston Globe about how companies are responding to complaints voiced on blogs, message boards, and even Twitter. Comcast now has an employee monitoring Twiiter full-time just to look for and respond to complaints (twitter.com/comcastcares).

Considering Comcast's well-documented customer service problems (including an all-time low score in the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index ratings), this seems like a step in the right direction. They are at least listening, and they're using a pretty innovative online application to track and respond to complaints.

The question is, will this catch on? Will other companies start tracking--and addressing--complaints on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc? And if it does become widespread, will the effect be to either a) overwhelm the companies doing the tracking or b) overwhelm the users who are always getting pinged by Dell and Comcast and Snickers and Toyota when they say something bad about a product?

A Four-Point Checklist for BtoB and Corporate Websites

Most business-to-business and corporate sites design with customers in mind, but that’s not enough. Understanding and designing for at least four distinct audience segments is key:

• CONSUMERS: BtoB sites are often viewed by consumers that are not necessarily direct customers. We see BtoB sites having a downstream impact on the business customers of the site owners, but very few take that into account in their design and content.


• POTENTIAL EMPLOYEES: In many cases, one of the largest audiences using a BtoB site is potential employees—in some cases, it’s the single biggest audience for a BtoB site. While most sites have information for job-seekers, our research shows that this audience is impacted just as much by sections of the site not specifically intended for them; and it’s not like they’re just hanging out on the “job board” area of the site. This has significant implications for site design and content. Companies need to view their entire site through the eyes of a prospective employee—or, better yet, get hard data on which things about the site have greatest potential to make or break the “sale.” Sites are often used by current employees, as well, and understanding how content affects employee loyalty and satisfaction is often overlooked—but can have both positive and negative consequences.

• PARTNERS: Another high-volume audience is existing and would-be partners. The quality, accuracy, consistency, and nature of messages and information throughout a website can play an important role in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of dealings with vendors and partners. In many cases, however, this audience is either completely overlooked or significantly under-anticipated.

• INVESTOR RELATIONS: Investor Relations has become a significant objective of many BtoB sites. Organizations can communicate high quality, consistent and timely information to current and prospective investors in a very cost effective and efficient manner. Investors will usually look beyond the pages specifically designed for them, and having a clear understanding of how other content impacts investors’ attitudes and behaviors is important. In addition, it is not always the case that the standard material in IR sections is always the right material or has the desired impact. There is a need to get a handle on exactly what impact sites are having on investors, especially since websites are becoming one of the single most important sources used by the investor community.

The web is an ideal communications vehicles, offering a perfect opportunity to interact with key audiences in a consistent, high quality and effective manner, at the convenience of the user, without being too intrusive. But most companies actually only get anecdotal information from site users. There’s rarely a real, strong, statistically valid feedback mechanism and so it’s easy to miss the mark—or, worse, to do damage.

Don't forget about your customers, but also don't forget about these other key visitor segments.  Whatever survey and analytics methodology you're using should be able to segment by these four audiences, so you're making sure you're meeting the needs of all of them.

Time Spent ≠ Online Engagement

I just saw the latest Nielsen ratings of the so-called stickiest sites on the web.

Not to beat a dead horse (has it been a year already since the new Nielsen ratings were announced?), but time spent on a website is not the "best engagement metric" that it claims to be. It works better in some industries than in others, but in general, a longer visit is not necessarily a sign of a better visit, of future sales, loyalty, engagement, etc.

What do you take away from the stickiest sites?  Does it provide value to you?  Is a long time on a site good or bad, from the visitors' perspective?

Renewed OMB Commitment to E-Gov

With July 4th upon us, it only seemed appropriate to talk about E-Gov.  But before that, it is worth remembering what July 4th is. It is not just a summer day to take off.  It is a celebration of the United States declaring independence from Great Britain.  We often take the importance of Independence day for granted. I had the privilege of being in Israel on Yom Ha'atzmaut, their independence day, a number of years ago.  At the time the country was only 50 years old and  Independence day meant something to every citizen.  It is time we remember the importance of Independence day as more then just a reason for a picnic. 

But now, back to E-Gov.

We did a press release about our selection as the vendor of choice for online customer satisfaction management for the federal government, but I forgot to write about it on the blog.

We're excited. We already work with about 200 federal government websites, do a quarterly e-gov index ranking federal websites, and we're looking forward to expanding the list of sites in our index greatly.

I also want to thank the many dedicated government employees who with great enthusiasm and passion strive to make government websites more useful and valuable to citizens.  It is hard to remember how we functioned before E-Government.