53 Vital Multichannel Website/Online Marketing Tips

Here is the hyper-link to forward to your multichannel catalog and retail colleagues:

http://minethatdata.blogspot.com/2008/01/53-vital-multichannel-websiteonline.html

1. Create widgets that allow your customer to create a sub-store on their own homepage (Google, My Yahoo, etc.).
2. Give your customers access to their historical online visitation behavior.
3. As a perk, allow your multichannel or most loyal customers to create a widget-based personalized homepage.
   
4. Stop guessing what your customer wants --- pay CLOSE ATTENTION to the widgets your best customers put on their personalized homepage!
5. Don't treat your RSS feeds like e-mail campaigns.
6. Allow every store manager to create a personalized/widget-based "store page", and encourage store customers to interact with that page instead of your typical e-commerce homepage.
7. Allow your best store employees to have their own personalized/widget-based "store page", and encourage your store customers to interact with that page instead of your typical e-commerce homepage.
   
8. Have gifted employees write heartfelt blogs about your brand. Give them twenty-four months to build an audience. Keep your PR department out of this activity.
9. After twenty-four months, measure the profitability of customers who interact with the blogs your employees write.
   
10. Retail websites serve three purposes: E-Commerce, Research, and Entertainment. Decide which of these elements is most important to your customer.
11. Catalog websites serve three purposes: E-Commerce, Research, and a Catalog Order Form. Decide which of these elements is most important to your customer.
12. Your catalog/retail audience is homogeneous. Your website audience is heterogeneous. Merchandising a website is more difficult than merchandising a catalog, or a store.
13. Divide your online audience into "segments" based on the activity that drives them to the website (i.e. visitors from Google (paid/natural, branded etc.), from E-Mail, from Catalog, from Retail, from Portals, from Shopping Comparison Sites, from Affiliates, from Widgets, from Blogs). Measure everything across sub-audiences. Merchandise to each individual audience.
14. It is very likely that your customer visits your site three or four times between purchases, rendering metrics like conversion rate useless.
15. Instead of measuring conversion rate, measure the probability of a prior loyal visitor visiting again this month.
16. Instead of measuring conversion rate, measure the average number of visits made if a loyal visitor visits again this month.
17. Instead of measuring conversion rate within one session/day, measure the probability of a loyal visitor purchasing over a seven/thirty day period of time.
18. Instead of measuring conversion rate within the online channel, measure the probability of a website visitor purchasing via mail/phone/store within a seven/thirty day period of time, and add those conversions to your online conversions.
19. Your website is a home with many entry doors. Customers are less and less likely to ring the doorbell to the front door.
20. Use Multichannel Forensics to identify if e-commerce customers become retail customers.
21. Shopping cart abandonment is not a bad thing. For many customers, the shopping cart is simply a "wish list repository", a place to hold items the customer wants to purchase in your store at a later date.
22. If you want to increase the conversion rate of your website, pay attention to "ugly" websites.
23. In your customer database, record the number of days since last website visit.
24. In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit to all of your key landing pages.
25. In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit from Google and other search engines.
26. In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit from an E-mail campaign.
27. In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit from Portal advertising, Shopping Comparison sites, Affiliate marketing, etc.
28. In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit from a blog.
29. In your customer database, record the number of days since last visit to each of your key merchandise divisions.
30. In your customer database, record the number of days since the customer used your internal search function.
    
31. Measure customer interaction with the sub-channels on your website (paid search, natural search, branded search, non-branded search, e-mail, widgets, portals, shopping comparison, affiliates, etc.).
32. Once measured, target your e-mail and search marketing strategies around customer interactions with sub-channels.
33. Retail Executives: Please treat your online marketing team as equal partners.
34. Catalog Executives: Please treat your online marketing team as equal partners.
35. Online Executives: Please meet your retail and catalog executives "half-way"!
36. Similar to catalog marketing, there is a relationship between online merchandise density and sales per visit.
37. Pay close attention to the items catalog buyers purchase online. Which non-catalog-advertised items are customers purchasing?
38. Pay close attention to the items retail customers purchase online. Which non-retail items are customers purchasing?
39. Personas are communication tools that allow your executive team to understand who is interacting with your website. Executives understand personas better than they understand conversion rates.
40. Online Executives: Go "on the road". Visit every store manager, every one of your call centers and distribution centers, and evangelize your craft to those who are not immersed in it.
41. Link customer behavior across multiple computers for a complete view of customer interaction with your brand.
42. Try something different with e-mail marketing. Stop the "sameness" that plagues the retail/catalog industry, test anything that is not a "best practice".
43. Require each executive to respond to one customer complaint per month/quarter on a "complaint blog", and actively listen to customer comments in response to executive posts.
44. Require each store manager, or teams of store managers, to execute online marketing campaigns from time to time, to learn and appreciate your craft.
45. Require online marketing managers to work the sales floor in your store two days per year.
46. Require each store marketing manager (television, newspapers, magazines) to execute online marketing campaigns, and require these folks to measure success across all channels.
    
47. Require each online marketing manager to execute store marketing campaigns, and require these folks to measure success across channels.
48. Require store merchandisers to actively monitor "what sells online".
49. Require online merchandisers to actively monitor "what sells in stores".
50. Test the difference in customer behavior when marketing campaigns are integrated (same across stores/website), and when marketing campaigns are run independent of each other (different across stores/website).
51. Retail executives: Your website may well be a media channel. Split your website into two parts, an e-commerce part, and a media channel. Treat each "sub-channel" appropriately. Hint: You're better at managing a media channel, your online marketing folks are better at managing the e-commerce channel.
52. Web Analytics: Complement your traditional session/daily metrics with time-based metrics based on fixed groups of customers. There isn't a difference between a customer visiting four times and buying once during a month, and a customer visiting once and buying once during a month.
53. The days of +25% online sales growth are winding down. If you are an online marketing executive, be ready to prove your worth in a +4% comp-sales online world.