Tom Lindmeier’s Blog @ MarketPlanB

With average conversion rates running at 2.5%, there’s much work still to be done and plenty of opportunity to improve the shopping experience. I’ve always maintained that this number is very low because most visitors come to your site ready to buy. To put this in perspective, mortar retailers could not possibly survive if only 2.5% of store visitors made a purchase.

Ecommerce marketers typically take a closer look at competitors promotion strategies during the 4th quarter holiday season because aggressive competitors may steal a substantial portion of business with the right offers. This is also true during economic downturns as marketers struggle to achieve revenue targets and are willing to give up margin to maintain market share and move inventory. Some will strive to take advantage of the downturn with the purpose of dealing fatal blows to weaker competitors.

This article is dedicated to all the entrepreneurs who direct the day-to-day projects required to build developing e-commerce businesses.

Direct marketers refined the science of A/B testing 50 years ago and we need to pay attention to lessons they have learned. Unless you are controlling the demographics of your samples, the absolute minimum sample size is 5M per segment with 20M to 25M being the standard.

Here’s a little food for thought. I was tuned in to the subject by reading Smiles Really DO Boost Sales by Roger Dooley at NeuroscienceMarketing.

Offline retailers teach and encourage sales and service personnel to smile because of the conventional knowledge that it is effective. Advertisers have also leveraged this concept by portraying the smiling faces of happy people who celebrate life as the standard formula for creative development.

But with all these laughing people, it becomes difficult to differentiate your brand when everyone is happy and having a good time.

Once you made the decision to redesign your website, it seems that everybody in your organization wants to get involved and join the committee because this is fun stuff. So how we do we collaborate, create a great website and not miss our deadline by 6 months?

Here’s the media center interview about the site redesign I developed at Junonia that was shot at Internet Retailer in San Jose.

When I started to engage in behavioral targeting several years ago, I was quite wary because I had seen so many instances of bad execution. (This topic is in primarily reference to “on-site” targeting, not media buys). Customized messaging based on user activity metrics is a fantastic tool if you are providing value. If you are not providing value the negatives will irreparably damage your customer relationships.

So here’s my list of the three worst mistakes…

An article by Dori Molitor in The Reveries titled Ka Boom Ka Ching speaks to the power of the most powerful demographic: female boomers.

There was a very intelligent discussion on Cord Silversteins blog titled Engage Your Customers or Die where he asks the question: “Is it a good thing for companies to try to engage their customers online? Does the good outweigh the possible repercussions that could come from it?”. The repercussions were defined as the big bad things that can happen if you do not handle every instance right.

If you read my previous post on the Invisible Visitor, I maintained that that the route to understanding our customers is engagement. Once they become visible, you are then positioned to make strategic decisions that result in major marketing breakthroughs. So the question is not “if” you should engage but rather “how”.