Tom Lindmeier’s Blog @ MarketPlanB

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

I know you may have a task list that goes from here to eternity and nowhere near the amount of resources available to realize your vision. But those who prioritize with strategic vision have a much better chance succeed. If your tactics are not guided by strategic vision you will fail. That’s why we need to go back to kindergarten every day and ask these very basic questions.

• Is your web presence truly different and inspired? Get different and stop following the herd. The trouble with consultants and “experts” in web design is that they can often guide everyone in the same direction. E-Commerce is still a relatively new channel that hasn’t fully matured and most sites lack an inspired branding component. Gain inspiration from mature channels such as print and television and adapt them to your site. Branding opportunities that offer true differentiation are still readily available in the web world.
• Is your site sticky enough to keep ‘em coming back? Your customer acquisition efforts are a waste of resources if you can’t convert with efficiency. Go back to to square one and get it right if acquisition marketing does not convert.
• If you are converting prospects, now may be the time to bring in the expert vendors to ramp-up. You’ll get traction sooner and you can bring it in-house later to gain efficiency.
• Don’t defer to the geeks. Just because they are tuned into technology and can make you feel inadequate is no reason to let them steal the show. They can push you towards tactics that direct you away from your strategic vision.

Here’s an important qualifier. The geeks are your best strategic partner if you ride them like a bucking bronco. Harnessing the power of geekdom can provide the ultimate insights in the development of your strategic vision.

The question of how often to mail the email list has been a hotly debated topic in every eCommerce business I have been associated with. Conventional wisdom is that you should deliver as often as you can. I tend to agree. My experience has been that the ceiling is more frequent than you can imagine. I have mailed up to three times a week. That’s 156 times a year.

But how you determine that maximum frequency rate? Here are the considerations I have frequently debated.

1. Opt-out Rates– If the opt-outs exceed opt-ins, you are obviously in trouble (duh). But you can’t necessarily link opt-outs to frequency. You’ll need to conduct a population test to determine where the trouble lies. Segment your mailings to 2 or 3 frequency rates and test. It takes time for fatigue to set in, you may need up to six months to test.
2. Response Degradation– You will most certainly reduce your response rates as you increase the frequency. However, in most cases, frequency will override response unless your degradation is precipitous. If you have enough history you can compare like offers by season. But again, you may need a population test.
3. Value Proposition– I have saved this for last because we tend not give it enough weight. We know that providing lightweight content and repeating the same offer will not be successful regardless of frequency. But as you increase frequency, the value proposition becomes more difficult to achieve if you haven’t increased your resource allocation. It seems that everyone is in the business of providing advice and information today and that only magnifies the challenge. Value comes from expert campaign planning, talented content developers and great execution. I have found that a prolific diversity of offers is the secret to campaign planning in the retail space. I will follow up with an article on campaign planning in the near future.

I will leave you with a tip for those of you who concerned that frequency is degrading your response. Right above the opt-out link in your emails, provide an option to decrease the frequency of mailings by 50%. You will decrease opt-outs by up to 30%.

Askimet Spam does a reasonable job with 95 to 98% of spammers effectively blocked. But I am finding that as time goes by, I spend more time moderating comments from spammers who have penetrated Askimet.
I discovered that if I enter my blog name into Google and repeat the search with omitted results, many of the same spammers who get through Askimet are on the last pages of the Google search result. Most of these are forums where I find an ability to edit and remove my URL.

Does this work? Or is it a waste of time? I would take pleasure in striking back.

The process of A/B and multivariate testing can be a very labor-intensive when you don’t possess the tools to automate the process. The marketplace has come to the rescue by providing the necessary resources and technologies. Optimost and SiteSpect are a few of the respected vendors. The Google Website Optimizer is a free tool for testing landing pages.
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. The reality is that unless you are a top 200 e-commerce site, you may not have enough page views to engage in statistically valid multivariate testing. The alternative is that you may have to run your tests for 6 months or a year or restrict testing to A/B.
My concern is that in the process increasing the universe of potential clients, some vendors are not accurately stating test sample minimums. Google states that you need 1M weekly page views to engage in multivariate testing. This is pure folly. If you test 1M page views and then retest, I can guarantee that you will get a different result. Also, if you have a seasonal business (most do), skewed results are compounded.
One can make the case that statistically invalid testing is better “guessing” to what drives e-commerce conversion improvements. If you see gains that are greater than 40%, you have a reason to pick a winner. However, a 10 or 15% gain will most likely not fall within the range of error.
The unfortunate truth is if you are a small or medium size e-commerce business, you do not have the capability to engage in a truly robust and prolific testing program. You are limited to fewer tests over longer time periods.

The subject of this article is not about SEO tactics, it’s about the principles needed for the successful execution of SEO strategies. This is also not about the subject of playing a cat and mouse game with the search engines so you can get high rankings right now with little effort. Very few experts just come out and tell you that a successful SEO program is really just a lot of hard work (because nobody wants to hear it and it does not sell). The tactics are freely shared for a good reason: the devil is in the details. Successful SEO firms rely on efficiency of execution to provide value to their clients. If you take what Google tells you at face value and execute well-known best practices you will have some measure of success. But real “conquer the competition” success is dependent on the level of execution.

With the assumption that you are executing best practices, you still have formidable barriers that are the real key to SEO breakthroughs. Here are 5 common characteristics of successful SEO programs from an executive level. These laws should govern the execution of your SEO tactics.

These are the hard lessons I learned from building a successful SEO program at Junionia.com, a top 500 e-commerce site. We did not gain traction until these principles were applied. This is also the primary subject matter of my speaking engagement at Mid-Market e-Tail in October of 2006.

The methodology of SEO optimization is well-documented in websites and blogs. The problem is sorting through the clutter of bad advice and unsubstantiated articles. I have taken the time to find a few good resources on SEO building blocks: link building, site optimization and content optimization.
On Site optimization: 12 Basic On-Site SEO Tactics for On-Site Optimization
Link Building: How SEOmoz Built One Million Links in 33 Months, The Secrets of Building Links
Content Optimization: Holistic Search Engine Optimization

I found this video from Matt Hempey on the Get Elastic blog. It’s the most entertaining video I’ve seen in ages. A wonderful example of going hyper viral.

There haven’t been very many books published on ecommerce and social media for a very good reason. The landscape is changing so quickly that whatever is published is quickly out of date. (Blogs are the best source for emerging information and I’ll list a few at the bottom of this article). None-the-less, social media appears to be moving from bleeding edge to fast-follower territory. The risks of not entering the fray may be higher than standing on the sidelines.
As a former director for an e-commerce business, I am well aware of responsibilities that come with prioritizing the ROI for marketing programs. Social marketing may not make it to the top of the list because the outcome is so unpredictable and the prospects for failure are acute. Although social media tools are free, the process of developing quality content can be resource intensive. If you have not yet maximized your conventional marketing channels, I recommend that you get your ducks lined up before you pursue large-scale social marketing strategies because right now there are programs with a more predicable ROI that cannot be bypassed.

None-the-less, the buzz surrounding Web 2.0 is creating a drumbeat that is unavoidable for a very good reason. Social media is the ultimate PR and SEO strategy when it actually works. The results can be spectacular. However, the success of your social media venture is in the hands of your audience and you cannot ultimately control the impact.
How do you begin? You simply need to ask the question: how can my business respond to the social needs of my customers and prospects? Of course, you need a basic understanding of your customers to answer the question. See my previous article Web 2.0 Madness. You really don’t need to undertake a new research study to get this done. Just dig up all of your research and correspondence and view it with the objective of answering the question.

There are a number of e-commerce sites that have done a great of successfully integrating Web 2.0 strategies. I suggest visiting Bodybuilder.com, Karmaloop.com, 1800Flowers.com and Zappos. Recommended blogs on social media are Socialmedia.biz, Marketingvox.com, Socialnewswatch.com and Marketing Hipster.

I’ve recently been doing some competitive research for a client and began with some research on tips for how to sleuth online competition. I ran into this article by Alan Rimm-Kaufman at Catalog Success. Although you may find that you already are using some of the tools, you will also find tips of great value that you have ignored. This is definitely worth checking out. Thanks Alan.

Spock, the new people search engine achieved a PR coup yesterday with a story on PBS News Hour. Here is their definition of the concept.

Spock is a people search application. You can search for celebrities you love, politicians you hate, athletes on your favorite sports team, your neighbors and friends, or even people you have fallen out of touch with. For each person we find on the internet we provide links to where they are on the web. At Spock, we make finding information about people easy. Spock combines two very powerful forces. First, our technology organizes web content about people into easily understood search results. We search for information on bio pages, social networks, news sites, blogs, directories …pretty much every place imaginable on the internet. Second, the Spock community contributes information to help enhance the search experience. Members can add tags, pictures, and web links or simply vote on existing information to increase its relevance. Anyone can join to help make search better for everyone.

The business model for may become a killer application because it solves a problem with a unique solution. I am a member of a number of social networks and am sometimes frustrated by the fragmentation of my social network. The ability to aggregate people information is of value to me. So I enthusiastically searched Spock for my name and started a sign-up process.

Spock is still in beta so I expected to find some problems and limitations, but my experience found that it is not usable at this time.

1. The name search revealed only one source of information: Linkedin. There was nothing from bio pages, other social networks, news sites, blogs, and directories as they claim. In contrast a simple Google search will find thousands of references.
2. I started a sign-up process so I could claim my search result. There is a typical email confirmation process. They also provide an opportunity to add data from other social networks at this time and request sign-up names and passwords to build your social profile. The confirmation process failed with an error message that said “duh”. I made another attempt to sign up with the same result.

Right now, Spock is not a better search experience and if my experience is typical, it is not ready for prime time.