The Web's Best - Keep Calm, Keep Up
The Web's best probably looked a lot like your digital enterprise at one time
or another — doing whatever it took to reach consumers’ hearts and wallets.
They didn’t just arrive on the scene fully polished and impressive. The Web’s best
continually refine their offerings, promotions and brand images and now embody
what it means to be successful on today’s 'Net. This is no time to panic, but to
keep calm and keep up with the Web's best.
Leading enterprises make improvements (varying
in degrees of complexity) as they carry on —
measuring, testing and optimizing at every turn. They have intangible
qualities in common — beautiful, resilient, reliable
and recognizable — and have an unparalleled focus on what it
takes to succeed on the Web. They also have a commitment
to acquisition and retention, optimization and analytics, and
infrastructure and reliability.
THE WEB’S BEST & YOU
The Internet’s hyper-competitive landscape can make it seem impossible
to keep up with the Web’s best. WordPress bloggers publish
a half a million posts every day, around the same number of
Tweets are sent daily and e-commerce sales continue to grow at
impressive rates, topping $200 billion annually. But as you will
see, with such a huge pool of enterprises to keep up with, it’s better
to keep calm and go into digital battle knowing there will always
be more engaging blog posts than yours, there will always
be wittier Tweets and more streamlined paths to purchases, too.
Before delving into some of the Web’s best in 2013 — and
before readers begin comparing their digital initiatives and hurrying
to get the latest platform or software to keep up — stay
calm and learn about other companies’ pain points and how
they leveraged technology to fix them. The best of the Web do
not have to be the largest brands in the world (or the digital enterprises
with the most bells and whistles) — they simply have
to be the ones who recognize where they need to improve (for
their customers not their competitors) and leverage the appropriate
technology or tactics to be a better self.
ACQUISITION & RETENTION
Rewarding Customer Loyalty
Customers — however they look for your enterprise — are the
livelihood of every business. The Web’s best develop and test
new tactics to acquire more customers and retain the ones they
already have. American Giant and Advance Auto Parts are using
Extole to leverage the power of referral marketing to do just that.
This digital initiative is when a brand offers its customers a reward
for sharing the brand or specific products with their
friends. It’s a valuable acquisition channel, as referred friends can
prove to be 16 percent more profitable over their lifetimes than
customers acquired through traditional advertising. This statistic
is hard to ignore, but Extole CEO Matt Roche, thinks it’s not
difficult to understand.
“People drive the same cars and wear the same styles as the
people they spend time with,” said Roche. “When people
share, they are attaching their affiliation. That automatically
brings loyalty. People are driven by this social proof. Referred
friends develop a strong loyalty because they inherit the loyalty
of their friends.”
American Giant is a U.S. apparel manufacturing and retail
company known for “The Greatest Hoodie Every Made.” It
used the Extole platform to allow its customers to share their
brand or products with friends however they feel most comfortable
(e.g. email, social or personal URLs). It’s what American
Giant does with those shares that is worthy of note. Don
Pillsbury, VP of sales and marketing at American Giant says all
interactions with the shares are tracked from initial clicks all
the way down to conversions, allowing his team to see which
sharing channels are most popular and which products get referred
and purchased the most.
“The platform also gives us control over the entire referral
experience and supports optimization across calls-to-action,
promotional copy and placements as well as offer (reward)
structure,” said Pillsbury. “Being able to tweak and modify the
program to optimize for our audience has helped us turn our
referral marketing program into an incredibly valuable customer
acquisition channel.”
Through referrals, American Giant is also able to reach a
valuable group — the friends of its customers — that it wouldn’t
otherwise have had access to.
According to Pillsbury, American Giant is seeing a 21 percent
conversion rate from email shares through its referral
marketing program, which is higher than the brand’s typical email conversion rate. The program also consistently drives 10
percent of all e-commerce transactions.
Advance Auto Parts, an automotive aftermarket retailer of
parts started in 1932, reiterates many of the same success stories
using Extole.
KEEP CALM & ENGAGE ON: Social promotions garner visibility, but brands must make sure they adhere to each network’s rules and regulations. Check out five platforms to help you stay compliant.
Referral marketing helps Advance Auto Parts achieve two
primary objectives, according to the company’s eBusiness Marketing
Manager Heath Bradbury. First, it helps its marketing
team better understand the value that referrals have for its business.
Bradbury says they get better visibility into which channels
are driving these conversations and referrals, as well as
tighter tracking of sales that come from those referrals. Secondly,
referral marketing helps Advance Auto Parts provide incentives
on both sides to help drive even more conversations
and referrals. Advocates are rewarded for bringing new customers,
and those who were referred to Advance Auto parts
get an exclusive offer.
“Referral marketing helps us reach an audience that may
not be engaged with the brand in other marketing channels
like search or email,” said Bradbury. “In that sense, it’s very
complementary to our other marketing efforts. We’ve found
that referral marketing over indexes in acquisition rate when
compared against our other marketing programs.
“This makes sense given the nature of the program lends itself
toward acquisition; existing customers, I think, are probably
being brought back via many of our other marketing programs.
Furthermore, acquisition is supported by a strong conversion
rate derived from careful attention to program optimization.”
Converting Traffic to Sales
Many Internet professionals can empathize with The Thule
Brand, which prior to leveraging Shopatron, enjoyed substantial
visitor traffic to its branded marketing site, but had little
success converting that traffic to sales. The brand website did
not enable online purchasing, and instead referred visitors to
its online and offline retailers using dealer locator buttons and
product-to-product links (its roof racks and bike mounts are
sold at retailers like R.E.I., L.L. Bean and Dick’s Sporting
Goods). Thule was able to generate some orders for retailers
but ultimately, was missing sales and frustrating its most loyal
customers, who trusted the brand and wanted to buy direct.
“In mid-2007, we decided to rebuild our Web presence,”
said Steve Doviak, Internet manager for Thule. “Despite the
fact that ‘omnichannel’ was not yet a buzzword in the retail
community, connecting our online and offline channels made
perfect sense. However, it was extremely important that our
strategy addressed both our dealer and customer needs. Shopatron
accommodated both.”
With Shopatron, Thule integrated its dealer network into
the e-commerce process to convert traffic from its various
branded websites into increased sales for Thule and its authorized
retailers. In fact, Thule has increased its dealer base
from fewer than 100 to more than 700 local retailers servicing
Thule online orders.
And because shoppers buying from Thule can elect to receive
the order through direct shipment or in-store pickup,
Thule has dramatically expanded the delivery options for
shoppers when they purchase online, transforming them into
active participants in the fulfillment of their orders.
“Shopatron helped Thule create the connection between
our brand, our retailers and our customers,” said Doviak. “By
launching Thule.com for e-commerce, we are able to learn
about our customers’ needs and help drive business for our
local dealers.”
Within three years of implementing Shopatron, Thule’s average
order value increased by 50 percent and the number of
orders increased by 96 percent.
Impressive for sure, but Thule’s e-commerce site has also enabled
rich online store analytics that serve as a resource in paidadvertising
efforts. The data has helped Doviak and his team
target both users interested in products as well as consumers
who may not be familiar with the Thule brand at the time of the
product search.
Increasing Visibility via Social
Long gone are the days when social success is based on fan
and follower numbers alone. Instead, most enterprises know
that the true goal of social is to cultivate brand engagement
amongst audience members. Not only does an engaging social
strategy produce loyal customers, but it also boosts visibility
and has the ability to increase conversions. The biggest challenge,
however, is finding the right technology to help your
brand succeed in its social initiatives.
Take Victoria’s Secret and Shape as an example. The companies
partnered to launch a sweepstakes on Pinterest during
the 2012 holiday season through the Piquora platform. The
objective of the promotion was to drive impressions and gain
followers for both brands. The campaign simply required participants to curate their favorite holiday gift ideas and inspirations
to a board titled “Red Hot Holiday Countdown”. In
the end, the campaign drew in more than 3,200 participants
and had more than 68,400 Pins and Repins, which generated
an estimated 2.9 million impressions. The two brands also
gained a combined total of more than 11,000 new followers
during the promotion, and two months later, Shape was receiving
27 percent more page views originating from Pinterest.
More recently, powerhouse coffee retailer Starbucks also
stepped up its social strategy, launching the “Tweet-a-Coffee”
campaign that encourages spontaneous gifting on Twitter.
Through the campaign, customers can sync their Starbucks
account to Twitter in order to purchase $5 gift cards for their
contacts directly from the social network. Starbucks first
launched its eGifting platform in 2011 on Starbucks.com,
which was extended to Facebook and its iPhone mobile app
prior to its arrival on Twitter. This new campaign, however,
not only provides increased revenue for the company, but also
fosters word-of-mouth advertising, thus increased visibility, for
the brand on the social network.
“What’s so exciting about extending our eGifitng platform
to Twitter is the open and real-time nature of the platform,”
said Adam Brotman, chief digital officer, Starbucks. “Tweet-acoffee
allows us to do something quite different in eGifting in
that people can now give the gift of Starbucks to anyone on
Twitter in the moment. This can be between the closest of
friends, the most distant of colleagues, or even between people
who have not even had the chance to meet yet in person,
but have connected in some way on Twitter.”
ANALYTICS & OPTIMIZATION
Optimizing for Everyone
To succeed in the service industry, it is vital to cater to every
client’s potential needs and wants. This is challenging for a
service website like Trulia, which must be optimized for not
only a consumer audience looking to rent and purchase
homes, but also a broker/agent audience looking to list properties.
To identify the best performing combination of features
and design elements for both audiences, Trulia sought out the
services of testing platform SiteSpect.
“Trulia chose SiteSpect because the functionality fits well
with our rapid, iterative development process,” said Dan Voorhies, director of analytics at Trulia. “For smaller changes
to Trulia, SiteSpect allows us to modify content outside of our
release process and quickly use quantitative data to evaluate
changes. SiteSpect also works well for traffic management, allocation
and analytics for the larger-scale testing that is needed
for major changes in the user experience.”
Trulia leveraged SiteSpect when implementing a redesign
for key areas of its website back in April. SiteSpect enabled Trulia
to test different versions of its redesigned page, helping the
company hone in on the most intuitive page layout for its enduser.
According to Voorhies, the result was a much cleaner and
more navigable page.
In fact, Trulia’s Q3 revenue report suggests that its testing
and optimization efforts paid off, as the company received an
average of 35.3 million monthly unique visitors in the quarter,
which is an increase of 42 percent from the same period last year.
Plus, the real-estate service saw an upswing of approximately
4,300 subscribers in the third quarter, reaching 36,401.
“At Trulia, we want to make sure that we are constantly innovating
to create the best possible user experiences for homebuyers,
sellers, and renters,” said Voorhies. “Our product and
user experience teams come up with great new features and
designs for areas on the site based on qualitative user feedback.
It is important to gather quantitative data on the performance
of these new designs to make sure end users are actually understanding
these new features. A/B testing offers us a way to
measure the side-by-side performance of these designs with a
much larger sample of users than would be possible in a qualitative
study.”
Voorhies also says that Trulia is constantly running tests to
make sure that the site is optimized for the user experience. In
fact, at any given time the company may have up to six concurrent
tests running to improve different areas of the site. According
to SiteSpect CMO Kim Ann King, continuous testing
is the best way to meet performance goals.
“It’s not just about implementing a tool, it’s about having a
culture of testing and really having a strategic program on testing,”
said King. “Website testing is so much more than, ‘Oh,
I’m going to test this headline and see what works.’ It’s really
about understanding your goals, your website KPIs, what
you’re trying to change and having a really good hypothesis,
buy-in from executives and having a team to look at those
results and communicate them with the organization. It’s more
comprehensive I think than most people realize.”
Serving the Underserved
Launched in a dorm room in 2002, ModCloth has expanded
from a modest moneymaking “thrifting” hobby to employing
nearly 300 people in offices in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Los
Angeles. Its website averages about 700,000 unique U.S. visitors
each month and its tech-driven approach to selling vintage-inspired
clothing and décor from thousands of independent designers
has made it a Web best, from its acquisition strategies to
its analytics initiatives to its optimization campaigns.
Before looking specifically at how ModCloth acquires new
customers, it’s important to understand the variety of challenges
retailers face. In its “Customer Acquisition Strategies Guide,”
Lenati, a management-consulting firm specializing in sales and
marketing strategy, highlights eight core barriers to acquisition:
low category awareness, low product/brand awareness, poor perceptions,
purchase product friction, competitor lock in, strong
ecosystem, poor brand fit and poor product fit. Lenati suggests
only by building a rigorous, honest, and comprehensive understanding
of why every individual in the market is not yet your
customer will you be able to create a clear vision of the pathways
you must build or nurture to ensure success.
In published ModCloth case studies, it was clear the retailer
levarged analytics to recognize these barriers in its business
model and eventually turned to Monetate to optimize its
offerings. Let’s take poor product fit as an example. Not only
were ModCloth shoppers sharing their measurements in 58
percent of the product reviews on its website, but they were
also asking for their products to come in different sizes. Mod-
Cloth sizing was a pretty big problem because of the wide variety
of independent designers they work with meant no
standard set of sizes and it was also underserving a very active
online audience — women who wear sizes higher than a 14
(which many retailers cap their offerings at).
Interestingly, ModCloth found that U.S. women who primarily
wear plus sizes are twice as likely than those who don’t
to shop online daily. Additionally, U.S. women who primarily
wear sizes 16 and above indicate that they buy more than 50
percent of their clothing online compared to women who only
wear standard sizes. ModCloth took this barrier to acquisition
and retention and began offering a wider range of clothing sizes
to optimize the shopper experience.
ModCloth then needed to figure out how to share this development
with its community. The company created specially
curated landing pages for plus-size customers, gave
individualized product recommendations based on new versus
returning visitors, and also used Monetate to note the last
three apparel and shoe sizes a visitor added to her cart. The
company then used this data to personalize a shopper’s future
website trips with content and links to connect her with the
products that are more likely to fit. This is especially relevant
for plus-size shoppers, according to a Monetate case study, as
they would normally have to dig through the site before finding
clothes in the right size, causing a bumpy path to purchase.
Now, visitors who have previously purchased plus-size
products are shown homepage images that provide quick links
to the growing range of apparel that’s offered in sizes 16 and
up. This content personalization from Monetate drove a 14.94
percent lift in average order value, improved customer service
and lowered product returns.
KEEPING UP
The only way to succeed as a business on the ’Net is by making a commitment to progress — making small, yet measurable changes over time. There will always be a better technology on the market, but brands that take steps to identify and act on the areas that need improving, like those recognized here, are the ones that customers will come back to time and again.
OK, NOW IT’S TIME TO FREAK OUT
The infrastructure and reliability of a website is crucial to the success of any enterprise. Downtime can result in lost sales, reputation points and even ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs). In fact, Google went down for (stated anywhere between 2-5 minutes) in Aug. 2013 and reportedly took a 40 percent hit in Web traffic. Additionally, Amazon, who Panopta reported had no downtime in 2012, also went down in 2013, but for a lot longer (reports average it was about 30 minutes or more) — losing a widely reported $2 million because of the outage. See who were the uptime winners, downtime losers for 2013.


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