Rise of Social Shopping
Blink an eye and big stuff happens. With valuations in the billions for sites such as +OpenSky and in the hundreds of millions for relative newcomer WaNeLo.com Don't get lost in the trap such valuations create.
Remember Arthur C. Clarke's quote:
Any sufficiently NEW technology is indistinguishable from MAGIC.
There are several forms of new ecommerce magic happening now including:
+Wanelo = gamified, social & mobile shopping.
MassDrop = social affiliate program.
+OpenSky = Social Shopping with a #crowdfunding or +quirkydotcom feel.
+fab.com = social shopping.
+Etsy = +eBay for crafters.
+Woot = Daily Deal
We added a new section to our Ecommerce Questions Haiku Deck to reflect the rise of social shopping. We also noted how and why Amazon should be worried. New "social shopping" plays are hitting Amazon right where they are vulnerable - community, social and mobile.
Amazon is "Search and Stab" and they are about to compete with savvy mobile game creators. Shopping as a social game will beat low prices created by scale. Didn't Amazon just prove that point by vanquishing Walmart from the king's ecommerce throne?
Amazon understands the ARBITRAGE of online commerce better than anyone, but what if arbitrage wasn't the driving force anymore? Going to be an interesting fight between SCALE and its many benefits and a new generation of "kids" who don't know any better than to question everything, assume nothing and have FUN.
Fun is contagious. Will follow with video notes soon.
Yesterday at the Digital Summit in Charlotte, NC we ran into a familiar problem. "Marty we don't have any content," an growing ecommerce website shared.
I shared the good and bad news. The bad news is developing an effective content strategy takes time, focus and money. The good news is there are things to do in parallel that bring all pieces together such as:
* Create an Ask. * Begin to CURATE content. * Curate 90%, Create about 10%.
* Listen and set up Key Performance Indicators to LISTEN better.
* Develop a testing culture.
* Begin the journey to sustainable online community.
Added video notes to explain all of this to our Ecommerce Questions Haiku Deck: http://shar.es/1guIF1
Find video notes on platforms, content curation and community on Curagami's YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/tSHeIxtrs4g
Asking the right questions in the right way is key to online marketing success. How SMBs can compete with Amazon isn't as important as what is their why and how are they learning from Amazon's web marketing power.
A blog about ecommerce marketing, running an online business and updates to Shopify's ecommerce community.
Marty Note
We agree with all 7 of these "product page best practices" such as:
1. Powerful product descriptions (tell a short story and use language from reviews). 2. Clear Call-To-Action (CTAs). 3. Size Chart (we love the Johnny Cupcakes graphic). 3. Include Stock Levels (and use Amazon's only 4 left language). 4. Great Product shots. 5. Social Share buttons (with feedback loops for # of shares, look at SumoMe.com for the best social share widget). 6. Shipping & Free Shipping info clear and easy to find. 7. Relevant to what is happening now (Holiday theme). 8. Remove background (this one was new to us, but we get it).
& The forgot 2 of our favorites:
9. Reviews - voice of the customer is the most convincing and begins to create online community. 10. TEST - we've only beaten a red "Add To Cart" button once, but we only knew we beat it because we tested.
See your Google organic visit data overlaid with Google's major algorithm updates, and then dig into your data.
Marty Note
One of our favorite Free Tools is Panguin. Panguin overlays Google algorithm changes on your Google Analytics taking the mystery out of what has happened to all of your traffic.
We've seen well established sites take a 30% traffic haircut due to all of Google's changes. Hope your site isn't in that group, but if it is know that working your way back is possible, but change is necessary (it doesn't get better on its own).
The truth is: a decided customer is a rare phenomenon in the e-commerce world. In most cases, people are sure only about their needs, and slightly know about the way they can be satisfied. There is a fine line between making proper suggestions and trying to sell more at a rate when a customer doesn’t see it as an aggressive tactic. Cross-selling and upselling techniques when used properly can be a delicate thing that works like a charm both for customers and businesses. And here’s...
Martin (Marty) Smith:
CrossSelling & UpSelling is the path to increasing your AOV (Average Order Value) and higher AOV's is the path to sustainable online community. Great post here on how to cross and up sell.
Visualizing Data
Inside every big data stack is a secret, a secret capable of helping your web marketing IF you find it. Our new Curagami Ecommerce Master Class discusses how to cut a mound of mud into meaninful patterns.
Steps are easy:
1. Start with clean data. 2. Start categorizing.
3. Sort by your categories. 4. Cut your detail out (remember to replace functions with numbers).
5. Graph your broad strokes.
We fly through how to create patterns in this 3 min video. If you ae stuck or confused email martin(at)Curagami.com.
Good luck and make sure your weed whacker is working.
M
How did we made more than $30M in online commerce? Watch our first Ecommerce Master Class Video & to learn about directed search wins hearts, minds and loyalty. Can watching a 2 minute video really make millions? Worked for us :). M
There's some great data out there on marketing channel ROI. This infographic pulls together industry studies and surveys on how marketing channels compare.
Marty Note
Somewhat disingenuous to separate channels like this. Everything is everything now and that means results in one channel are influencd in many ways by other channels. That is an important caveat for the "all or nothing" crowd who may read these results thinking they can reduce or eliminate commitment to social or PPC.
Yeah we wouldn't do that. Your site is MODELED and substantial changes to any part of your current model could take down all the dominoes. That doesn't mean this knowledge isn't important though your results may be different. Knowing what channel is contributing profit and what channel is contributing traffic allows you to invest in the blend. Remember it is the blend that wins so don't go cutting off your nose to spite your website.
Hero Marketing: Compete with Amazon shares passion, customer focus, exponential thinking & need to create movements not promotions needed to win online and how SMBs can compete with Amazon.
Here are 5 tips to increase e-commerce sales through quality customer service and relevant content, targeting the 2nd step of the consumer conversion funnel
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Content Is the KEY To Tomorrow's Commerce
There is NO DOUBT in team Curagami's (http://www.Curagami.com) mind that content holds the key to conversion and SEO in tomorrow's ecommerce world.
We would order these tips differently:
1. Product Reviews (the most power UGC on our site curate the heck out of these and find your Ambassadors here too).
2. Clear returns & Free Shipping policy - we added free shipping, but having pages dedicated to both of these ideas means you may not have to pay Retail Me Not for your traffic.
3. Product Descriptions - use keywords you see customers using in reviews and use the keywords tool to test words against each other.
4. Photo & Video Quality - looks are overrated on an ecommerce site. Sounds strange to write that sentence, but if your customers trust you, you use User Generated Content and offer the right shipping and loyalty environments your pictures can be something you are always working on. Better is better no doubt, but a site with moderate images and the right reviews, shipping and returns can outsell a site with beautiful pictures and the wrong policies.
5. Customer Support - best way to show customer support is via your existing customers. This is why reviews are so important. Reviews are the unvarnished voice of the mob, your customers.
WaNeLo.com
WaNeLo.com understands something you don't. They understand there is NO WAY to compete head-to-head with Amazon. Better to shift to a "blue ocean" by creating a highly social, mobile and gamified environment.
As a "mashup artist" WaNeLo.com can create pages that cost pennies, pages that may generate dollars. Are there bumps with this "new age" affiliate marketing? Of course, but, as the pagespread chart illustrates, you don't beat the giant YOU CO-OPT him :).
Marty Note
Solid tips here with a few caveats:
* #3 printing is a nice to have now not a must have. Printing just isn't as important, but, for some, a printed piece is easier to share.
* Reviews are now more important in their absence. Having hundreds of reviews is great as it shows the size and value of the tribe formed around a given product. A Customer's voice is always a tad different sounding too, so be sure to curate content FROM reviews.
* High res images is a good idea, but don't slow the delivery of your page down. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help server your images and videos fast no matter who is looking at your content or from where.
* Product comparisons are great especially if they are social.
* Shipping = we would amend shipping to make sure your FREE Shipping triggers are easy to find / be aware of and set to maximize conversions.
$50,000 New Ecommerce Web Design Contest
FOMs (Friends of Martin's) are working on a cool event to support my +FedEx keynote talk in Maryland at the end of February. We have 3 partners willing to contribute time into a "prize" to help online merchants pivot to the NEW Ecommerce.
If you would like to contribute email Martin(at)Curagami.com (not on our site yet as we may fill our partner roster from friends and social. Read more about the contest on G+
https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/M3n5Ds4Tk9p
9 Pillars of Customer Retention Include Know Your Customers
Get Connected
Thank Your Customers
Amaze Your Best Customers
Help Your Customers Buy More
Save Your Churning Customers
Create Evangelists
Listen to Your Customers
Acquire Retainable Customers
Marty Note
Great post and we love #3 - THANKING customers. Often over looked or done badly there are a lot of cool ways to think customers now such as:
* Follow them BACK! * Curate their content into your social streams.
* Link to them.
* Share their content about you (with permission and attribution).
The social web creates many new ways to say THANKS other than boring auto-response.
Internet of Things (IoT)
The idea of a connected world where objects can communicate via the internet with each other and with computers and smartphones, does seem to have endless and even overwhelming possibilities. For businesses, IoT technology opens up the potential for smarter process and efficiency, more targeted marketing and better understanding of customers by utilizing data and digital insight. The opportunities are so vast, that for many companies, coming up with a clear strategy for how to implement this new technology is a huge step. In the retail industry, recent research conducted by Forrester found that 96% of retail decision makers are hoping to make the necessary changes to adopt IoT technology in the near future but over half are concerned about integration challenges. And this is a big part of the issue – to really make sure they harness the potential of this new technology, customer focused businesses need to first consider a few key areas....
Marty Note
@Jeff Domanskyhits two key Internet of Things issues squarely:
* Securely and reliably connecting everything.
* Understanding how IoT tech means greater efficiency and a better post-purchase experience for customers.
At Curagami (http://www.Curagami.com) we see several important synergistic intersections including:
* Money becomes less and less important. * Subscriptions become more and more important. * The need to mashup, combine, filter and control the NOISE is going to be huge.
That last point is reinforced by life today. When apps make life easier they scale quickly (Uber) when they add to a noisy world they struggle. Adding to PAIN doesn't scale. Reducing pain in favor of getting more by doing less but getting more or having fun instead of digging ditches feels like a winning idea.
The future could become even more unreasonably noisy. Do we really need to know our fridge needs a new filter, our cat is almost out of food and our car is due for a tuneup? Finding a way to quiet the demand curve of IoT feels like a winner to us. What about you?
Never been more important to know your website's long tail than in ou social / mobile / connected time as Amazon proves and WaNeLo illustrates.
Love this cool memory game from Iron Yard instructor Chris Davies (@chrisdaviesgeek ). Easy to adapt to any business and great time on site builder so helpful to the new SEO.
E-commerce used to be static, Not So Much Anymore
This excellent Paper.li post from @Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.comshares interesting ecommerce research, design ideas and the impact of the social / mobile web on online commerce.
The new ecommerce requires originality, social curation and a supportive tribe as we discuss regularly at http://www.Curagami.com our Durham, NC based startup dedicated to creating cool new tools for online merchants.
How to Choose the Best E commerce Platform for SEO. An independent, comparative study of all the most popular E-commerce platforms in respect of SEO.
Marty Note
Wow, this is an exhaustive "complete guide" to SEO for ecom. I agree with the ranks their exhaustive research creates with a single caveat. I hate platform ecoms like Shopify and Volusion.
Both work great UNTIL you need to scale and then the limitations of such a template and community serving become clear. That said, for companies just starting or below $5M in annual sales Shopify would be a great place to start.
Magento is complicated and intense. No need to go there until you can pay for it with money and expertise. Great post.
Showrooming Scurge
Most retailers HATE people showrooming in their stores. That's stupid as it is like trying to hold back the tide. Better to embrace showrooming - the practices of shopping in the world and then buying online for better price.
One way to embrace showrooming occurred to this morning watching Bruno Torturra discuss how easy it is to stream a live event to the web. Torturra is streaming protests, but retailers brave enough to encourage showrooming could use the same tactics to build a powerful Ambassador layer.
The recipe is simple:
1. Create content explaining how to stream live video. 2. Create a community to share your "shopping videos". 3. Provide social rewards (encouragement and features) to filter. 4. Rinse and Repeat
Your customers could help keep your prices in line, alert you to cool merchandising by competitors and a million other near real time benefits. You can't go into something like this halfway.
It's an all or nothing idea and that means listening more than you talk (some sites, brands and companies are better at 2 way communication than others). Early today team Curagami wrote a piece about competing with Amazon (http://sco.lt/58qhn7 ).
Add this "video showrooming army" to that and you get differentaion from the monster. Cool thing is cost of creating such cool and cutting edge competition is minimal (webpage and some serving). I wouldn't host on YouTube unless you were strapped for cash since you want the SEO juice flowing in your site's direction.
Soon retailers will be glad people are in their stores FOR ANY REASON, beat them by embracing showrooming now.
A couple weeks ago, we dug into internal site search & found that in some cases, searches performed by only 10% of the site's total traffic made up nea
Tip #1 - Make sure search boar is visible.
Tip #2 - Use auto-complete, suggestions and create Top 10 Search results content.
Tip #3 - Show most "relevant" results first (see tip #10).
Tip #4 - Deliver results in "local language" i.e. call things the same as your audience.
Tip #5 - Offer multiple ways users can filter results (price, category, best reviewed, most shared).
Tip #6 - Include product reviews, in-stock status and purchasing buttons.
Tip #7: Mine internal search to guide merchandising.
Tip 8: Keep SEO Spiders away from internal search results to avoid duplicate content and no social support problems.
Tip #9: Give customers the ability to save searches to MyProfile.
Tip #10 Use an algorithm to fire search results based on predictive analytics (persona based if possible).
Marty Note
When I was a Director of Ecommerce we used Internal search to help make our aggressive growth goals. I added 7 - 10 because internal search is every ecommerce team's best ally. Internal search is a goldmine of information. Follow these ten tips to mine the gold internal search provides.
Tiffany & Co. has been the world's premier jeweler and America's house of design since 1837. Shop creations of timeless beauty and superlative craftsmanship that will be treasured always.
Marty Note
WOW the Tiffany animation sets new standards for "interactive" web design and storytelling. #toogood!
Kudos to every ecommerce team breaking their backs to feed our online needs. The winner in this group of merchants is TIFFANY. TIffany's amazing animation sets a new stunning standard for holiday design.
http://www.tiffany.com
Macy's shows the least design growth, but they were solid in 2012 at least in that PORTAL category they play in. Urban Outfitters got MUCH better but shouldn't have been shown up in COOL as bad as they were by Tiffany.
Two years in web design is like 10 in real life as Tiffany proves.
Two years ago, we published a two-part post on social media marketing safety with Internet marketer, curator, cancer survivor, entrepreneur and Friend of Paper.li, Marty Smith.
Well, guess what? Marty is back. And this time, he will share his journey and thoughts on entrepreneurship, e-commerce, social media and how his battle against cancer has shaped his thinking.
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Martin (Marty) Smith
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