Retailers like Target, Walmart, Victoria’s Secret and American Eagle’s “aerie” brand have found a way to direct-market to “Millennials” through Facebook Sponsored Groups. Like opt-in email campaigns, these retailers are using its Sponsored Group member lists to send notifications on contests, sales and even new Facebook applications.

Everyone who has joined a Sponsored Group has opted in by default to receiving Facebook “email” messages:

Here’s the latest Valentine email from aerie, a clothing line from American Eagle aimed at 15-25 year old females. It was sent to almost 50,000 members of its Sponsored Group:

Continue Reading »

In last week’s webinar on holiday marketing, Jason Billingsley and I discussed the potential for online retailers to use Geo-IP targeting to serve specific content to different site visitors based on their geographic location. In this post, I’d like to recap the ideas mentioned in the webinar.

When your browser requests content from a website’s server that uses geo-ip techonolgy, it’s checked against a database to determine your country, region, city or even latitude/longitude and content is delivered based on your location. When you visit a web portal, for example, and you see your local news or weather appearing - this is geo-IP content delivery in action. This is just one example, but there are ways this can be effectively used on ecommerce websites:

Target By Country

If you have multiple websites targeted at individual countries, you can simply redirect visitors to the appropriate site when they click a link to your .com site or type it in directly into a browser.

Or you can detect when a visitor is from a different country when they land on your .com site and inform them of your nationalized site like Amazon:

Continue Reading »

Yesterday we talked about OfficeMax’ viral campaign and its goal to brand itself as “human friendly.” OfficeMax has recently redesigned its website, and you’ll notice right away its clean look and innovative approach to navigation.

Now customers can hone in on specific products with one click:

Which you have to admit is more user-friendly than Staples’ or Office Depot’s methods, where you have to first locate the correct category, then forage from there:

Continue Reading »

Earlier today we discussed the Elf Yourself campaign for OfficeMax and how its benefits will be long term branding rather than immediate sales. Rebecca Bolwitt pointed out another campaign for M&Ms.

M&Ms and Zazzle’s viral has a built-in ecommerce component. After you M&M-ize yourself you can add your character to a number of customizable products from Zazzle, including t-shirts, mugs, postcards, neckties, baseball hats and even postage stamps.

After you create your character, you can move to the “MPorium” where you can choose a product to personalize.

Continue Reading »

If you recognized this was NOT an official OfficeMax Elf Yourself video, perhaps you’re one of the 26.4 million people who took part in the real OfficeMax viral campaign last Christmas. (For our non-US readers, you can read up on this campaign here).

There’s no denying that this was the biggest social media marketing success for a major retailer in 2007. Hitwise ranked ElfYourself.com as the 51st most visited website in December, and users spent a total of 2,600 years on the site. Even more remarkable, 40% of visitors to ElfYourself.com were 55 years or older - proving that social media campaigns can engage boomers successfully.

OfficeMax VP of Marketing and Advertising Bob Thacker said: “We were looking to build the brand, warm up our image. We weren’t looking for sales. We are third-place players in our industry, so we are trying to differentiate ourselves through humor and humanization.”

Continue Reading »

Thought we’d kick this week off with a hilarious video I came across via GrokDotCom:

• I linked to this yesterday, but it deserves another nod. Justin Palmer shares 3 creative ways online retailers handle product stock-outs. We incorporated his ideas into our Webinar on holiday marketing, when stock-outs are even more of a concern.

• For online retailers who drop ship, here’s 5 ways to start the new year right.

• Here’s a great example of using customer review content in print advertising from Best Buy.

• Miranda at Ecommerce Cache shows an incredible effort in comparing how retailers handle product search attributes. Full of screenshots.

• Matt at eCommerceOptimization explains “Live Link Video” - definitely a “Hey, why didn’t I think of that?” concept.

• Chad White reminds us why you must proof read your emails with the “Oopsy Hall of Fame”.

• Peter Lee at GrokDotCom noticed Crutchfield experimenting with a left side add to cart button placement. John Quarto-VonTivadar follows up with some food for thought on testing calls to action on left vs. right hand sides (or “stuck in the middle”) — complicated by the fact we’ve been conditioned to expect them on the right.

• Alexis Brion reminds us that site maps must be user friendly too, along with some design examples.

• File this under “What Were They Thinking?” E-Commerce Patent Issued For Online Shipping Calculation Process

This post is a companion to today’s Webinar “12 Things Retailers Must Learn From Christmas ’07” and points to Get Elastic posts and other websites mentioned in the session, along with some additional resources you might find helpful.

Whether you caught the presentation or not you’ll find this a handy reference for your holiday marketing planning.

Planning

• Full Holiday 2007 post-mortem from MarketingCharts.com
• OneUpWeb’s 2006 Holiday Online Retail Buying Trends white paper - excellent resource.
• Marketing Experiments has a great merchandising calendar that you can download.

Choosing the right promotions

• Valentine’s marketing ideas that can be applied to any holiday.
• Offering free shipping to Canada? How to optimize your site for it.

Off-site messaging

• Examples of Facebook marketing creative and landing pages.

On-site messaging

• Future Now’s 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey results.
• Examples of Christmas home page designs.
• Palmer Web Marketing’s post on saving stockout sales.
• Trigger email tip for recovering abandoned shopping carts with email, you can use this for low-stocked items sitting in an abandoned cart.
• Detailed post on shipping cutoff dates.
• Store locator usability examples and tips.

Building trust

• User Reviews: The Power of Social Commerce webinar replay and summary blog post.

Returns

• Example of the word-of-mouth effect that Zappos-type return shipping policies can have.

Essential email

• 12 Can’t Miss Email Strategies for Online Retailers
webinar replay and summary blog post.
• Net-A-Porter’s example of emailing your wishlist.
• If you’re looking for inspiration on a particular season, check out RetailEmail.Blogspot’s seasonal archive. From Breast Cancer Awareness Month to Earth Day, you can see screenshots of email campaigns and scan subject lines.

Masterful merchandising

• Cross-selling dos and don’ts with examples from top online retailers.

Capturing last minute shoppers

We have several posts on this:

• Last-minute holiday marketing tactics for online retailers
• Optimizing your store for last minute shoppers
• Tips for converting last minute shoppers
• In-store pickup usability tips

• Upresent.com is the service that allows you to add gift notification services to your e-store.

You’ll also enjoy our Webinar with Melissa Burdon of Future Now: 7 Simple Ways to Boost Your Holiday Conversion Rate.

Happy holiday marketing!

Cork’d is a social network for wine lovers and its complementary video podcast “Wine Library TV” has a lot of neat features. Check out my 11 reasons why I heart this podcast (even though I’m not much of a wine drinker):

1. Vivacious Host

There’s nothing worse than a monotone host. Not a problem for Gary Vaynerchuk.

2. High Profile Guests

Like Joanne Colan from Rocketboom.

3. Interactive Video Format

Viewers can add tags or comments to the video, vote each others’ comments up and down and reply to other comments - right on the timebar:

Continue Reading »

Found this fun tool the other day where you can check your blog (or any other web page)’s reading level. Get Elastic happens to be a College/Undergrad level.

Readability algorithms work by analyzing word and sentence length to assess difficulty. While I’d say this is for entertainment purposes only, if your audience is consumers it is important to take a look at your blog and website content and make sure it’s accessible to the general public.

The average adult reads at an 8th or 9th grade level, and 20% read below the 5th grade level. Would you want to create a usability problem for 20% of your customers? Not only that, but many English-as-a-second-language (or third, or fourth) may not comprehend above the Elementary level.

How could your conversion rates increase simply by using simpler language and shorter sentences on product pages, shipping information pages and email marketing? Jakob Nielsen has a good article on making your site more accessible to lower literacy visitors.

Because blogs are intended to pre-sell product and/or engage in 2-way conversation with customers and retailers, it’s important to write for readability. I ran the readability test on the top 50 online retailer blogs based on subscribers and here’s what I found:

Continue Reading »

Thinking about running a Facebook advertising campaign? It helps to pick apart what advertisers are already doing. Today we’ll examine several campaigns of online retailers from ad copy and design to landing page and boil them down to 11 tips for Facebook banners and graphic ads.

Apple

Ad

I’m not too crazy about the ad text - it seems a bit awkward. It could be shortened to “Hottest Phone, Lowest Price. $399 + Free Shipping from the Apple Store.” Easier to read, capitalized letters are proven to convert higher in PPC - why should this be any different? Oh, and ditch the Christmas messaging, it’s January 21st!

Landing Page

This is a great landing page choice - leading right to the conversion page for the product advertised. BUT this is the Apple.com store, and the ad was served to me as a Canadian. Geo-targeting is available, please use it. It’s not clear that this is the US store unless you check the address bar. Especially disappointing as the iPhone requires “hacking” to be used in Canada. Can the average Facebook user figure this all out?

Continue Reading »