Rishi Rawat of the Retail In The Eyes of the Everyday Customer blog posted a very thought provoking idea on his blog earlier this week: Could a retailer improve its natural search rankings by asking its email subscribers to Google its most desirable keyword phrase and click on its listing in search (especially if it’s on the second page of results)? Rishi calls his tactic “email marketing optimization” or EMO (not to be confused with emo or Elmo).

Click through rate in natural search could be a factor in Google’s secret-sauce ranking algorithm. SEOmoz estimates click through to account for 7% according to its Search Engine Ranking Factors report:

Note that SEOmoz’ research is based on the expert opinions of some of the world’s top SEOs, not of Google itself.

It makes sense that Google would consider click through rate as a sign of a web result being relevant to a search term. (Have you marketed yourself well in meta description tags?) Click through rates by human beings add that personal element to its computerized intelligence.

Another clue to the quality / relevance of a search result is the bounce rate, which is easy for Google to calculate the time elapsed from the click through to the click back.

A campaign such as what Rishi proposes is brilliant. His hypothetical email goes like this:

Subject: Search and win

Email Message:

1. Google gourmet chocolate popcorn.
2. Hunt down kukuruza.com.
3. Instantly take 5% off all our 27 flavors.
4. Promo ends 1/29/10.

Not only does this attract click through, but encourages customers to at least browse the site for something they want (27 flavors of chocolate popcorn — this I gotta see!).

Of course, the promotion could be reinforced through content spaces (banner images) throughout the site and the promo code auto-applied through targeted selling, writing a rule that all referrals from Google for the target keyword qualifies for the promotion in the cart.

Anyone going to give this trick a try?

One of the most complex industries for ecommerce is telecommunications or “telco.” Telcos may sell any or all of the following services: home telephone, cable/satellite television, dialup/broadband Internet/mobile broadband, mobile phone service. A telco may be “double-play” (offering any combination of two services), “triple-play” or “quad-play,” and often seek to bundle services to their customers.

Not only can services be bundled through online purchase, but often the services themselves are bundles within bundles. A digital TV service requires hardware, basic and premium channel subscription, length of term and may also involve promotional discounts.

Mobile phone bundles are most complex – with selection of device (with hundreds to choose from), selection of plan, services, accessories, length of term and warranties/device insurance. Add to this that customers may want to port over a number from another wireless carrier, and needs to pass a more extensive credit check than a one-off sale. Current customers also need self-service tools to update/change their plans and services at any time.

If that isn’t complex enough, telcos also need to handle micro-geographic customers (regions and territories within countries). Available services, product selection, pricing and promotional offers vary by state/province, zip code, even down to home address for telephone, cable or Internet. The telco must employ targeted selling in order to show the content and offers (before checkout) to the right customers, collecting information either from the customer or through IP geolocation tools.

A telco or any other online business with micro-geographic customer segments (like grocery/fresh food delivery) has several options:

1. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region before viewing product, direct customer to geo-specific subdomain/subfolder
2. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region and filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly
3. Use IP geolocation to automatically redirect to a geo-specific subdomain/subfolder
4. Use IP geolocation and automatically filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly
5. Do nothing (because do nothing is always an option, but usually not a good option)

Some examples from telco:

1. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region before viewing product, direct customer to geo-specific subdomain/subfolder (Bell.ca)

2. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region and filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly (Verizon, ATT)

3. Use IP geolocation to automatically redirect to a geo-specific subdomain/subfolder (have not found a micro-geographic example, but many retailers already use this for country redirection)

4. Use IP geolocation and automatically filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly (Rogers Wireless)

So now the question is – which is best?

Reducing Friction

Friction refers to anything in the sales or sign up process that causes psychological resistance to proceeding. Certainly interrupting the customer journey with a page or popup asking for personal information is going to cause some psychological resistance — especially when you’re asking for a home phone number or exact address.

Geolocation and filtering avoids the interruption that may cause landing page abandonment. Whenever you can cut out a manual step for the customer, you can expect better usability – provided your technology is working properly. Showing the wrong products/prices is worse than asking for customer input. But sometimes you cannot avoid asking for information, as geolocation don’t provide exact addresses or phone numbers, and are not 100% accurate all the time. So automatic redirection is not necessarily the best option in every case.

If you do need to ask the customer to select a region or provide personal information, I offer 5 tips:

1. Use a lightbox, not a page. Bell.ca’s lightbox shows enough of the product page underneath to assure the customer they will see the right page after providing the information. Verizon Wireless’ gatekeeper page is not unlike the forced registration page that customers loathe in the checkout process.
2. Include, in as few words as possible, the reason why you ask for this information.
3. If you ask for a telephone number or address, have a clear link to privacy information.
4. Allow existing customers to sign-in from the lightbox, and redirect them to the appropriate subfolder, or apply the catalog filter.
5. Store the customer preference in a cookie (rather than a session) as customers may research one day and come back to purchase on another day.

Search Engine Optimization

Whenever product pages exist under multiple URLs, you have a duplicate content concern. If you’re a Canadian telco with a sub-site for each province and a large product catalog, for example, search engines may not index your site fully because its allocated bandwidth to crawl your site is limited. If a product page is not indexed, it cannot be found in search engines. The best approach is to choose one region as the “canonical” region (perhaps Ontario), and apply robots.txt to the other pages.

If you’re using geolocation, you can automatically redirect a customer to the geo-specific subdomain or subfolder, or if you’re not using geolocation, prompt the customer to select his/her region.

What if you’re using geolocation plus a filtered catalog and a visitor arrives through search, comparison shopping engine, email or social media links and lands on a product that’s unavailable in his/her region? This is a good case for a lightbox that cross-sells similar items: “We’re sorry, this item in unavailable in your region. You may be interested in these similar products, or click here to launch our “Phone Finder.”

Okay, that’s nice but which is best?

Best solution depends on what’s technically possible for your site. The most advanced solution combines geolocation with catalog filtering – but again, geolocation cannot recognize street address or phone number. Often you can’t change a site structure quickly (or there may be a strategic reason you maintain subdomains/subfolders), or your ecommerce platform may not accommodate customizations like catalog filtering. The key is to make sure your solution is not too interrupting to the customer journey (check if your request for information page has high exit rate or bounce rate) and doesn’t cause search engine issues.

Upcoming Telco Webinar October 27

Ecommerce best practices for the telco industry

Sign up today

Selling wireless and media products online is a complex challenge which often results in a frustrating user experience and falls short of the expectations of seasoned online shoppers. Wireless and cable operators, wireless resellers, and handset manufacturers try to mirror the online shopping experience of their online retail peers, but despite their best efforts the complexities of backend provisioning processes and legacy business rules often surface for customers to see. For those telcos who have mastered selling online, the rewards are high—significant reductions in call center operation costs and increased ARPU.

In this webinar Product Manager Peter Sheldon of Elastic Path Software will discuss the best and worst practices that the top global telco brands employ in their online stores.

Webinar Takeaways:
- What are the biggest causes of shopper frustration and store abandonment?
- What best practices have emerged and what can we learn from other online retailers?
- How can complex availability, compatibility, and provisioning rules be simplified for a better online experience?
- How does the experience differ for new vs. existing customers?
- How can triple play and quad play operators simplify and streamline their online experience?

A couple weeks ago, Internet Retailer announced that manufacturers selling direct to consumer is the fastest growing online retail category in its Top 500 Guide. Gearing up for this month’s webinar on direct to consumer retailing with Sally McKenzie, we mentioned some benefits and drawbacks of manufacturers selling direct-to-consumer online. Today I want to focus on how manufacturers can overcome the challenges of competing with retail partners online, and leverage the strengths of a branded site.

Keep in mind, there are 4 types of manufacturers who sell direct to consumers online, those with:

1. No retail stores, sell only through retail partners (e.g. Bose)
2. Retail stores and retail partners (e.g. Sony Store)
3. Retail stores, no retail partners (e.g. American Apparel)
4. No retail stores or retail partners, only available online/phone (like Dell used to)

This post focuses on the first 2 — manufacturers who compete with retail partners (who may also be restricted in what/how they can sell online due to channel conflict).

Why do manufacturers lose consumer sales to retail partners?

Manufacturers that sell through retail partners may lose sales to retail partners because of any of the following:

• Customer unaware the brand has an online store
• Customer experience with the branded store has been poor, even if the site is much improved today
• Customer experience with manufacturer sites in general has been poor, customer goes directly to retailer e-store
• Retailer e-store has better features and functionality such as comparison tools, product images or simpler checkout
• Customer wants to pick up in-store, whether to physically experience the product before purchase, to save time or shipping costs, for lower price/store promotion, to use a store coupon or to earn store loyalty points

How can the manufacturer overcome these challenges?

Awareness: Spread the word

Before you say “thank you, Captain Obvious,” hear me out. Awareness of your online store is important. Don’t be afraid to bid on your own branded terms in paid search. Put your URL on packaging (although this may upset some retail partners). Put your store URL on all catalogs, direct mail, TV and print advertising. For manufacturers who run their stores as separate URLs, subdomains or subfolders, choose a URL that clearly communicates the site is transactional, and redirect to your existing store if necessary.

Awareness: Drive new traffic through an affiliate program

Many manufacturers will not compete on price with retail partners, and will sell at full MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price). While this may reduce your competitiveness, your margins will not suffer. Fatter margins can be passed off to affiliate partners who will promote your products on their popular product review blogs, shopping portals, newsletters or other web sites.

Awareness: SEO your content, and SEO some more

Branded sites have the search engine ranking advantage of a keyword-relevant domain name, but often rank lower than retail partners when attention isn’t paid to title tags, keyword-rich product descriptions, SEO friendly customer review content or worse, the site is built in full Flash without SEO.

I always tell retailers to write their own product descriptions and not use the stock manufacturer description. I would suggest to manufacturers to also write custom content for their web stores, and not use the same as is distributed to other retailers and affiliates.

Customer experience: Content

Though some customers prefer to buy from a retailer (whether online or offline), many will check out your site for more detailed product information to research before purchase. It helps to have better content than your retail partners to meet their initial expectation of good information on your site such as product videos, 360 degree imaging, downloadable manuals and in-depth product descriptions can attract customers.

Persuasion: Value propositions and assurances

If the content on your site “sells” the customer on the product, you win even if the purchase happens through a retail partner. But converting that customer on the branded site has several advantages such as higher margin, the collection of customer data and the ability to re-market to that customer. The secrets to converting the customer lie in your value proposition(s) and point-of-action assurances.

Consider Apple.com. You can buy an iPod from any electronics retailer, but only Apple throws in free engraving:

Plus it beats or at least matches any other retailer’s shipping offer – ships free, within 24 hours.

Point-of-action assurances include size charts, shipping arrival calculators, pre-checkout shipping and tax calculators, links to return policies, guarantees, security seals and so on.

Added value: Personalized products

Speaking of personalization, manufacturers have the unique ability to offer value-added services like build your custom product that retailers don’t. Some brands already doing this include Sigg water bottles (though Cafepress), Flip video recorders, Etnies shoes and Timbuk2 bags.

Retailers like Etnies already allow customers to share their custom creations with friends via email, but how much better to share with your social network in this Web 2.0 times by posting the image of the custom product to Twitpic, Facebook or a personal blog?

For example, Shutterfly allows its customers to create custom photography books and embed it on any website:

Customer service: Help them find the product in-store

Sometimes product is out of stock on your site, or you may only sell that SKU through retail partners. Patagonia has the ability to check its partners’ store inventory and redirect the customer to the retailer for purchase which is win-win-win for customer, manufacturer and retail partner.

While you don’t claim the sale yourself, you’re still putting money in your pocket and providing a good customer experience.

If you’re interested in ecommerce for the manufacturing industry, you don’t want to miss our webinar next week From Manufacturer to Retailer: Expanding Your Brand through Ecommerce. We’ll be covering:

• Blending brand form and function: making the transition to interactive, direct marketing
• Striking the balance between direct selling and promoting retail partners
• Assorting and pricing for ecommerce
• Making solid ecommerce technology and infrastructure choices
• Resource and organizational planning for success

Missed our manufacturing webinar? Watch the replay today!

When you think of keyword research, you likely associate it with search engine optimization and the importance of including keywords in various tags and body copy to appear higher in search results. But keyword research is essential to your entire online marketing strategy, and has applications beyond SEO, including:

Information Architecture

When you first set out to organize your site structure and decide on how to label your categories, you may have to make decisions between synonyms – especially for e-commerce sites. For example, you might have to choose between “athletic shoes,” “runners,” “running shoes,” “trainers” and “sneakers.”

How do you make your best guess which is most popular? Head off to Google Trends and compare each term, and make sure you set which geographic market you operate in, as there can be regional differences in preferred terms:

One thing to watch out for is some terms have more than one meaning – like “runners” (table runners, stair runners, wedding runners, runners knee, etc) or “trainers” (personal trainers, game trainers, dog trainers). You may, from this graph, conclude your best label is “running shoes” as it far outperforms “athletic shoes.”

If your site has been up for a while and you’re considering a restructure, you may also check on your pay-per-click data, comparing these keywords for impressions and clicks to your site, which would indicate that the search performed had intent to find information on products you sell. A searcher looking for “dog trainers” is not likely to click on an ad for “Nike Trainers.” If you get far more traffic for “runners” than “running shoes” then you may reconsider your current category label.

Using the customer-preferred term also aids in usability. People scan for “trigger words” that match exactly how they describe the product themselves. Customer thinks “where are the running shoes?” and scans the menus for that term, and may miss the lonely “athletic shoes” at the top.

Internal Site Search Optimization

Your site search may not be returning results (or the results you want) for user searches because your customers describe your products in ways you never thought of – including mis-spellings.

There are several ways you can research terms to tweak your search tool. An obvious one is your internal site search logs – mine them for frequent searches and test what results appear. Proactively, you can use the Buzzillions reviews site which employs customer tagging, Amazon tags, a thesaurus or the Google Keyword Research Tool to look for synonyms.

Sourcing New Products

Does your internal site search log reveal customers are looking for Nike First Touch II Astro Turf Trainers en masse? You might consider adding it to your product mix if it’s a hot item. You can also surf Amazon Bestsellers and use the Google Keyword Tool and segment your keyword results by last month’s search volume (to identify current winners).

Pay Per Click Advertising

Of course, keyword research is essential to PPC advertising. But many marketers stop at the Google Keyword Tool or an enterprise tool like Keyword Discovery.

One of the tedious aspects of PPC keyword research, and most difficult to thoroughly perform with just the traditional tools is negative keyword research <-- This link describes how to use Google Suggest (now integrated with the Google.com search box), Google Shopping and Buzzillions. You can also use eBay for negative keyword research and hack Google Analytics to expose the exact search phrases for your broad matched PPC keywords.

Email Offers

You can identify hot products using Google Trends, Amazon Bestsellers lists or your Analytics, search and sales reports and use them in your email campaigns.

Search engines don’t just spend their energies trying to outsmart webmasters (or rather, SEO practitioners) — they also give back to the webmaster community. Webmaster tools offered by Google, Yahoo and MSN, help site managers identify various problems with their sites, along with other features.

As the TopRank blog illustrates, you can use Google Webmaster Tools for:

• Viewing any errors the search robot may have crawling your site
• Setting your domain’s geographic target
• Setting your preferred crawl rate (frequency that Googlebot visits your site)
• Setting your preferred www or non-www domain format (not necessary if you already use 301 redirects in an .htaccess file)
• Finding duplicate title and meta description tags (so you can make sure each one is unique)
• Viewing your top keyword referrals
• Enhancing your 404 page to include what Google thinks the visitor was looking for and a Google search box
• Setting which site links you want to appear in search results (example below):

But that’s not all, you can also check out which of your site’s pages have links from other sites (the more relevant links you have from respectable websites, the better). This can help you recognize links from bloggers (maybe it’s positive or negative feedback), partners and other sites. It can also help you track your link building / marketing strategy — just don’t expect the tool to show you every single link Google knows about.

You can also use the “page not found” report to locate URLs that other sites have linked to that don’t exist on your page (a typo or a page that doesn’t exist anymore). You can “save the link” by redirecting that link to the proper page, or contacting the webmaster of the other site to fix the link.

There are cases when you need to block search engines from crawling certain pages or areas of your site. For example, your staging site and secure pages. Other times you might find a rogue URL that slips into the Google Index that you don’t want in there, like a URL with a session ID. The worst case is someone Google’s your website and that session ID appears instead of your home page, with the page title “ERROR” — I’ve seen it happen.

Google’s Matt Cutts describes how to prevent search engines from indexing your pages, and how to use the URL removal tool if you need to in Google Webmaster Tools:

Get slapped with a Google penalty? You can use Google Webmaster Tools to request re-inclusion (after you fix the reason why you were penalized).

Google’s not alone in offering webmaster tools. Yahoo and MSN (Bing) offer their own too. You’ll need to sign up for them each separately (with Yahoo ID and Windows Live accounts, respectively).

Here are links to get you started with webmaster tools from the big 3 search engines:

Google Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer
Bing Webmaster Center