Training Marketer

Consumers want and expect e-tailers to provide personalized shopping experiences and make product recommendations based on shopping behavior, according to a recent MyBuys/e-tailing survey.

The study also found that online merchants are not living up to consumer expectations and have not made the investment to create personalized product recommendations.

Some interesting findings include:

• Three out of four consumers are willing to provide some meaningful amount of personal information in exchange for a more personalized, relevant shopping experience.
• 77% of consumers say they have made additional purchases after encountering personalized product recommendations online.
• 36% of consumers are more loyal to online merchants who offer personalized shopping experiences.
• 41% of online merchants say personalization is an upcoming initiative.

The power of personalization sets the few sites that offer it apart from the thousands of others who are behind the times. Consumers have high expectations and it is the responsibility of the seller to try and reach the high bar consumers set.

Purchase anxiety – that feeling you get when you’re thinking about buying something, but not completely sure you want to spend the money on it. The feeling is usually attributed to a large purchase or buying something on the internet.

Online shoppers tend to feel more purchase anxiety than offline customers, according to Derek Gehl at Entrepreneur.com. Spending a lot of money on something you can’t hold in your hand, by a person they’ve never seen before may cause serious purchase anxiety for online customers.

The goal of your website is to help customers overcome anxiety and feel comfortable enough to make a purchase. Gehl outlines a few elements you can add to your site to reassure visitors that you are a reputable seller with a quality product.

Here are a few of his tips to make customers comfortable enough to click the checkout button:

Show proof that you value and will protect customer privacy. Include a privacy policy, clearly displayed on your site to reassure customers that you will not share their personal information. Process purchases through a secure server and include “security seals” on your site to let customers know you have done everything to keep your site safe from hackers. Popular security seals are VeriSign, TRUSTe and Hacker Safe.

Use testimonials. We know you think you’re the best company out there, but we want to know what everyone else has to say. Post a few testimonials from valued customers who can vouch for the quality of your product or service. Try to include as much information on the testimonial provider as possible.

Include contact information. Show that you are open to customer calls by providing as much contact information as you can on your site. Create a contact information page and link to it on every page on your site.

Don’t forget to follow up. Even after the purchase, customer anxiety may develop into “post-purchase anxiety.” Be sure to thank the customer for their purchase and keep them updated on their shipment status. It is your responsibility to keep the customer informed until it has made it into their hands.

For the full list of tips, please see Gehl’s article on Entrepreneur.com.

Velocity had an interesting post a few weeks ago about how spending less time and money on company videos can work for B2B companies.

In the past, Velocity would spend more than $50K on short films that took weeks to shoot and edit. They’ve recently been experimenting with “guerrilla” videos that only require a camcorder to shoot and only days to edit and upload to the web.

“The point of guerrilla video is to shoot first and ask questions later. If the footage is disappointing or the experiment is a failure, you’ve lost very little. If you get good footage you’re ready to edit.”

Video content on B2B sites can help tell your story, demonstrate a product and share your ideas.

Instead of wasting money on costly, large scale videos, why not make it simple? Grab your video camera, shoot a quick video and get it out there. Get past the “pretty” and focus on delivering true customer value.

Especially if you have a limited budget, low cost videos can be the solution to a problem you never thought you had the time or money to produce.

Take a chance, test it out and start shooting.

Last week, MarketingSherpa published a great “how-to” for all of those companies out there who are lacking in time or money and want to improve search results. They talked with an expert who revealed seven free SEO tools and one paid option to help save you time and money.

Will Reynolds, SEER Interactive Founder, gave the Sherpas a guide on how to sift through the numerous search tools out there to “distinguish the helpful and free ones from the useless and costly ones.” He shares the eight tools he uses on a daily basis, and only one costs money to use.

He warns to not rely solely on any one method and advises to use the tools like a team. Reynolds also tells people to know your business well enough to know when data from the search tools is flawed. He personally ignores up to 20% of the data returned by the free SEO tools.

Here are the seven free tools Reynolds depends on:
(Read the full MarketingSherpa How-To for complete information)

Google Advanced Search - Allows you to limit a search to: anywhere in the page, title of the page, text of the page, URL of the page, and links to the page. Reynolds thinks the most important one is “links to the page.” He uses the tool to target link campaigns and keep track of the competition.

Google Trends - Gives you a picture of keywords’ historic search volume on Google dating back years and illustrated with graphs. The tool is best used to decide on a keyword (ex. singular or plural?).

Microsoft adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007 - This tool is only free to adCenter account holders with Excel 2007 and is still a beta version. It can be used to measure MSN traffic directly from an Excel spreadsheet.

Rank Checker - A Firefox plug-in that takes keywords and reports your rankings on top search engines, including Google in other countries. The tool automates the process of manually going into each search engine and checking your rankings.

SeoQuake - Another Firefox plug-in best used for researching your competition. It can also help you determine why the competition is outranking you and give you reason to adjust your SEO strategy.

Today’s Hot Trends - A part of Google Trends that shows the top 100 fastest-rising search terms on Google. The tool can help you seize an opportunity or create a blogging strategy.

Yahoo! Search Assist - As you type in a term in the Yahoo! search box, Search Assist gives suggestion for related keywords, loosely based on word content and search volume.

And, one paid tool:

VoiceStar - For a cost of about $500 a month it can help you connect telephone conversations with online searches. The tool delivers traceable phone numbers in search ads. Reynolds uses this tool primarily for his business to business efforts, especially when large purchases are involved. Many people would rather pick up the phone and talk to someone when placing a $10,000 order.

Seth Godin points out the obvious in a recent post about “rough edges and attention.” Explaining that sometimes it’s the human touch that gets things noticed. Like a haphazardly placed sign on the back of a UPS truck or the list of specials on a restaurant table, “you notice it because a human being did it.”

Add a human touch to your marketing pieces, “you” is a powerful word. Remember that your customers are people. Think of how you communicate with family and friends. Try to extend that type of communication across to your customers. Talk to people like they’re people.

After you figure out your customer demographic, how do you know how to talk to them? What tone will fit best?

Copyblogger tackled that topic early last month in a post titled “Are You Talkin’ to My Generation?”

Your customers may fit into one or a variety of groups, that’s up to you to figure out. Copyblogger can get you started by breaking most consumers into four categories: the silent generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y.

Here’s their general breakdown of how each likes to be spoken to:

Silent Generation: respect for authority; conformity and adherence to the rules; law, order and duty; dedication, hard work and sacrifice.

Baby Boomers: personal gratification; personal growth, health and wellness; optimism and positive attitude; teamwork and being involved.

Generation X: diversity and global thinking; self-reliance and independence; life balance; fun and informal attitude; technologically literate.

Generation Y: confidence and achievement; sociability and collective action; diversity and morality; street-smart; optimistic and savvy.

“These days, it’s not enough to slap up a nice design and some well-written content. You have to get into the heads of your buyers and learn how they think – and why they think that way.”

Whether you’re looking for new web design ideas or just a good Friday afternoon laugh, Web Pages That Suck can help you out. Instead of learning from your own mistakes, why not learn from others’ pitfalls?

Amazon described the author’s first book by saying, “Unless you’re abnormally gifted, the best way to learn a craft thoroughly is to learn not only its central tenets but also its pitfalls.”

“Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015” is a must read on the site, including these major mistakes:

• We’ve designed our site to meet out organization’s needs (more sales/contributions) rather than meeting the needs of our visitors.
• It takes longer than four second for the man from Mars to understand what our site is about.
• Our site looks like we’ve never seen another web site.
• We use design elements that get in the way of our visitors.
• Our site doesn’t make us look like credible professionals.

A couple of the top “worst” sites of 2007:

Tally-Ho Uniforms & Accessories

Usability Net

MarketingSherpa released their weekly chart, this week focusing on ecommerce marketer survey responses. The Sherpa’s learned a lesson they feel all marketers should be aware of – “Analytics tools can help you really put your customers first, but most don’t get their full value.”

A breakdown of the chart:

Preference centers: a place where customers can choose the content and frequency of emails. This tool will help segment customers and target your message. Preference centers also show respect for customers by not clogging their inboxes with unwanted or too frequent emails.

Personas: customer profiles that represent each major buyer group. Develop a customer profile for your typical customer, and look at your website from their angle. Persona-based design uses the customer buying experience as a base to develop the entire website around.

Usability tests: how easy (or difficult) is your website to use. Organizations benefit from usability tests by putting stakeholders in the position of the customer. Stakeholders experience the confusion and frustration that may go along with the customer buying process.

Tying web analytics with search: organizations use this, but marketers know they can do better. High turnover rates of valuable analytics staff one of Sherpa’s main reason why organizations typically fail in this area.

Segmenting website content: creating pages and content, then using navigation to guide customers to them. The best segmenting uses cookie data to deliver relevant content matched to the user.

It’s an interesting chart that shows us all what we could be doing better, something we already know. Thanks to the Sherpa’s for reminding us that an emarketer’s work is never done.

Marketers learned how to sell to Generation Y and the Millenials from the time they picked up their first Nintendo controller. The same generation has now moved behind desks in the corporate world and has given them a paycheck, giving them more buying power than ever.

The marketing once used to sell to your grandfather will not work with these youngsters. There are large differences between Gen Y and past generations in how they were brought up and what they expect out of life.

How they’re different from older generations:

They are digital natives. They have grown up with computers, cell phones, the Internet, Nintendo and mp3 players attached to their hands at all times. And, they can usually use all of them at the same time.

They watch less TV. Rather than watching TV, you would most likely find Gen Y in front of their computer, watching videos online or playing a video game.

They think advertising is full of lies. They would rather know what their friends think. This generation has grown up with marketing being thrown in their face wherever they go, almost becoming immune to it. They also don’t have brand loyalty and will move on to whatever the next big thing is.

They’re environmentally friendly. They care about what’s happening around the world and want to do their part to help. News is read not on paper, but on a computer screen complete with interactive polls and video.

How marketing will change:

Because of how skeptic Gen Y is about marketing and advertising, marketers must work to build a level of trust between the two. Those marketers who succeed will have an open dialogue with customers, admit when they have done wrong and become more transparent.

Web sites targeting Gen Y will adopt more Web 2.0 practices. Social networking and blogging will be the main way Gen Y learns about products and the main way companies will reach customers.

You may think you’re ahead of the game now by using Twitter to update customers, but that could change tomorrow. Gen Y will choose what will be the next big thing to hit the Web marketing world.

Web sites will also have to cater to short attention spans. Long, boring and big paragraphs of text will not be read. They shift topics quickly and multi-task like pros.

This generation is anxiously biting their nails, waiting for the next version of the iPhone to hit store shelves. Web sites must adapt to a culture that is increasingly comfortable with mobile Web.

The future of the Web is whatever Gen Y wants it to be. While they continue to land jobs in the real world, business to business marketing will be changing along with it. Before long, these young employees will be running the show and Web marketing must follow suit.

When stumbling upon your homepage, could a stranger figure out:

1. Who are your target customers?
2. What products or services are you selling?
3. How do the products or services solve customers’ problems?

Newt Barrett at Content Marketing Today used those three questions to form a quick case study of website home pages. After analyzing a random technology homepage, he shares this advice:

Don’t bury customer benefit inside your site, state it up front on your homepage. And, be obvious. Explain how you can solve your target customers’ problems.

Barrett’s big secret to online success:

“Don’t keep what you sell, who you serve, and how you can help a deep dark secret!  Say it loud and say it proud!”

“About 68% of online shoppers read at least four reviews before making a purchase,” according to research by PowerReviews and the e-tailing group.

Like we’ve said before, they don’t care what you have to say, your customers want to know what other customers are saying about you.

Even business to business websites should allow customer reviews of individual products and services. Dave at the B2Blog runs down the list of excuses marketers come up with as to why business to business websites shouldn’t use customer product reviews. Loss of control and fear show up on the list, but there’s no hard reason why any marketer shouldn’t use customer reviews.

If you don’t already, maybe now would be a good time to start finding out what your customers think of your product. Then, share the information with everyone else.

Do you enable customer reviews on your product pages? Why, why not? We would love to hear your opinion.