Multichannel Brand Management: Refine Your Message
E-Commerce
As you can see, the contents in this monthโs issue are quite operations-heavy. Weโre always trying to balance our coverage, and with a more general focus for our big double-issue next month, as well as a broadly focused June issue, weโll turn to technology-related issues in July. Perhaps the most interesting thing we found in putting this monthโs issue together was that, although there typically arenโt a lot of drastic changes in the whole area of catalog/multichannel operations, fulfillment and management, there are nevertheless noteworthy changes taking place. For instance, take a look at consultant Liz Kislikโs feature on necessary changes in catalog order takersโ approach
Upselling, the Multichannel Way Itโs Time to Master the Phone/Online Upsell By Liz Kislik Since the 1980s, when the majority of catalog orders began shifting from mail orders to the telephone, itโs become standard practice to not just take phone orders efficiently, but also to incorporate the upsell as a regular part of call center operations. But itโs 2007, and the typical catalog order isnโt necessarily over the phone anymore. Consider this scenario: Your customer calls to place an order and everything in the process goes smoothly. Your order taker follows standard practice and offers one or more upsells. In the classic
Outdoor sporting goods cataloger Cabelaโs tracks overall SEO program performance by comparing, week-to-week, the percentage of keywords ranked in Googleโs top four, along with the percentage in the top 10. The keyword sample includes 90 โtailโ (product-specific) keywords and nearly 2,000 general keywords. During and after the migration from SearchDex to GravityStream, this metric was watched very closely to gauge performance. โGravityStream caught right up and quickly blew past,โ says Derek Fortna marketing programs manager for Cabelaโs. The collection of additional metrics began once GravityStream migration was complete. These include the following: 3 keyword yield per page runs between eight and 20; two to
Test the following: 1. the title tag 2. the headline (H1) tag 3. the placement of the body copy in the HTML 4. the words in the body copy 5. your keyword prominence 6. the keyword density 7. your anchor text or internal links to that page 8. your anchor text or inbound links to that page from sites that you have influence over 9. the URL structure, including occurrences of keywords in the URL, number of directories om the URL and complexity of the URL (i.e., number of parameters in the query string) Then measure the following: 1. traffic to the page being tested 2. traffic to the site overall 3. backlinks to the page being
Four years ago, eyeing a niche for upscale designer room furniture and decor for childrenโs bedrooms, three business veterans with decidedly different backgrounds joined forces to launch the Koo Koo Bears Kids catalog/online business. During a session at last weekโs NEMOA conference in Cambridge, Mass., one of the principals, Joe Mediate, shared the lessons he learned in starting up the company and steering it on the road to success. 1. Pool diverse backgrounds. Mediate, with 23 years of experience in the computer business, was approached by two women for the start-up: One with a background in retail merchandising, the other with experience working with Helen
In a recent survey by the Performics performance marketing unit of DoubleClick, most respondents said that customers turned to search engines earlier in the purchase process than in years past. Although the shift indicates a significant shift in shopping behavior, there wasnโt a notable shift in buying behavior, according to companies queried in the Performics 50 Index. Some of the most noteworthy findings include the following: 4 total sales from search engine marketing programs grew as search spend increased 4 total Q4 revenue attributed directly to search increased by 43 percent over Q4 2005 4 overall search-attributed sales for all of 2006 increased by
Reflecting on his past experiences as a database marketing executive with the Landsโ End, Eddie Bauer and Nordstrom catalogs, Kevin Hillstrom, president of Seattle-based MineThatData, discussed ways he learned to adapt company business models to maximize multiple channels during a presentation at last weekโs NEMOA conference, held in Cambridge, Mass. While with Nordstrom and Eddie Bauer, โwe brought their channels together to come up with a single solution,โ he said, noting how Nordstom โbasically endedโ the old business model of having the catalog function as a viable sales contributor. Instead, it would serve to promote store and Web traffic. โWe saw customers were behaving differently,
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Writing this issue of The Corner View from Cambridge, Mass., during the Spring NEMOA conference this week, I found myself reflecting on the types of people who attend this conference, as well as the types of people in this industry today. Although the catalog business has undergone much consolidation over the years, which has stripped some companies of their entrepreneurial spirit, when you come to a NEMOA, it reinforces the industryโs ages-old character. NEMOA people are warm, caring, entrepreneurial and very social. They share a unique passion for the catalog business. In many respects, theyโre indicative of the traditional cataloger. But guess what? Theyโre