A Convenient Truth

Convenience. We value it more than I think we sometimes realize. We’re willing to pay more for it, and we’re willing to sacrifice quality in exchange for it. So it stands to reason that delivering convenience for our customers can lead to a pretty profitable equation for retailers.

Consider the convenience effect of some of the more popular innovations in recent years:

• Mobile phones. We love our mobile phones,  even though they’re more expensive and of significantly lesser sound quality and reliability than land lines. And now we browse the web on our tiny smartphone screens.
• Digital music. While it’s getting better, the sound quality of digital music is not as good as CDs (and some people say CDs aren’t as good as LPs). And we happily listen to our iPods over poor sound quality earbuds because they’re a lot more convenient than bulky headphones.
• Camera phones. Digital photography with nice SLR cameras is finally nearing the quality of film, but cameras on phones have a long way to go to get to that same level of quality. But it sure is easy to post photos on Facebook and Flickr from a camera phone.
• Diet pills.  OK, these aren’t as widely adopted as the previous examples (yet), but they’re the easy way out for weight loss even though there are some less-than-pleasant side effects. (Hint, you don’t want to sit next to an Alli pill taker on a long flight.) Of course, if you’re not into pills maybe you can still avoid exercise and get some six-pack abs with the Vibro-Belt.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the immense convenience of e-commerce and the effect it’s had on retail. But we cannot rest on our laurels as the desire and demand for convenience knows no bounds.

The threshold for inconvenience continues to get ever lower. We often complain about how many clicks it takes to get to what we’re looking for on a web page. Think about that for a moment. The energy required to cause our index fingers to press a button too many times is irritating. Some might say it’s not the energy, it’s the time. OK, fair enough.  Then the “waste of time” threshold starts kicking in when we are forced to wait three to four seconds for a page to load. We’re busy! We haven’t got that kind of time to waste!

My favorite example of the power of convenience is the Kindle. Amazon managed to make the paper book seem inconvenient. If that doesn’t tell you that just about everything can be made easier, I don’t know what will. People (and I’m one of the them) are willing to drop hundreds of dollars for a book reading device that still doesn’t format as well as a paper book. But it’s so light and so much easier to hold in one hand than a hardcover book. You can lay it flat on the table. You can carry lots of books around easily, which is very nice for a traveler like me. And you can get books in an instant with the wireless connection, which is soooo much more convenient than plugging the device into a PC for a sync. I sometimes feel ridiculous saying things like that, but I’m not going back.  And I’m not alone; people write long blog posts professing their love of the convenience the Kindle brings.

But this post isn’t a social commentary. It’s about recognizing an opportunity to make money.

So, how can we focus our businesses on the convenience opportunity? Here are three places to start:

1. Start with website usability
   We should start with our sites because they are the low hanging fruit. The promise of convenience with e-commerce is high, but all too often we put obstacles in our customers’ way, many of which I’ve written about previously. Where are we causing customers more clicks than necessary? Why are we requiring all those clicks? Is it a lack of planning on our part, or are we putting our immediate priorities ahead of our customers’ needs? Have we overwhelmed our customers with choice? How can we make narrowing our selection easier and quicker? And let’s not forget site performance. How fast are those pages loading?
2. Re-examine the store experience
   We need to continue to think about how our in-store experiences can be easier and more convenient for our customers to shop. Paco Underhill provided some great tips in his book,  Why We Buy. We can also look to a cross-channel strategy to allow technology to provide some conveniences. How can we bring customer reviews and recommendations into the store? Is “buy online pickup in-store” a desirable convenience to offer? How about accepting payment via mobile phone or PayPal in our stores?
3. Consider our customers’ lives – what could make those lives more convenient?
   What’s life like for our customers? If she is a busy mother of young children, can we do more to help her easily put together some nice outfits for the kids (or herself) to free up time for answering emails, paying bills, or maybe, just maybe, giving her time to relax in the bath? Does it make sense to give our customers the ability to automatically replenish certain items at certain intervals? If we think hard, we can probably find ways to improve certain tasks that don’t currently seem difficult. If the book can be made more convenient, there are no limits.

Sometimes I think we get so caught up in our metrics and the particulars of our businesses that we forget about our customers’ needs. After all, retail is really a service business. Customer convenience can and should be a key part of our value proposition. When we find ways to make our customers’ lives easier (even by just a little bit) we are providing services and products our customers will be willing to buy — and at prices that are nice for our bottom lines.

What do you think? Is customer convenience the right strategic target for us? What ideas have you implemented to improve convenience?

3 steps to a more effective retail Facebook presence

Amidst the many clouds of uncertainty surrounding retail use of social media, a few key strategies are starting to emerge. Three recent studies, including a white paper written by yours truly, have examined customer interactions with retailers via social media. Encouragingly, all three studies (Emarketer recently summarized the findings from studies by Marketing Sherpa and Razorfish) have very similar findings regarding customer desires in their social media interactions with retailers.

While the percentages varied slightly, all three studies found customers who “friended” or followed retailers said they were interested primarily in learning about new products and new or exclusive promotions. How great is that? I have to admit I was a bit surprised to see these results because it seems like current conventional wisdom says to avoid being promotional on sites like Facebook in deference to its more personal nature. In hindsight, that conventional wisdom seems a little questionable since it’s unlikely customers are going to interact with retailers like their friends. They know we’re about selling to them — we’re retailers!

More good news: It appears that the customers who follow retailers are really the best, most engaged and brand committed customers for those retailers. I suppose that’s not terribly surprising, but it’s certainly valuable information. Since our findings were part of a larger customer satisfaction study, we were also able to determine that site visitors who also interact with a company on a social media site are more satisfied, more committed to the brand, and more likely to make future purchases from that company than customers who don’t follow those retailers. Our study also found that 61% of people who follow retailers follow less than five retailers. That’s further  indication that people are really focused on their absolute favorite retailers.

We also found that more than 80% of shoppers who use social media list Facebook as a site they use regularly, which makes it the overwhelming social media leader. YouTube came in second place with only 31% of shoppers.

So, to summarize, our best and most engaged customers like to interact with us on Facebook (an incredibly viral platform) and want to hear about new products and promotions. This is a great foundation for a successful strategy!

Without further ado, here are three steps to a more effective retail Facebook presence:

1. Focus on best customers
   Rather than trying to build our fan base to the highest possible numbers, let’s focus on getting as many of our highest value customers as fans on Facebook. They’re the most likely to become our Facebook fans anyway, but they’re also the most likely to recommend us to their friends. Facebook’s viral nature gives us the opportunity to put our Word of Mouth Marketing on steroids, and developing messages for our best customers gives us a clear focus. We should reach out directly to our best customers via targeted messaged and encourage them to join because we…
2. Give ‘em special promotions and news about products
   These are our best customers. Let’s treat them well and make them feel special. Let’s give them exclusive offers and early notice on cool new products.  Victoria’s Secret does an excellent job here, and it shows. Of the Internet Retailer Top 40 retailers’ Facebook pages I looked at, Victoria’s Secret has by far the most fans at almost 2.7 million at the time of this writing. Clearly, they are delivering on customer expectations, and they’re being rewarded for it by attracting lots of really engaged customers.

   My good friend Adam Cohen, partner and social media lead at Rosetta and blogger at a thousand cuts, (and my go-to guy on all things social media) correctly cautions against too many rich, exclusive promotions as they could be unsustainable as the fan base grows. This is particularly true if the offers start to attract deal seekers who are not our best customers. Good warning from Adam and in line with the excellent old adage “everything in moderation.”

3. Leverage Facebook viral features
   We’re giving great, exclusive offers and product news to our best customers. Those best customers are the most likely to recommend us to their friends. Let’s encourage them to do so. It could be as simple as letting them know an exclusive offer can be shared with their friends by simply hitting the “share” link.  There are lots of Facebook applications and other techniques that can be used, but I would personally just start simply and go from there.

(Bonus tip) Make sure your page can be found in Facebook search.
This isn’t really one of my key steps, but during my research I was surprised by how poor Facebook’s search is. For example, I searched for “LL Bean” and found nothing. Then I tried “L.L. Bean” and again got nothing. Their page is actually entitled “L.L.Bean” with no space between “L.” and “Bean.” Facebook’s search will only find it if you search for it exactly as it’s titled.  So, my tip is think about how people might search for your brand and then name the page with the most common search term.

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Three separate studies have all found that customers who friend or follow retailers in social media are most interested in learning about promotions and new products. That’s some mighty strong corroboration, and it’s incredibly great news. Judging from the large percentage of retailers with little-to-no Facebook presence, I’m guessing many have been holding pat waiting for a clear direction on how to best leverage social media. While this information may not give the clearest direction for all social media channels, it certainly provides some clarity on today’s biggest channel, Facebook. Different social media channels require different strategies and tactics, and in the end it’s still important to learn more from our customers about their specific needs and desires and then work to satisfy them.

In the meantime, let’s build some really great Facebook pages for our best customers and give them some exclusive offers to enjoy. Please let me know when you’ve got your page running so I can become a fan!

What do you think? What have you learned about Facebook? What tips do you have?

The Missing Links in the Customer Engagement Cycle

The Customer Engagement Cycle plays a central role in many marketing strategies, but it’s not always defined in the same way. Probably the most commonly described stages are Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry, Purchase and Retention. In retail, we often think of the cycle as Awareness, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention. In either case, I think there are a couple of key stages that do not receive enough consideration given their critical ability to drive the cycle.

The missing links are Satisfaction and Referral.

Before discussing these missing links, let’s take a quick second to define the other stages:

Awareness: This is basic branding and positioning of the business. We certainly can’t progress people through the cycle before they’ve even heard of us.

Acquisition: I’ve always thought of this as getting someone into our doors or onto our site. It’s a major step, but it’s not yet profitable.

Conversion: This one is simply defined as making a sales. Woo hoo! It may or may not be a profitable sales on its own, but it’s still a significant stage in the cycle.

Retention: We get them to shop with us again. Excellent! Repeat sales tend to be more profitable and almost certainly have lower marketing costs than first purchases.

Now, let’s get to those Missing Links

In my experience, the key to a strong and active customer engagement cycle is a very satisfying customer experience. And while the Wikipedia article on Customer Engagement doesn’t mention Satisfaction as often as I would like, it does include this key statement: “Satisfaction is simply the foundation, and the minimum requirement, for a continuing relationship with customers.”

In fact, I think the quality of the customer experience is so important that I would actually inject it multiple times into the cycle: Awareness, Acquisition, Satisfaction, Conversion, Satisfaction, Retention, Satisfaction, Referral.

Of course, it’s possible to get through at least some of the stages of the cycle without an excellent customer experience. People will soldier through a bad experience if they want the product bad enough or if there’s an incredible price. But it’s going to be a lot harder to retain that type of customer and if you get a referral, it might not be the type of referral you want.

I wonder if Satisfaction and Referral are often left out of cycle strategies because they are the stages most out of marketers’ control.

A satisfying customer experience is not completely in the marketer’s control. For sure, marketing plays a role. A customer’s satisfaction can be defined as the degree to which her actual experience measures up to her expectations. Our marketing messages are all about expectations, so it’s important that we are compelling without over-hyping the experience. And certainly marketers can influence policy decisions, website designs, etc. to help drive better customer experiences.

In the end, though, the actual in-store or online experience will determine the strength of the customer engagement.

Everyone plays a part in the satisfaction stages. Merchants must ensure advertised product is in stock and well positioned. Store operators must ensure the stores are clean, the product is available on the sales floor and the staff are friendly, enthusiastic and helpful. The e-commerce team must ensure advertised products can be easily found, the site is performing well, product information in complete and useful,  and the products are shipped on time and in good condition.

We also have to ensure our incentives and metrics are supporting a quality customer experience, because the wrong metrics can incent the wrong behavior. For example, if we measure an online search engine marketing campaign by the number of visitors generated or even the total sales generated, we can absolutely end up going down the wrong path. We can buy tons of search terms that by their sheer volume will generate lots of traffic and some degree of increased sales. But if those search terms link to the home page or some other page that is largely irrelevant to the search term, the experience will be likely disappointing for the customer who clicked through.

In fact, I wrote a white paper a few months ago, Online Customer Acquisition: Quality Trumps Quantity, that delved into customer experience by acquisition source for the Top 100 Internet Retailers. We found that those who came via external search engines were among the least satisfied customers of those sites with the least likelihood to purchase and recommend. Not good. These low ratings could largely be attributed to the irrelevance of the landing pages from those search terms.

Satisfaction breeds Referral

Referrals or Recommendations are truly wonderful. As I wrote previously, the World’s Greatest Marketers are our best and most vocal customers. They are more credible than we’ll ever be, and the cost efficiencies of acquisition through referral are significantly better than our traditional methods of awareness and acquisition marketing. In my previously mentioned post, I discussed some ways to help customers along on the referral path. But, of course, customers can be pretty resourceful on their own.

We’ve all seen blog posts, Facebook posts or tweets about bad customer experiences. But plenty of positive public commentary can also be found.  Target’s and Gap’s Facebook walls have lots of customers expressing their love for those brands. Even more powerful are blog posts some customers write about their experiences.  I came across a post yesterday from entitled Tales of Perfection that related two excellent experiences the blogger had with Guitar Center and a burger joint called Arry’s. Both stories are highly compelling and speak to the excellent quality of the employees at each business. Nice!

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Developing a business strategy, not just a marketing strategy, around the customer engagement cycle can be extremely powerful. It requires the entire company to get on board to understand the value of maximizing the customer experience at every touch point with the customer, and it requires a set of incentives and metrics that fully support strengthening the cycle along the way.

What do you think? How do you think about the customer engagement cycle? How important do feel the customer experience is in strengthening the cycle? Or do you think this is all hogwash?

The Prizes and Perils of Free Shipping

Shipping charges. As customers, we HATE paying for them, and we LOVE getting them free. In fact, our feelings about shipping charges are so strong that we highly overvalue free shipping. We’ll spend money we didn’t plan to spend on products we don’t need in order to avoid dumping cash into those awful shipping fees, even when that incremental spending is much more than the shipping charge.

So, free shipping promotions are a powerful tool for retailers. But, if we’re not careful, overuse of free shipping offers could lead us down a path where free shipping becomes more an expectation than an attractive benefit. At that point, we’ll be left with the huge costs of subsidized shipping without incremental sales to support those costs. And that ain’t a pretty equation.

That said, strategic use of free shipping incentives can lead to incremental sales and greater brand loyalty. We’re probably all familiar with the various “free shipping when you spend $X” offers that are out there, so let’s consider some of the more innovative strategies in use today for free shipping:

Free shipping as part of the business model

Zappos really uses free shipping on purchases and returns as a key component of their business model. They encourage people to order multiple sizes of the same pair of shoes and return those that didn’t fit (or those they just didn’t like, for that matter). Free shipping removes a key disadvantage Zappos has to physical retailers, and in fact even provides an advantage for customers who can try on shoes in the comfort of their own homes.

Zappos’ CEO Tony Hseih has said Zappos is a customer service company not an e-commerce retailer, and free shipping is a big part of their customer service strategy. He’s also said Zappos looks at customer service as a marketing expense, which I think is an interesting perspective that might help the cost make business sense.

But free shipping both way at all times is not a sustainable business strategy without trade-offs. Zappos is not the low price leader in their category by any means. Even with their higher prices, public filings from the recent Amazon acquisition of Zappos exposed their relatively low profits as a percentage of sales. Zappos has certainly built a powerful brand with a loyal following so it looks to me like they’ve made the trade-offs work, but theirs could be a tough model for others to follow. I’ll be curious to see if the model continues to work within the Amazon business model.

Speaking of which…

Free shipping as a loyalty program

Amazon Prime is one of the more brilliant loyalty program innovations to come along over the last several years. For an annual fee of $79, customers can get free 2-day shipping on many key items and free standard shipping on many more. Again, this is a case of a pure-play e-commerce retailer looking to mitigate one of its disadvantages to physical retail. Amazon sunk some money into this program by giving away a lot of free trials, but they’ve since hooked people in to the fee. A recent Piper Jaffray analysis estimates Amazon Prime’s membership at 2 million people and growing at 24% annually. And once you pay $79 to get free shipping, you’re going to make the most out of it. Piper Jaffray found member spend growing from $400 annually to $900 annually!

But this again is an expensive proposition that wouldn’t be sustainable for most businesses. The $79 will help to defray some of the free shipping costs, but as with most paid loyalty programs that I’ve studied, customers don’t renew their memberships unless they’re getting a positive return on their investments. And Amazon, as a general merchandiser, can provide customers with enough product choices that they can visualize making enough purchases to get their money back and then some. Specialty retailers may not be able to offer a similar program on their own; although, I keep thinking there might be an opportunity for some third party to aggregate a bunch of retailers into a program in a way that might work. (Maybe that’s a future post.)

Free shipping as a store traffic driver

The previous two examples were pure-play retailers using free shipping as a way to mitigate a major disadvantage they have to physical retailers. So how can multi-channel retailers leverage the advantages they have with their multiple channels? Free shipping to stores is one way. When I was at Borders, we offered unrestricted free shipping to our stores as a cross-channel strategy in order to leverage the selection and experience of Borders.com combined with the convenience of picking up the order in our stores. Originally, we thought it would appeal mostly to urban dwellers who didn’t want packages left on their doorsteps, but it turned out to be a hit all around for people who just didn’t want to pay for shipping. Wal-Mart does something similar with their Site-to-Store program. And Borders just took it a step further with their recently announced “in stock guarantee” for their stores that offers free shipping to home for customers if the Borders store is out-of-stock on the item the customer came in to purchase.

But businesses offering free shipping without purchase hurdles often depend on additional future purchases to make the offering profitable. For example, we ran a lot of analysis at Borders on the free shipping to stores offer. We determined we needed X% of people to buy $X more in-store when they picked up their orders for the offer to make financial sense. With the new offering, it appears Borders is counting on pulling some market share from Amazon with the promise of books available right now in their stores.

There can be little doubt that free shipping is a powerful offer, but we have to be careful how we wield it. Someone recently told me that effectiveness of fire lies in prudence and intention. Used in a positive manner, it can provide great warmth and light but when used in a negative manner it can cause great destruction. Since I like overly dramatic metaphors, I’m going to compare free shipping to fire. Let’s be careful out there.

What do you think? Should we be concerned about free shipping becoming an expectation? How do you use free shipping strategically?

Sitting in the “Marketing Hot Seat”

My good buddy Adam Cohen, a Rosetta partner who heads up their Search, Online and Social Media businesses, issued a challenge called “The Marketing Hot

You’re the CMO.  You
have a marketing budget of $1M.  Your company is a consumer product
company, relatively unknown / early stage.  Customers who know the
product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months.  What do you do?

I thought this would be a fun exercise to take on, particularly because the scenario placed me in the seat of a manufacturer, publisher or product company. Would my retail oriented perspective provide a different line of thinking than would typically come from a manufacturer, and would that perspective be worthwhile? I’d certainly love to know your thoughts.

My take is actually the first one Adam posted on his blog, A Thousand Cuts. Check things out over there over the next few weeks to see perspectives from the other 12 bloggers.

Here’s my answer to Adam’s challenge:

OK.
Setting aside all the caveats about the fact that I don’t know what the product is, what it costs to make and what our margins are, here’s generically how I would approach the situation:

Strategy

1. Thoroughly understand the customers who like our product
   The customers who know our product like it. We need to find out why, in their words, and determine what personality traits, hobbies, demographics, etc. in those customers are relevant to their liking our products so that we can speak to others like them.
2. Get our online destinations right
   With a relatively small marketing budget, we’re going to need to maximize our online strategy. (Actually, we should do that even if have a large marketing budget.) We need to make sure our website and our retailer websites are highly usable and highly effective in merchandising our product and providing the ability for customers to easily spread the word about us.
3. Drive traffic with whatever budget is left
   Only when we have ensured that we have solid destinations for our traffic will we start to actively search for traffic.

Tactics

1. Learn as much as we can about the customers who most love the product.
   Why do they like it? What are there personality types; let’s use the Myers-Briggs personality test and really get a  thorough understanding of these folks. How do they describe our product? Let’s pay attention to the words they  use as we’re going to reuse those words in our copy.
2. Hire ForeSee Results to measure our site’s effectiveness from our customers’ perspectives.
   I realize this may seem self-serving since it’s my company, but I was a client for seven years before joining the  company three months ago, and I’ve see how well it works.  So, I want it in this role. So there! We’ll use  measurements, analysis, Session Replay and usability audits to ensure we’re providing the best experience  we can.
3. Hire Bryan Eisenberg to develop archetypes and to implement Persuasion Architecture on our site.
   We need to speak to customers in language that resonates, and Bryan understands how to do that. We’ll also use  his language for product descriptions and other content we give to retailers for their sites.
4. Create a high quality product video.
   We’ll use this video on our own site and we’ll give it to retailers for their sites. We’ll focus on the key aspects  customers love and use copy that includes words that resonate with those customers. We’ll also show real  customer testimonials.
5. Launch customer reviews and customer forums on our site
   We need to make sure our customers can openly provide their thoughts about our product, even when  they’re negative.
6. Launch several blogs on our site
   Since we only have one product, we need to provide some fresh and compelling content on our site to give people a reason to come back. The content doesn’t need to be about the product all the time. It can be able anything, as  long as it’s compelling. I’ll focus on general marketing, our CEO can blog about leadership, and we’ll find some  people to blog about topics our customers are interested in. All of this blog content will also be great for SEO.
7. Launch a marketing campaign to retailers informing them about key customers and teaching them how to sell the product
   Our initial marketing efforts will essentially be internal. Let’s get the sellers pumped up and doing their jobs well  before we send customers their way.
8. Develop a widget for retailers that gives customers the ability to easily share information about the product
   We need to give our customers ways to share information about our product on their own in a way that is easy and  positive. Let’s create a fun widget that people want to share on Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.
9. Get our SEO right, buy search terms, send emails, run re-marketing campaigns, etc.
   I don’t want to minimize the value of these techniques, but we really need to make sure our destinations are right  before we add lots of traffic.So there you have it. My main point here is to focus on the customers first, the destination second and the traffic driving last.

What do you think? Does my strategy make sense? How would you have addressed the challenge? Do your manufacturer/publisher/product partners address your needs?