Ruth P. Stevens Articles and Columns: IM Press (Interactive Marketing Press)

New marketing techniques to drive sales and improve the customer experience

As e-commerce grows, e-tailers are getting savvier about marketing. Here is a round-up of new techniques that online merchants are trying.

Consumer-generated content
Sites who are blessed with a loyal and passionate following find that providing a forum where customers can share ideas will have a dramatic impact on visits, and sales. Bodybuilding.com, for example, runs a popular forum, where visitors talk about ways to improve their workouts. The forum drives site traffic and also provides a resource for equipment vendors to conduct market research.

Site personalization
Going well beyond simply greeting the customer by name of the home page, dynamic serving of web pages is rising to new levels these days. DueMaternity.com, for example, sorts customers by their baby's due date, and offers products specific to their stage in the maternity cycle. (Due also lets visitors upload a photo and imagine, just for fun, what they might look like when pregnant.)

Better onsite search
Delightful Deliveries, a gift e-tailer, upgraded its internal search software to allow customers to search on several variables at a time—gift baskets under $50, for example. Since implementing the new search capability, their average order size doubled.

Up-selling via transactional email
In a recent study by email service provider Silverpop, 21% of e-tailers include promotions in their transactional emails, such as order-confirmation messages. The promotions must be somewhat discreet, since the Federal Trade Commission requires that promotional messages be secondary to order-related content. But still the environment is attractive to marketers because consumers generally welcome service-oriented emails and are likely to pay attention to them.

Gift certificates
U.S. consumers are embracing gift certificates like never before. Even better for e-tailers, 50% of consumers who redeem spend more than the certificate's face value, according to ValueLink. e-tailers are finding new customers and gaining incremental sales using the services of providers like GiftCertificates.com, GiftCards.com and GiveAnything.com, who manage the entire process, from design to reimbursement.

Customer reviews
Product reviews written by customers has been a source of trepidation among e-tailers, who fear that a negative review will impact sales unnecessarily. But online merchants who have tried the concept, like Petco and FairIndigo, are pleased with the results. FairIndigo, a high-end clothing merchant, found that negative reviews have actually helped the company identify and solve product problems they wouldn't have known about otherwise.

Adding a blog
Ice.com first introduced a blog to its jewelry site with the intention of improving customer service, but they were pleasantly surprised to find that the immediacy of blog content also increased their site traffic from organic search by 15-30%.

Bill-me-later payment option
retailers like Walmart.com and TowerRecords.com are using a "house charge" service called i4 Commerce as an alternate to credit cards. The convenient payment option improves retention dramatically, resulting in 30-50% more frequent shopping visits, according to i4 Commerce data.

User-generated video
Pet lovers just can't resist telling others about their wonderful pets. In July 2007, Petco ran an in-store pet talent show in 100 of their 900 stores, and winners uploaded one-minute videos of the winning pet tricks. Petco customers were asked to vote on their favorite, who will get a trip to Las Vegas. YouTube provides the video upload services for free. Petco sees this strategy as an important way to differentiate themselves from their competition.

RSS as an alternate to email
As spam renders email less effective, e-tailers are adding RSS feeds to their outbound marketing mix. eBags.com sends RSS subscribers a daily Hot Deal message that, when clicked, opens a small browser window that performs an end-run around the cluttered email inbox. One challenge in RSS—how to generate enough interesting content—was solved by the seed company Burpee.com by going back to the thousands of photos sent to the company by proud home gardeners and creating a steady stream of messages, 5 days a week. Burpee found that revenue from RSS grew 200% from season to season after it was introduced.

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