To say the reaction has been overwhelming is an understatement. It’s a big win for our R&D team who’ve tirelessly worked to make a revolutionary personalization platform like Relevance 7. We’ve done countless numbers of demo’s and presentations with customers, prospects, analysts and e-Commerce gurus. While we continue to fill our calendar with these meetings (Want one?), here’s some of the exciting feedback we’ve had (with some added commentary from me):

“This is revolutionary!”
Thanks.

“You mean I can do that without going to my IT team…”
Yes! Relevance 7 is designed to have the easiest integration and day-to-day use possible. The emphasis is on letting the marketers do their jobs.

“I can historically look at the performance of segments of users even if I didn’t pre-define them?”
Relevance 7 captures an incredible amount of data. This is just one of the new features I know users are going to love.

“Is it really that easy to personalize a content zone”
Using the content selector tool, it’s a matter of clicks. Even I can use it!

“No integration, huh…”
Nope. As I said above, it’s the easiest integration you’ve ever seen. Couple that with Sitebrand’s support team and you can’t go wrong.

“Lifetime dialogue with visitors, really?”
Sometimes site conversions have life-cycles that require multiple visits (high priced items, luxury goods, vacation packages, etc…), Relevance 7 can absolutely hold a lifetime dialogue with visitors.

“I can pull in any data source from my back end!…”
Yes. This is another great feature for Relevance 7. Again, all designed to help marketing professionals do their jobs, drive sales/conversions and create even better web experiences.

As you can see, we’ve received incredible feedback from our demo’s so far. We have a few surprises for you over the next few weeks here on Sitebrand.com and Sitebrand’s blog. We hope to hear your thoughts. It’s an exciting time for Sitebrand, online marketers and the personalization world. Relevance 7 is now in beta… and it’s coming fast!

To be clear, when I say content zones, I’m referring to areas on your website that can be personalized.

Take Cyber Monday as an example. Marketers want to spend time planning, creating and executing campaigns to drive more site conversions. IT has their priorities and can’t help as much as the Marketing team would like. The Marketing team tries to create content zones themselves but struggle with a lack of HTML knowledge. Before they know it, they spend more time trying to code things than they do marketing.

That’s in the past! Relevance 7 - our soon to be released personalization platform - is designed to help marketers easily create content zones and personalized campaigns in minutes, rather than hours and days.

Let me introduce you to another great feature from Relevance 7: Content Selector.

It’s as simple as it sounds. When creating a content zone in Relevance 7, marketers can now do so with a simple click of a mouse. No longer will marketing professionals need to dive into HTML, site tagging or any other nuance that takes way longer than it should.

A screenshot of Relevance 7, Sitebrand's world class personalization platform.

While using the tool, outline the specific area and preferred size for the content zone within your website. Upload any necessary images to Relevance 7 like you would adding an attachment to an email.  Now choose your segmentation rules (for example, new visitors on November 30 receive a 10% off when spending more than $50 message) and the campaign is complete and ready to launch.

With Sitebrand, you can have all your campaigns planned, created and ready to fire come November 30. All you’ll need is Sitebrand and your online marketing strategies. It’s that easy!

If you really like what you are reading, trying searching #Relevance7 in Twitter or send us an email to learn more.

Marketing Guy: “Dan, what is one of the greatest benefits Sitebrands new product [Relevance] will bring to marketers in general?”

Dan: “That’s easy, zero integration.”

Marketing Guy: “Are you referring to the one line of code that is required for your tool to be fully implemented into a website?”

Dan: “well, sort of.”

Marketing Guy: “Can you elaborate?”

Dan: “Zero integration means that there is no longer a need to involve IT, this means that marketers have 100% control over what they want to do on the website.”

Zero Integration = No need to pester IT = Marketers get to do what they want when they want.

His eyes lit up.

Marketing guy: “Really? What do you mean?”

Dan: “If you want to change content on your site to better reflect the type of visitor you currently have on your site, go ahead, you can do that through our UI without the need of your IT department. Whether or not you have long release cycles or other organizational roadblocks to do the types of online marketing you’ve been accustomed to doing in the offline world, you can now do it in the online world without pestering IT. If you want to tap into any data point you or your vendors own, you can do that without the techies. In other words, our one line of code will allow a marketer to tap into all of the various backend data sources you have in order to offer the most relevant message in real time to your visitors across multiple sessions.”

Marketing guy: “So what you’re saying is that Sitebrand has designed a personalization tool that puts the power of marketing where it belongs, in the marketers’ hands”.

Dan: “That’s what I said, zero integration.”

Screenshot of a campaign storyboard in Sitebrand's upcoming release, Relevance.

Some of the most strategic marketers I’ve had the pleasure of talking to say similar things when thinking about the dive into web personalization. They get relevant messaging, better customer experiences and increased conversions, but they aren’t sure how to make it work in a context that supports what their existing website is and does.

Whether its personalization or other online marketing engines, it’s clear the software is becoming increasingly cumbersome to use and require hours and hours of training to figure out.

Sometimes when envisioning a web campaign, it doesn’t make sense until you see what it would look like on your site from beginning to end. Or sometimes, the trouble is envisioning which sections of a website the campaign runs across. Software isn’t always the easiest thing to navigate and let’s be honest, marketing professionals don’t want to spend all their time HTML coding.

If you find yourself agreeing with this (and honestly, how couldn’t you?) what I’m about to say should really resonate with you. Imagine the ability to personalize campaign after campaign with the most friendly of user experiences with a pretty cool storyboarding feature.

Being able to see exactly how the campaign looks, where the call to action goes next and the 30,000 ft view of a particular campaign is compelling to say the least.

An up-close look at campaign storyboarding in Sitebrand's next generation personalization platform, Relevance.

If features like this can’t get you into personalization, I’m not sure what will. With Relevance, Sitebrand’s upcoming revolutionary personalization platform, it certainly helps bridge planning and execution stages. Or in other words, it bridges making lunch and eating it.

Hungry for personalization yet?

–
Stay tuned for a series of blogs that will show the power and flexibility of Sitebrand’s next generation personalization platform, Relevance! This is the first installment of the weekly series.

“The catalog marketer cares about long-term value, and proves that catalog marketing generates customers who have the best long-term value (which is usually the case), preserving the business model.

The online marketer gets caught up in the multi-dimensional aspect of long-term value associated with multiple micro-channels, finds the problem too confusing, quits, and focuses a disproportionate amount of energy finding ways to encourage a customer to convert to a purchase today. This leads to improvements in conversion that do not translate to improvements in long-term value, causing the online marketer to constantly search for the next big thing”.

I couldn’t agree more. I’m not saying that dollars don’t matter, of course they do, but there is so much more at stake. Too many online marketers are consumed with the now, they (I’m generalizing, I know) are focused on the $ conversion rate on a campaign by campaign basis. They ignore more traditional measurements such as the lifetime value of the customer, brand awareness, and other positive micro conversions that don’t translate into immediate ROI.

It’s as if online marketers are walking around carrying quotas over their heads. Every dollar out is scrutinized and measured against every dollar in. I realize that life time value and brand awareness are difficult things to measure (follow this guy if you need help @jimnovo, or check out @avinashkaushik who wrote a blog recently on this subject). I also realize that explaining and proving out the results of those measurements to those in charge of the marketing budget is even more difficult. Yep, the weight of the quota is squarely on the marketers shoulders. But that’s no excuse. Rather than giving in to the quota and solely focusing on the now, marketers should extend their efforts by embracing measurement methods, technologies and tactics that bring greater value to the lifetime of the customer.

Let’s take web personalization for instance. Vendors who have found some success in this space are typically focused on one of or both of these:

Testing: Whether it is A/B or MVT, the notion that testing out pages to optimize the funneling of users through your site is generally accepted as a benefit. This evolved out of the web analytics industry which emphasized a continuous improvement framework.

Conversion Optimization: Personalization vendors in this space are focused in optimizing the tail end of the purchasing cycle (the now). Product recommendations, shopping cart abandonment, product discounting, these are all forms of personalization where the goal is to persuade users to add more items to the cart, increase the average order value and ultimately to hit that checkout button now.

I have no problem with these forms of personalization. If done well, they do work. The first helps site owners build the best possible pages; and the second helps increasing that conversion dial within the context of the now.

Should marketers be doing these things? Absolutely.

Should marketers limit their use of personalization to these things? Absolutely not.

In addition to the types of personalization mentioned above, it should also be used in the context of providing the most relevant message to the visitor that is on my site right now. If that visitor is in the early stages of a purchasing cycle, then offer them messaging that makes them feel comfortable about the brand, offer them product reviews, newsletter signups, any type of messaging that makes them feel comfortable with you and your product. This will increase brand awareness, loyalty, and eventually will translate in a purchase and hopefully subsequent purchases in their lifetime.

By simply focusing on the end of the purchasing cycle you are focusing on the now and you are ignoring a number of other conversations you could be having with your prospects and customers simply because of the fact that you have a quota over your head.

It’s time for marketers to look beyond the quantitative quota and bring the virtues of the qualitative to the table - session wide dialogue, brand awareness, and loyalty are all virtues that need to be brought to the forefront as the previous generation of marketers did before us. It’s time to bring personalization to your business and to convince everyone around you that the measure of success for personalization and online marketing should not solely be focused on the now but rather the lifetime value a customer brings to your business. It’s time to think beyond the quota.

Relationship building emails, like this one from Sephora are great ways to engage customers.

This type of relationship-building email goes a long way! I was planning a visit to their Ottawa store anyway as I wanted to pick up a birthday present for one of my good friends, but after I received the email I got a little more excited about going shopping because I was also going to receive a gift - an early one at that! I was allowed to pick up my gift 14 days before or 14 days after my actual birth day.

Sephora made it easy for me to redeem my birthday gift, all I had to do when I went to the store was tell them my email address and they handed me my Lip Gloss Trio. While I was in the store I purchased a few little extra things for myself and since I spent more than $100, I also received some free samples. This small token of appreciation from Sephora enticed me to go spend some money in their store!

But wait! The story doesn’t end there… A few days later I received another email from Sephora asking me to rate my recent in-store purchase. It listed the items that I bought and gave me the option to write a review for each item. When I clicked through, I had the option to write a review, post some images or even a video. What a great way to get people talking about the products that they sell. There is nothing better than actual customer reviews to show people what great products you sell.

Cheers to Sephora for implementing a great relationship building strategy!

Happy emailing,
Alison

Kalma talks about personalization and its relationship to recommendations and although it’s nothing groundbreaking (Kalma doesn’t reveal ancient eCommerce secrets that’ll boost your conversion rates), he makes a great point about historical recommendations and how they may not jive with new sessions.

Full disclosure: I’m a bigger believer in session based personalization than recommendations.

To Kalma’s point - “It gets tricky when shopping for other people”.  Let’s take it a step or two further: last week you browse women’s dresses and skirts for your wife (at her request).  You look at a few different styles, brands, etc… but leave having not converted.  You come back to the site a week or two later but this time, you are looking for men’s dress shirts for you.  Based on previous browsing history, you could very well be presented with “targeted recommendations” of dresses and skirts.  Some may might find that offensive and most would find it irrelevant.

Another example: if you are anything like me, it’s an enormously difficult task keeping surprises/gifts from loved ones.  It’s a curse, I swear (I’m open to suggestions, too).  Imagine you’ve gone to such great lengths to hide ideas and deny all  guesses, only to have your super secret gift spoiled when your loved one uses the shared computer.  They reach one the sites you recently browsed in search of this gift and the recommendations are all in similar/hinting themes.  Perhaps your loved one isn’t that savy, but that’ll have you sweating bullets.  Or maybe the messaging is that targeted … “Did you still want to buy that engagement ring you were looking at?” … Yikes.  That could be bad.

In more extreme examples like those above, historical recommendations can be hit or miss.  Session based personalization is more reliable, as its all based on real-time actions of visitors.  And it never spoils gifts, either.

All this said, one thing really stands out.  Brian Kalma rolled recommendations and personalization up as one-in-the-same.  Interesting, but I see recommendations and personalization as two completely different entities.  Personalization can mean branding, messaging, calls to action and more via behavioral targeting, referring domains/URLs, unique/specific segmentation, etc…  Simply put, its not limited to relevant up-sell/cross-sell opportunities.  It’s about a session wide dialogue to heighten audience engagement and experience whereas recommendations are driving additional sales or conversions.

It’s well established visitors/customers don’t respond well to constant ‘buy this-buy that’ messaging.  That wears out quick.  The online marketing community has done a good job understanding that customers want an informative relationship that doesn’t push for sales on every tweet, message or email blast.  Under that logic, are product recommendations that different?  Don’t we run a similar risk of burning out visitors by only offering product recommendations?  Clearly it’s a valuable tool or tactic that has its place, however, it’s not the only weapon in your eCommerce arsenal.

You know what side I lean on.  Question is, where do you stand? Recommendations or real-time personalization - which do you see more long term value in?

We here at Sitebrand have been around for 9+ years, and now have a nice reference library of past editions collecting dust. The inner nerd in me took it upon himself to do a little extra data analysis above and beyond the call of duty to see what we can deduce from building some year over year, rank over rank metrics.

Using a trusty spreadsheet, I built up the numbers in a number of ways.

Let’s start by considering some trends within each year; comparing same year revenue numbers for #500, to #400, to #300 and so on. It is fascinating to see that every year, the delta between the same year hundreds keeps widening at a staggering rate. Pretty cool. Explosive growth, year over year up through the ranks.

The numbers start to tell a different story though when same rank revenue is trended year to year (i.e. Comparing position #500 revenue for the past 4 years, position #400 for the past 4 years, etc) …not specific company revenue, but the reported revenue for the same IR position, year over year. Confused?

Sitebrand's Dan Auns has found some unexpected trends over the last few years from IR500 reports

Knowing that the company in position #1 has remained the same for all 4 years, let us forget the fact that every year a different company occupies every other position. Let’s pretend that my year to year report is for the same 5 companies, year over year, and compare position x00 year over year for the past 4 years…

Almost across the board, the year over year growth rates have been declining year over year since 2005. The two exceptions occur at either end of the report, the #1 position and the #500 position.

The #1 position posted 26%, 38%, and 30% growth.
The #500 position posted 71%, 16%, and 41% growth. Growth across the board, but all over the map and unpredictable at best.

The trend for positions 100, 200, 300, and 400 show a -7% to -9% decline in same rank revenue growth year over year, for the past 4 years. Not exactly the results I was expecting.

Let’s keep in mind that these are growth rates, +20% growth no matter how you slice it is exceptional, and all stats can be spun if you look hard enough (Most often are). What do you make of these trends? Shoot me an email and I will share my workbook with you to take a closer look.

OK, that last sentence was a very politically correct, but you get my point.

The average online shopper doesn’t think like you and I do.

One of the greater eCommerce challenges is to plan your website and online shopping experience around how your visitors/customers think.  Online marketing professionals are smart, well educated and spend far more time in eCommerce than your average customer probably does.   But can e-Tailers honestly say websites are designed around how the average visitor thinks, navigates, behaves, etc…?

When I look at strong online companies who I respect, I find the majority of sites difficult. And I consider myself very much in tune with the world of eCommerce.  Sure, these sites look great, but flashy-cool websites only get you so far.  To me, the best sites always have the simplest designs.  May not be the most appealing website, but why fix what’s not broken?  I like how ecommerce-blog.org puts it, “most people don’t care how good of a graphic designer you have.  Lucas Film LTD may be interested in your work, but the rest of us aren’t”.

All that said, I realize and appreciate the amount of research, development, studies, testing and more that goes into site launches and redesigns.  I’m not saying companies intentionally create overly complicated web experiences or aren’t trying to think like their visitors/customers (in fact, I’d accuse them of trying to do just that… or at least they should be!).  However, I do believe we - as an industry - aren’t there yet.

Perhaps the online marketing community is evolving faster than the customers that fuel it.  Or the problems we’re trying to solve (shopping cart abandonment, low conversion rates, improved marketing strategies, etc…) are pushing for fixes that are far too elaborate for today’s needs.

I fundamentally believe a majority of eCommerce challenges can be overcome with a straight forward and easy-to-use website with clear and dynamic messaging.  Talk to your visitors, keep them engaged and show them the products/information they want to see.

Keep it short and sweet. Do your best to keep your subject lines under 50 characters, including spaces. Stick to one concept, eliminate unnecessary words, and use familiar language. You want it to be a teaser to get people to open the email, not a story that risks loosing their attention.

Be specific. “The Green Thumb Newsletter: June 2007″ doesn’t tell the recipient what they’ll find in the email and gives them no reason to open it. Ask yourself “what’s in it for them?” If the subject line doesn’t tell you, it’s missing a benefit. Here is an example of a subject line that shows the benefit of opening: “The Green Thumb: 3 Tips for Summer Gardening”.

Pique their curiosity. Does your subject line make you have to know what the content inside the email will reveal? Use questions, numbers, challenges and statements that compel the reader to open the email and reap the benefits inside.

Make it personal. Personalized subject lines are a simple way to secure the interest and action of your recipients. They can be personalized based on the content preferences, past purchases or web links clicked by the recipient. You can also personalize with the recipients’ first name, just be sure that your database contains a first name for each recipient or at the very least will display a default such as “Dear Customer” if the first name is not there.

Test it. When you have two strong yet different subject lines, split your list in half and use a different subject line for each group. After a number of tests like this, you’ll have a better idea of what works for the people on your list.

Happy emailing,
Alison