What a Cataloger Learned at IRCE
There was an energy — not to mention growing audience — to the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) last week that reflected the fast pace of change in the industry. The hot topics for catalogers included the following:
Video is a really hot way to sell products. Video of a product can increase sales of that product significantly, especially if the product's benefits or features can be shown better in a video than a photograph.
Through its acquisition of Brown Printing Co., Quad/Graphics now owns Nellymoser, a company that specializes in activating brands through mobile. Mobile-activated print is the use of visible or invisible activation points (e.g., QR codes, digital watermarks, image recognition, augmented reality) to make the printed page interactive. The technology enables consumers to engage with your brand straight off the page with their smartphones or tablets.
Treepodia offers an automated video production platform combined with video hosting and streaming. The benefits of video content are that video search engine optimization is light years more effective than traditional SEO. A digital video sitemap (DVS) guarantees that many of your product pages will appear at the top of Google and Bing results. Each product page with video gains higher rankings.
Furthermore, video has a positive effect on conversion rates. Video showcases your products more effectively, appeals to shoppers’ emotions, makes your site look more professional and increases engagement. Conversion rates increase by up to 85 percent for products shown in a video.
Direct marketers are still struggling to make display ads respond profitably. Retargeting display ads to recent website abandons is an acknowledged profitable strategy. However, many digital ad companies are leaving that business to Google or Fetchback. Why? Because while the programs are profitable, they're limited by the number of website or shopping cart abandons, so the revenue potential is small. The Holy Grail for display ads is to find a way to make acquisition of new customers profitable. Short of that, vendors can cookie catalogers’ buyer and mail files to send display ads to established customer and prospecting bases.
The key metric for retargeting campaigns is to measure the incremental lift in response with display ads. Wiland Direct is rolling out digital display programs for catalogers with built-in tracking of the true incremental lift from display ads. RKG has a clear explanation on its website of how to set up holdout panels and measure incremental response. Measuring incremental response from display ads is the key to understanding whether the ads prove profitable — the key to having management trust the elusive attribution of sales resulting from display ads.
The increasing cost of shipping via UPS and Fed Ex is hurting catalogers’ bottom lines. FedEx has moved to dimensional weight pricing, which bills on the greater of the dimensional or actual weight. The burning question is whether UPS will follow. Dimensional weight pricing will significantly increase the shipping costs of certain items; retailers are scrambling to understand which items will be affected and whether the increased shipping costs can be passed on to customers.
Several exhibitors focused on auditing FedEx and UPS invoices and contract negotiating. LJM Consultants, Refund Retriever and Transportation Impact are just a few of the companies that audit your invoices and help in contract negotiations.
The seismic shift in costs for parcel delivery has made the USPS an increasingly viable option because of its flat-rate shipping. Many catalogers are shifting some of their parcels over to USPS.
Useful Resources
Blue Hornet published Retail Email Idea Book, a resource that shows email best practices and how you can leverage them in fresh new ways to deliver relevant emails. The book offered tips on how to inject life into your email program:
- Harness the power of animation to literally fill your shopping cart with savings.
- Use "mystery" discounts to generate engagement.
- Try a reactivation series with progressive discounts to learn what motivates disengaged email subscribers.
- Use in-stock alerts to help prevent lost sales due to a lack of inventory.
- Ask customers to rate recent purchases, identifying and leveraging customer advocates.
There were a wealth of vendors at IRCE specializing in all aspects of how to squeeze more revenue from your emails. There were vendors for every budget, making many of the enterprise solutions for email more accessible and affordable for small and medium-sized companies.
The key to driving sales online continues to be maximizing conversion and search. Lots of exhibitors at IRCE focused on tactics to improve conversion and search:
- Magento is emerging as a widely used e-commerce platform, with both an enterprise solution and a community-based solution — and hundreds of thousands of users. Magento has a "bolt on" App store that has every possible application.
- Lots of vendors, including PM Digital, offered free search audits to help attendees easily identify ways for companies to significantly improve their search function.
- Feefo specializes in feedback surveys to provide genuine reviews from customers. Reviews are acknowledged as a great way to improve search rankings.
"Ecom Hell: How to Make Money in Ecommerce Without Getting Burned," was being promoted by its author, Shirley Tan. The book offers a series of checklists for getting started in e-commerce.
SLI Systems’ Big Book of Site Search Tips provided a wealth of best practices, including a checklist of about a hundred site search tips that will improve your website.
Every year IRCE represents a whole new generation of the internet retailing world. And every year the really cool features that seem to only be available to the big enterprise companies trickle down and become available to small and medium-size catalogers and internet retailers.
Jim Coogan is the founder and president of Catalog Marketing Economics, a consulting firm focused on catalog circulation planning. Jim can be reached at jcoogan@earthlink.com.
