E-Commerce

If attendance at affiliate marketing sessions at industry conferences is any indication, many catalogers and online merchants struggle with how to effectively manage and grow their affiliate programs. In a Q&A with Catalog Success associate editor Matthew Griffin, Kelli Beougher, vice president of distribution services at Linkshare, a New York-based affiliate network, offers some tactics that can enhance your affiliate program, setting it apart from the the competition. Catalog Success: Say a cataloger has an affiliate marketing program; the merchant manages its affiliates well and communicates on a regular basis. What are some next-level steps to improve on an existing affiliate program? Kelli Beougher: Beyond the

Ask Amy Africa--the Web usability surveyor and president of Eight By Eight, which consults for such B-to-B catalogers as VWR, S&S Worldwide and Hello Direct--and she’ll tell you there are really only a handful of things that matter when it comes to online marketing. During her keynote address at the recent MeritDirect Business Mailer’s Co-op Conference in White Plains, N.Y., she outlined the following pieces of online marketing that matter. Landing/entry page: Armed with her own survey findings, Africa said that 80 percent to 90 percent of people leave landing pages (upon coming from search engine sites) within five pages of the landing pages. “Landing

Seventy percent of marketing decision makers report that their organizations currently practice integrated marketing, a marketing plan that coordinates online and offline marketing efforts, according to the “B-to-B eMarketing Survey” released last month by marketing services provider Epsilon. The survey of 175 U.S.-based marketing executives also revealed the following: * 70 percent of companies report that the same person controls both traditional and interactive marketing budgets. * 46 percent allocate marketing budgets by channel using rough estimates based on past experience. * 23 percent allocate marketing budgets by channel using modeling and planning techniques. * 19 percent give each channel a fixed allocation. *

On the Web, data rules. The trick is to not allow it to rule you. To do that particularly when you’re trying to figure out just what customers, prospects and surfers do when they’re clicking around your site, the key is to measure the post-click value. So said John Marshall, chief executive officer of ClickTracks, a Web analytics software provider, during a session at last week’s DM Days New York conference. He offered several tips on Web analytics and tracking: * Determine the minimum amount of data you need for statistical relevance. He suggested that with fewer than 500 visitors, “you can’t get the type of

In a session during the DM Days New York Conference held last week, Amanda Watlington, chief executive officer of consulting firm Searching For Profit, offered up five tips on ways marketers can best position themselves in search engines: 1. “County fair principle: You must be present to win.” If your site isn’t visible to search engines, they can’t and won’t list it, she pointed out. “My client had a nice large site,” she said, “but navigation was invisible to search engines.” She advised the client to monitor how much time its site was active and live by checking logs and asking hosts when the site

Methods to improve Web sites were the order of the day at Internet Retailer 2006, held last week in Chicago. Several industry experts were on hand in one session to offer their strategies on how to create opportunities for sales and conversions. Below are tips they offered: * Give your customers what they want. “While 92 percent of customers say that customer reviews are helpful to their shopping experiences, not many merchants actually are employing customer reviews,” said Lauren Freedman, president of e-commerce consultancy the e-tailing group. She cited a recent joint survey conducted by her company and retail consultancy J.C. Williams Group. Other site

Once you start a Web site redesign, the results often can be surprising. Geoffrey Robinson, vice president of e-commerce for auto parts cataloger J.C. Whitney revealed several surprises that followed his company’s Web site redesign during a session at last week’s Internet Retailer conference in Chicago. * Men don’t read! When Robinson and his team at J.C. Whitney added more text-based product information to site search results, they found that predominately male audience didn’t click on the category links listed as text, but rather skipped to the bottom of the page where specific product images related to the search were featured. Unfortunately, these product links

Twenty-six percent of e-merchants offer tiered commission increases as rewards to online affiliate partners that drive traffic to their sites, according to a recent report from affiliate network LinkShare and shared with attendees at last week’s Internet Retailer conference in Chicago. Other affiliate incentives revealed by the study include the following: * Special access to marketing materials, such as data feeds and pay-per-click keywords: offered by 25 percent of online merchants; * VIP commissions, offered right away to large affiliates that can drive highly qualified traffic: 25 percent; * Contests rewarding top affiliates per month or per quarter: 22 percent; and * Special bonuses

With the advent and development of Internet marketing in the last 10 years, catalogers have been inundated with more data than they know what to do with, courtesy of their Web analytics packages. Catalogers shared their frustrations and success stories regarding their online marketing data at the session “Web Analytics: The Secret to Your Success” at last week’s ACCM. Below are their stories. 1. With the current version of its site active and taking orders since 2002, Classic Designs has been using WebTrends to track online marketing data since that time, said Mark Desrochers, co-owner of the woodworking catalog. But while the software had been

As online shoppers become increasingly savvy, catalogers must meet rapidly changing customer needs and expectations. The must-haves for accomplishing this are advanced e-commerce features that support personalization of online merchandising and enhance the brand experience. These features will allow catalogers to quickly respond to trends, assist in buying decisions, build customer loyalty, target marketing initiatives and enable product comparisons. Until recently, personalization features have been more reactive than proactive and have been delivered using approaches that leave much to be desired. Available e-commerce solutions that are fully featured have tended to be inflexible and expensive. In-house e-commerce development has left many catalogers with a confusing