Electronic Retailer - July 2011 - 31

Do the Driving
what’s new as what’s next?

BY JACK GORDON optimization has little to do with brand new technology. It has to do instead with the majority of marketers beginning to wake to the need to catch up with the frontrunners. “Optimization needs to be a basic marketing practice these days,” Justis says. “And testing needs to be an ongoing program, not a project. Competitive pressures are high, and switching costs for customers are low. Users change, needs change and the competition changes. Your website cannot be static.”

In late 2009, Omniture, an Orem, Utahbased division of Adobe Systems Inc., conducted a survey of 2,000 online marketers. The results were disheartening but also illuminating, says Adam Justis, senior marketing manager for Omniture’s conversion products group. Almost 70 percent of the respondents were still not “leveraging data” to determine which content and offers to put on their e-commerce sites or in their emails to customers, Justis says. “Those decisions were still being made by someone like a marketing manager or a director of online commerce.” By “leveraging data,” Justis means using analytic and testing software to figure out what actually appeals to online customers, and then using that information, instead of guesswork, to determine such things as which products at which price points will appear on a website’s landing page. He calls it “letting customers vote with their clicks.” The technology to do so with a high degree of sophistication is readily available. Indeed, Justis says, for at least five years, Omniture and other suppliers of analytic and testing software have jammed more features into their packages than most buyers use. As far as he is concerned, therefore, today’s hottest trend in e-commerce site

Optimize What?
Let’s back up. “Conversion,” in online marketing terms, is something that occurs whenever a target customer takes an action that the marketer is hoping for: registers for a drawing, signs up to receive information or publications, or buys an item from an e-commerce site. “Optimization,” in online marketing terms, refers to all of the things a marketer can do, using analytic and testing technology, to improve the conversion rate. This involves backtracking the customer’s every move from the final conversion (a sale, for instance) to the customer’s arrival on a landing page, or even earlier, to the banner ad or searchengine result that the customer clicked on to reach the landing page.

If you are running a direct-response TV campaign, then presumably you have carefully crafted and tested a TV commercial. If so, Ken Osborn of Liquid Focus Direct, says, then that commercial should run on the landing page of the product’s website along with an order form — and very little else.
July 2011 | electronicRETAILER

Electronic Retailer - July 2011

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