By David Selinger
Web site visitor footprints, real-time analytics, geographic micro-targeting and search engine strategies can optimize your marketing efforts. Four experts share how to use these technologies to drive sales.
Online marketers have invested heavily into sophisticated SEM and SEO techniques to drive traffic to their sites, and most are adept at creating and optimizing landing pages for a good percent of our audience. But there’s not enough time in the day to create a custom landing page for every paid search term, and no one can control where a customer lands via organic search.
Michael Redding describes the get-to-know-you game between man and machine as a version of “Name That Tune.”
Take, for example, someone who lands on an online retailer’s home page and enters a search term. The Web site can identify the person’s rough location and a bit about what the shopper wants to buy. With those two notes, the site can start figuring out who the visitor is.
At Tobi.com, an apparel retailer that emphasizes service from personal stylists, shoppers with computer webcams can view real-time images of themselves trying on recommended products. Gesturing with a thumb’s up saves the product in a virtual closet.
Ecommerce marketers need to optimize their product recommendations strategy. Simply offering suggestions isn’t enough to lift order value if those recommendations aren’t personalized and relevant for each customer. See how an online wine retailer built increased relevance into their product recommendations by considering users’ browsing and buying habits as well as logistical considerations, such as geographic region. Today, 10% of the site’s sales come from these recommendations, and the average value of those orders is 15% higher.
Just in time for the holiday season, e-commerce solutions provider RichRelevance and interactive marketing company Zugara have teamed up to provide a new way to shop in the comfort of your home. With the launch of Fashionista, all shoppers need is a Webcam and computer to begin virtually trying on every piece of clothing in an online retail store. Motion detection allows customers to control the application with the flick of the wrist while they’re standing away from their computer. In doing so, shoppers can signal their likes, dislikes, try on other items, take a photo, or share the look on Facebook.