Only a few more weeks until the ACCM (Annual Catalog and Multi-Channel Merchant Conference) event in Boston, one of the best DM conferences of the year.
If you're in Boston or are coming to the conference, drop me a note.
I'll be speaking on RSS and other new internet marketing media, together with Scott Voight of Silverpop.
If you're at the conference, definetly reserve the Monday 3 PM slot to come hear us. The last presentation we did together with Scott in London was a huge hit, and we promise not to dissapoint:)
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
Part of the upcoming 2007 edition of the RSS Marketing e-book are also the interviews we are doing with various internet marketing experts and RSS practitioners. In the following days and hopefully not too many weeks, we'll be posting those interviews here.
I'm sure most of you have heard of Bryan Eisenberg before. Bryan is the leading worldwide authority on internet marketing optimization and website persuasion architecture. He was also one of the few marketers that got on the RSS Marketing bandwagon early on.
Recently, Bryan started exploring RSS Radars as a tool to increase the traffic to their optimization portal GrokDotCom.com, increase visitor loyalty, position the website as the key news source for internet optimization ... and naturally facilitate online sales of their books and consulting services. Take a look here.
But while most RSS Radars are based on contextually filtering content from selected third-party RSS feeds, the GrokDotCom.com RSS Radars go far beyond anything else we have seen on the market so far.
Instead of relying only on contextual content filtering to select the most relevant third-party content, they are employing a number of additional filters, such as the amount of linkage the story is receiving, source relevance and credibility, and so on ... and they're calling it a discovery engine.
What are their RSS Radar marketing goals?
How their RSS Radar is different from what you can generally see online?
What concrete results are they achieving?
What you can learn from their RSS marketing?
All of these answers, and more, available in the audio interview.
Click here to listen to the MP3 file [14 minutes; 3 MB]
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
In part 3 of the RSS interview with Greg Reinacker of NewsGator find out how Enterprise RSS makes information management easier within a corporation.
What will happen in the RSS space in 2007, for marketers and business?
Will RSS become integrated into every enterprise application? How will that change how information is used?
Will RSS improve information management within an organization?
What challenges do RSS management present to IT departments in larger organizations?
Will centralized RSS tools help solve the internal information management crisis?
What is Attention XML and how will it help you get more of the content you need and less of the content that is not relevant specifically to you?
Are smart RSS Readers only for corporations, or can consumers also take advantage?
What are NewsGator's plans for 2007?
Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 13 min.]
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
Just got word from my Japaneese publisher that Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS is scheduled to be released in Japan in print end of July.
It's great to finally go international:)
Japan is getting the short 2007 edition of the book ... and yes, the longer US 2007 edition is still being written, unfortunatelly.
I can't believe how many times I've postoped it already. Actually, I'm quite ashamed of it.
But, I do believe it will be worth the wait.
I also wanted to thank Geoff Livingston for putting Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS on his list of 25+ Great New Media Books.
Geoff, thanks for the extra motivation to help me finish the 2007 edition:)
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
Just got a notice from Amazon (thank you) that they soft-launched RSS feeds for tags.
But first, how do their tags actually work?
You can tag any product you like, including your previous purchases, with a keyword that best describes the product.
Easily search and access products tagged by others, using the keywords you're interested in.
Tags are also used as a way for Amazon to provide you with personalized recommendations.
The good part is that Amazon now added RSS capabilities to their tags, available through most tag pages.
Subscribe to RSS feeds for the tags you're interested in, and get latest product releases that match these tags.
Use the RSS feeds to display Amazon products on your website, using the appropriate tags, to earn affiliate commissions.
Share RSS feeds for tags with your friends, as a recommendations vehicle.
More information here.
An excellent RSS e-commerce application from Amazon!
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
I interviewed Greg Reinacker of NewsGator end of January, as part of the interview series for the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book.
NewsGator is one of the leaders in the Enterprise RSS space, a provider of top-breed RSS Readers and also a branded RSS Reader vendor.
So, you can imagine we had alot to cover.
In part 1 of the interview, find out about how Windows Vista and Internet Explorer are changing the RSS landscape ...
How are Vista and Internet Explorer changing the world of RSS marketing and RSS content consumption?
How much and how quickly will they make an impact?
Are they really the game changer every marketer expects them to be?
What changes can we expect?
How can marketers take advantage of the advances Vista offers for RSS?
Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 8 min.]
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
I have to apologise to Amazon for missing on two of their RSS content delivery options, which I previously missed.
Sorry guys, and thank you for the heads up.
1. Product Discussions
Most Amazon.com product discussions are now available also as RSS feeds. An excellent way of keeping track of the conversations surrounding your favorite products, and certainly something more websites should implement ... especially those that provide content that people are pashionate about.
The first one that comes to mind is TV.com and their community show reviews.
2. Customer Reviews by Author
Like a product reviewer? Subscribe to their Amazon.com reviews RSS feed.
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.
Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.
David's idea is simple:
Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us
Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated
This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application:
"The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."
But, there are two problems:
Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David
Tagging relevant articles every day takes time ... time that busy B2B marketers usually don't have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients
This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.
Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.
More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
Online conversion is not only the result of online activities. Rather, the conversion process can be initiated by an offline channel, such as direct mail, catalog, flyer, TV advertising, mobile, print advertising and even radio advertising ... or even prompted by brand or retail.
On the other hand, the conversion doesn't really need to happen online, but it could happen in a physical retail store, over the phone or even using a mobile phone.
Consequently, measuring and optimizing conversion for multi-channel merchants, as well as for B2B marketers, where conversion is most often achieved in a live meeting, is a complex issue.
What Initializes Conversion?
Why do we even care which channel initiated the conversion?
Optimizing for the Source Consumer
Different sources of conversion always generate different results. A TV customer will convert at a different rate than a catalog customer, and an SEM customer will convert at a different rate than a print customer. The point is, each source of traffic delivers a different type of prospect. Being able to tailor the on-site experience to these different types of customers impacts our sales success.
Optimizing the Source
By measuring the conversion, and naturally sales, per source of conversion we are able to directly attribute revenues to that source. That allows us to optimize both the source (advertising) and the conversion touch-point (website). It allows us to evaluate each source, decide whether that source is performing according to our standards, and in the end helps us optimize our ad spend by channel.
So far so good. But it gets even more complex.
Imagine this scenario:
TV advertising generated demand for our product.
But instead of going to our website, the consumer goes to Google and does a search for a phrase he remembers from the TV ad.
Google delivers him to our website, where he does not make a purchase, but rather subscribes to our e-mail e-zine.
Our new subscriber then receives 5 more e-mail e-zine issues, before deciding to make a purchase.
But instead of coming directly to our website from the e-zine issue to make the purchase, he again uses Google to visit the website.
He finally ads the product to his shopping cart, but then changes his mind.
Because we already have his e-mail address and have identified an abandoned shopping cart, we initiate an abandoned shopping cart e-mail program.
After 3 follow-up e-mail messages from the abandoned shopping cart e-mail program, the consumer finally completes his purchase and converts.
Or in graphic terms ...
This isn't a sci-fi scenario, but rather a reality we're seeing in our webstores every day.
For example, in my own experience I'm finding that in our case e-mail e-zines don't convert the majority of subscribers directly, but rather facilitate the conversion indirectly. Subscribers receive the e-zine, which builds their trust, builds demand and gets them ready for the purchase. But when making the purchase, that same subscriber still enters the website through a Search Engine.
While looking at the conversion from this complex viewpoint does present difficulties, it simply needs to be done.
Just take a look at the number of steps outlined above. Each of these steps represents an optimization opportunity, enabling you to further increase sales. And every step also represents a threat that decreases conversion.
But in addition to the question of how to measure this process, the next logical problem is how you actually attribute conversion to the appropriate channel. It is clear in this scenario that TV started the process. So while each of the following steps assisted in achieving the conversion, the TV advertising needs to be attributed for starting the sales process.
The problem here is that the above scenario is really a simple one. In a multi-channel environment, the paths are much more complicated and can shift from channel to channel, including offline channels, before the purchase is concluded.
Also in many cases it will be difficult to establish the initial channel that started the sales process. If for example you're conducting a full-scale offline campaign through TV, print, outdoor and radio, all at the same time, all of these media will generate online search, consequently making it impossible to determine from which media exactly the prospect came.
Furthermore, we must not forget that an offline media cannot be taken out of the equation once the sales process has already started. Even while the consumer is receiving our e-mail campaigns, he may be exposed to our offline advertising, further facilitating the purchase decision.
Where Conversion is Achieved?
As if measuring the impact of various sources of traffic and conversion were not enough of a challenge, we also need to take into account that the conversion can be completed using an offline channel.
Many website visitors will make the purchase through your call center, using the phone number on your website.
Multi-channel merchants with their own retail stores or even with retail partners will often see the conversion happening in the physical store.
A website visitor may order a print catalog from your website, and then make the purchase using the phone number in the catalog ... or go back to the website and make the purchase there.
In B2B, online will often generate the lead, which will then be processed in-person by live sales reps.
Unfortunately we can never expect to be able to measure the multi-channel environment with 100% precision, but we certainly can get close enough.
What we have to understand though is that measuring multi-channel conversion is not a one-time deal, but rather a long-term process that will slowly enable you to increase measurement precision.
We will return to these issues in more detail in many of the future posts on this blog.
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
Defining Online Conversion: Combining Action and Exposure Elements
Conversions aren't just about new sales or subscribers versus your website visitors.
First, let's review the conversion rate definition from Defining Online Conversion: What Is It?:
The conversion rate is a % of unique actions that result from unique exposures.
The conversion rate metric can be used to measure anything you want to track, analyze and optimize, and is by no means linked only to sales or subscribers and your website.
Here are just some quick examples of conversion rates not used as often as the standard sales/visitors CR:
sales / e-mail clicks
sales / e-mails delivered
order finished / add to cart
sales / ad impressions
phone calls / website visits
product recommendations / product views
etc.
There are countless combinations available, depending on what specifically you want to measure and optimize.
Let's return to our conversion rate definition for a second:
The conversion rate is a % of unique actions that result from unique exposures.
As you can see from the definition, the conversion rate is a combination of actions and exposures, with a simple formula of:
conversion rate = actions / exposures
Consequently, conversion rate optimization begins first with defining what you want to measure and optimize, and then by defining the action and exposure elements that help you get to the numbers you need.
Let's presume you want to measure the overall effectiveness of your e-mail e-zine in driving sales.
The overall effectiveness of your e-mail e-zine can be measured as a conversion between the number of unique e-mail messages delivered [exposures] to your list and the number of unique sales generated [actions] from the e-mailing. [CR = unique sales / unique delivered e-mail messages]
However, this will only give you the overall effectiveness and a trend to watch over a longer period of time, telling you whether you are increasing or decreasing your overall effectiveness. It does not tell you what you need to optimize to increase your sales.
To determine this, consider the steps needed to make the sale via the e-mail campaign.
It starts with getting the click from the e-mail message delivered to your website. Increasing the number of clicks requires increasing the attractiveness of the Calls-to-Action [CTAs] in the e-mail message.
Hence you need to know how effective the CTAs are in driving recipients from the e-mail to the website, by measuring the conversion between the number of unique e-mail messages delivered [exposures] and unique clicks [actions] to your website [CR = unique clicks / unique delivered e-mail messages].
This will of course only give you the basic information --- getting more will require measuring each individual CTA.
A click of course does not mean sales, so the next step is measuring the conversion from the e-mail clicks [exposures] to purchases [actions] --> [CR = unique purchases / unique e-mail clicks]. This will help you optimize the actual landing pages to which you lead the subscribers to your e-mail list, using your e-zine.
And finally, to fully optimize your process you may want to measure the conversion on the sales process level to help you optimize each step that leads to the purchase after the click, such as how good the product landing pages are in getting clickers to add the product to the shopping cart [CR = unique add to carts / unique e-mail clicks].
Much like everything else in series so far, this is just a simplistic demonstration, here primarily for the purpose of helping you see how to combine action and exposure elements.
In the case of e-zine optimization for sales, you would also need to measure relevant clicks (since only relevant clicks will increase your sales), different CTAs, open rates and so on.
The point is, combine different actions and exposures to come up with conversion rate formulas that will impact your bottom line.
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
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This isn't a sci-fi scenario, but rather a reality we're seeing in our webstores every day.
For example, in my own experience I'm finding that in our case e-mail e-zines don't convert the majority of subscribers directly, but rather facilitate the conversion indirectly. Subscribers receive the e-zine, which builds their trust, builds demand and gets them ready for the purchase. But when making the purchase, that same subscriber still enters the website through a Search Engine.
While looking at the conversion from this complex viewpoint does present difficulties, it simply needs to be done.
Just take a look at the number of steps outlined above. Each of these steps represents an optimization opportunity, enabling you to further increase sales. And every step also represents a threat that decreases conversion.
But in addition to the question of how to measure this process, the next logical problem is how you actually attribute conversion to the appropriate channel. It is clear in this scenario that TV started the process. So while each of the following steps assisted in achieving the conversion, the TV advertising needs to be attributed for starting the sales process.
The problem here is that the above scenario is really a simple one. In a multi-channel environment, the paths are much more complicated and can shift from channel to channel, including offline channels, before the purchase is concluded.
Also in many cases it will be difficult to establish the initial channel that started the sales process. If for example you're conducting a full-scale offline campaign through TV, print, outdoor and radio, all at the same time, all of these media will generate online search, consequently making it impossible to determine from which media exactly the prospect came.
Furthermore, we must not forget that an offline media cannot be taken out of the equation once the sales process has already started. Even while the consumer is receiving our e-mail campaigns, he may be exposed to our offline advertising, further facilitating the purchase decision.
Where Conversion is Achieved?
As if measuring the impact of various sources of traffic and conversion were not enough of a challenge, we also need to take into account that the conversion can be completed using an offline channel.
Many website visitors will make the purchase through your call center, using the phone number on your website.
Multi-channel merchants with their own retail stores or even with retail partners will often see the conversion happening in the physical store.
A website visitor may order a print catalog from your website, and then make the purchase using the phone number in the catalog ... or go back to the website and make the purchase there.
In B2B, online will often generate the lead, which will then be processed in-person by live sales reps.
Unfortunately we can never expect to be able to measure the multi-channel environment with 100% precision, but we certainly can get close enough.
What we have to understand though is that measuring multi-channel conversion is not a one-time deal, but rather a long-term process that will slowly enable you to increase measurement precision.
We will return to these issues in more detail in many of the future posts on this blog.
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.