This is the first installment in a series that blends website architecture, data structures, and SEO marketing into a collaborative design pattern.

Designing a product catalog is one of those "better get it right" projects that any e-commerce firm faces.  When you discuss lifespans of projects, this one has the longest lifespan of them all.  Since I've been through this a couple of times, I thought I would share my thoughts and designs as I delve into yet another one.

There are a lot of political and technical pressures put on a product catalog from many departments within an organization including IT, Marketing, Executive, Operations, and particularly the "Industry Expert" within any company.  It is important to not only recognize them, but to appreciate them.  At the end of the day, almost everyone is "right" in their desires to have the catalog data serve them in a certain way.  As you put yourself in their shoes by doing a proper discovery before you start designing you should try to not only understand what they want, but why they want it.

Atomic Data

Your marketing team will call this "flexibile product information", your IT team may call this "dynamic product data", but at the end of the day, it's product data that is smashed into all of its discrete component pieces.

This is one of the first pressures that will be placed on you and you need to be prepared to deal with it properly.  It is important to understand that there is a competing struggle in any database design... Flexible vs. Fast.  If you think of a product as a construction made from legos, then the properties of those products are the individual lego pieces.  The concept of "atomicity" means that you can assemble your lego construction with Red, Blue and Green legos to make a space ship... and then you can rearrange those same Red, Blue and Green legos and build a house.

Now you've all seen the non-atomic way of building a product.  It's a row in a product table and it tends to look like this:

 

You are limited however when you decide to stock a product that has a "Sub Sub Type", or a product that only has one color, or a product that has two vendor brands on it.

You also have a design flaw where you are "numbering instances" of properties.  In this case "Color1" and "Color2" are going to cause problems for you when you want to search by "Color".

There is also a failure to properly "atomize" the data with things like "SubDept" being equal to "Ladies Apparel".

Let's compare this model to one that is fully "fourth normal" or highly "atomic".

 

Lets analyze this model.  The product is statically registered in a much abbreviated product table.  It serves now primarily as a hook that you can hang things from.  We've decided to establish all of our atomic types as "Type", "Gender", "Vendor", "Brand", and "Color".  You can see how this can be reused.  For the "Live Strong Velocity Ladies Sport Top" it makes sense that Color (to this product) "means" White and Yellow... but to other products the same property of "Color" could "mean" other colors.

You can also see the intrinsic hierarchy here that establishes "Apparel" as a "top category" over "Top" and likewise, "Top" as a parent category over "Tank Top".  This enables you to still utilize hierarchies in your product data representations while granting you also the ability to search ad-hoc through your product data in a non hierarchical manner by using the raw properties.

 I have taken an apparel data model and created a good sample of how the property to product mappings for a decent catalog could be structured:

 

This model describes the relationship between products and properties but also illustrates some of the intrinsic relationships between the properties themselves.  For example, if you mapped a City to a product, you could "infer" what State and Country relationship existed by recursing through the Property-to-Property relationships.

So... which data model is right?  The answer could likely be ... Both!  It really depends on your requirements which we will discuss in Part 2 - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data Structures - Speed versus Flexibility.

This is the third installment in a series that blends website architecture, data structures, and SEO marketing into a collaborative design pattern continuing from Part 2 - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data Structures - Speed vs Flexibility 

Many e-Commerce projects begin with an existing brick and mortar store that has decided to go online.  This means that certain data models and business processes can be inherited from the legacy business processes of a non-online environment. 

If you were going to open a physical, brick and mortar store, you would generally design the store based on "Customer Paths", meaning you would examine the vector that a customer would take upon entering your store so you could direct them along the shortest path (in certain cases) to where they were trying to go to find the product that they wanted.  Many websites are designed along a similar path but the application of brick and mortar strategies to websites may not be the most effective.

Take for example the concept that an apparel store is designed along the Customer Path strategy of Departments, Aisles and Shelves.  An apparel store would generally have a Ladies department, with a Shirts Aisle and a Tank Top Shelf.  It would make sense from a Customer Path perspective to have (female) customers enter, segment them by Gender as they walk to the Ladies department, further segment them by Type as they walk to the Shirts Aisle, and further segment them by Type as they scan the Tank Tops Shelf.

This seems to work in practice, but only as long as you can only have a single store.  Take a customer now that is female but instead wants the Nike Shirts section.  Your demographic segmentation Customer Path does not cater to them properly and so the Customer is forced to scan through all shelves that have Shirts in order to find the Shirts that match the Nike Brand.  You can see how relying on a fixed hierarchy limits your store planogram and structure in a very singular manner.  To experiment with alternate Customer Paths, you would be forced to do a hard store reset, or you could experiment with alternate locations... perhaps a Nike Store which would provide a Brand-based alternative for the Brand-conscious customer.

Imagine now a website where instead of a fixed store with a rigid, hierarchical structure of Departments, Aisles and Shelves, you had a completely dynamic store that could be rebuilt in an instant and individually for each customer that entered for their own, private shopping experience.  Imagine also, those fixed Aisles and Shelves full of product, which instead of sitting in fixed placements, when a Customer entered the store the entire inventory was tossed into the air, only to fall back in the precise order that the Customer wanted to see them in upon entering.  This is no fantasy in an online e-Commerce website where this type of flexibility is possible.

Let's take a look a the Customer Path options open to an e-Commerce Apparel customer:

 

If you recall the Product to Property Mapping diagram shown in Part 2 - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data Structures - Speed vs Flexibility, you will see some of the same Property mappings in the above diagram.  These help to illustrate the product being mapped within the data model along the Customer Preference Paths instead of a fixed hierarchical model that a traditional brick and mortar store operator might follow.

For example, a customer that may be more interested in Tour de France could be immediately segmented in a store with inventory sorted by the Event Property first.  Then, if the customer was interested in the Brand Property next, the inventory would be tailored to suit by showing Nike merchandise.  Finally as the customer settled on a Tour Property related Product with UCI Pro Tour branding, the final product match is easily found because the inventory re-sorted itself to match the preconceived desires of the newly arrived customer.

Similarly, a customer that was more interested, at the time, in Lance Armstrong and then Tank Tops and then a color selection of White, could follow the Customer Path of Player / Type / Color.

You can see how the model continues.  Take some time to evaluate your own design process when you created your categorization model for your e-Commerce storefront.  Think about the process you went through as you decided on the model and see if you were trying to adapt a brick and mortar model to one that could have been conceived with an online presence in mind from the start.  If so, this may help guide you along a fresh look at the construction of a new categorization schema for your online e-Commerce catalog.

The series continues in Part 4 - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data Structures - SEO Path Aliasing

This is the fourth installment in a series that blends website architecture, data structures, and SEO marketing into a collaborative design pattern continuing from Part 3 - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data Structures - Customer Paths.

It may seem counterintuitive to discuss search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in the midst of a conversation about data structures, architecture diagrams and in-store plan-o-grams, but it can directly relate to your choice of data models.  As we discussed in the previous article, it is important to structure your website to conform with the needs of entering customers in a way that segments them properly so they find the things that they were searching for.  Part of this is anticipating what a customer is going to want before they enter your store. 

When dealing with search engines, there are two customers to contend with... the "Natural" search engine... and the "Paid" search engine.  These two customers are very important to understand and to distinguish and need to be treated with a deference and distinction from the "real" customers that frequent your online store.  The complexity arises to some degree because these two "customers" happen to be "ghost shoppers".  You never know when they are going to arrive and they generally float through your store much like a customer would, but they are searching for every product on every shelf in every aisle and in every department... all at the same time.  The complications continue because you want to manage what the ghost shoppers can and cannot see so they don't memorize portions of the store that you don't want reported on the search engines.  This may come across as elemental theory to an SEO expert, but in the context of blending SEO concepts, architecture and data structure modeling, it illustrates one aspect of the equation.

Imagine now that you are a search engine, whose job is to find, identify and classify billions of e-commerce pages throughout the Internet with the primary objective of finding pages that are considered "relevant."  I quote the term "relevant" because what that precisely means changes with the breeze and the whim of arcane departments of voodoo at the various search engine optimization firms.  With that said, you want to look at a natural search engine as a stream of water pouring into your website.  This stream is going to remember whatever it touches, so you want to ensure that it finds the things that you want it to see.  You also need to consider the diffusion of the stream of water as well.  Don't let the natural search engine stumble across pages like "Privacy Policy" or "Terms & Conditions" as that won't deliver any tangible benefit for you.  In similar fashion, on your landing pages you should try to structure your site so the links that are the most compelling draws for the majority of natural searching customers should be setup to receive the largest stream of natural search "attention." 

You also need to anticipate every possible combination of keywords that would be used to "land" on any given destination.  Lets take a look at the SEO Path Aliasing diagram to illustrate that:

 

We have already covered Customer Paths but sometimes the proper "path name" doesn't match an actual English phrase.  This means that the combinations of words that make sense for categorizing a mix of products may not make linear sense for a keyword search.  Our diagram above illustrates this with the green path of "Ladies / Nike".  There may not be many customers that would enter that phrase in a search, but it may be a logical progression as they navigate through a website.  This is where Aliased Paths come in.  In our example, the Aliased Path for "Ladies / Nike" could be "Ladies Nike Apparel"... sure this one is a bit of a stretch...  I'm not sure how many actually type in the word "apparel" but you'll need to work with me on this one.

You will note that this path is identified as "overridden".  In smaller e-Commerce websites, it may be a simple matter to manually go through each Customer Path and identify the possible Aliases but in far larger catalogs this quickly becomes a daunting task.  It doesn't mean that overridden Path Aliases aren't an important part of configuring your catalog categorization scheme, but you can, for the most part, rely on the auto-generated Path Aliases for many of the Customer Paths in your catalog.  Take the path "UCI Pro Tour / Tank Tops" which easily converts to an English text keyword search of "UCI Pro Tour Tank Tops". 

Note also our attempt to focus the "stream" of the natural search flow throughout the various Customer Paths.  Many search engines respond to a setting within the hyperlinks of a "NOFOLLOW".  This mechanism gives you some measure of control over which links you allow the natural search "probing" to find.  You will note how the various Customer Paths are identified as NOFOLLOW for those paths that we want the search engines to pass on as they traipse through our pages.  This poses another logistical issue in a large-scale e-Commerce website which we will address in the next segment, Part 5 - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data Structures - SEO Weighted Auto Mapping

This is the seventh installment in a series that blends website architecture, data structures, and SEO marketing into a collaborative design pattern continuing from SEO Weighted Auto Mapping - Best Practices for Web Product Catalogs - Part 6.

I initially intended to stop at Part 6 but as I continued to think about the usefulness of highly atomic product catalog data for e-Commerce catalogs, I began to think about how to use that information in more ways.  Dr. Flint McLaughlin commonly teaches a theory he calls the "Marketing Experiments Optimization Methodology":

   

He obviously can explain it far better than I can, but the general rule is that your first priority is to optimize your product (and it's value proposition), followed by the presentation of that product, followed by optimizing the channels through which the product is sold.  I will certainly investigate the first two, but if you focus solely on the "Channels" aspect of this, let's think about how our Product Property data can help us optimize our Marketing Channels.  I'll revisit one of my earlier diagrams that shows the various paths that can be traveled to finally land on a product.  This concept that the customer can "come from anywhere" and is going to want complete flexibility in how they choose to travel through your website is just as valid for other websites that show your products as well.

 

Consider a model where we have completed our website, we have optimized it for the search engines, and we are generating significant traffic.  Jared's First Law of e-Commerce states (yes, I just made that up...) that it is illegal to make money on the Internet.  The United States Treasury is the only institution entitled to "make money"... so our real objective is not to "make" money... but to "divert" money from other places so we get that money.  If you think of your e-Commerce project in that light, it refocuses some of your goals.  Now that we know that our job is to divert money that people would have otherwise spent somewhere else... what are the best tactics to accomplish this?

One of the primary mechanisms for this is called Product Feed Syndication.  Syndication reminds me of Gary Larsen penning a Far Side comic strip.  He spent his time creating a quality comic strip, but he didn't call up every newspaper and ask them individually to print them in their papers.  He used a Syndicator or an Agent whose job was to do that for him.  In similar fashion, you've created your entire e-Commerce catalog with rich product information and you've published your own website containing them... but you're not the Wall Street Journal quite yet...are you?  That means that the vast majority of eyeballs that may be interested in your products are cruising through other websites than your own and you need to divert them to you.

 Syndication Product Feeds are taps into your database that compose the products, their details, and their categorizations in a format that is consumable by the various feed agents (or syndicators).  These can take several forms which I like to classify as:

1. Comparison Search Engines
2. Online Marketplaces
3. Product Review Sites

This article will primarily address the Comparison Search Engines but some of the principles can apply to the others.

Comparison Search Engines serve an important role in helping you expand your Channel Footprint.  Basically, if you're the mom-and-pop shop on the corner, the Comparison Search Engines are the mall in downtown (some larger and more useful than others) and it's useful to have a presence in both places.

The challenge you have with Comparison Search Engines is they too require navigation paths.  They may call them "categorizations" or "paths" or "trees" but they map directly to the Paths described in the diagram above (Aliased Path Automapping) just like they do on your own website.... with the exception that their paths are going to differ from yours in many cases.  One good example is the path that many Comparison Search Engines use for Sports Apparel.  They start with "Apparel", then continue to "Sports" and then to "Cycling" and so on.  However, they also provide paths that start with "Sports", continue with "Cycling", and then "Apparel" which really contains the same product mix as the one before.  Many feeds have a very flat structure to them, meaning that for each product, you may be able to specify four separate "Paths" that will be submitted with that product to the Comparison Search Engines.

Because our Product Property data is atomic and weighted, we can simply query out the top four weighted paths from our database for each product and layer that into our feeds to the Comparison Search Engines.

We can also tightly couple our Property mappings to their Paths or Categorizations by dissecting their Paths into their component parts.  If a Comparison Search Engine has a root level of "Apparel", we can match that to our Property Type of "Apparel".  That can form the basis of our query then that only pulls the top four weighted paths for that product that originates with the Apparel Property Mapping.  If you really want to get aggressive on each Comparison Search Engine, then you could layer in a direct mapping from the Product Properties to each and every path variation provided by each Comparison Search Engine categorization.

As I have time, I'll try to revisit this article and distill some more useful information about the various Comparison Search Engines and how to feed each one.

Once you have mastered the Comparison Search Engine syndication feed, we can continue to leverage our Atomic Product Data in Online Marketplaces and Auction Sites - Best Practices for Web Product Catalogs - Part 8.

Most companies compete in crowded markets in specific niches.  This document will serve as an analysis of your specific project with respect to best practices that integrate traditional and internet marketing to help you go through your current marketing plan to see which holes can be filled in your own strategy. 

The emphasis of this document is to focus on the website and the web marketing initiatives that drive the business in an effort to allow the business model to begin the transition toward more exponential growth and high profit ratio approaches.  This should be combined with effective tracking and metrics with an initial baseline so we can compare where you are now versus where you are going from month to month and year over year.

There are many ways to accomplish this, so we need to break it down into phases so we are tackling each phase in the proper order (prioritized in order of what should come first).

Product

The first aspect of the marketing analysis should always focus on the product itself.  What it is and what it does for the customer.  It is important to note that customers don’t buy “products”… They are buying what your product will "do for them".  This is an important distinction.  You are not selling a product… you are selling the freedom or the sexiness or the relief or the status that your product provides.  This "benefit" should be the key centrepoint of your marketing message.  Each other marketing message and "touch" should always come around to confirm this one, unique message.

Presentation

The presentation of the product is the second aspect that we examine.  The website should conform to match the target audience and should match the quality and tonality of the message that is being conveyed.  If you are providing happiness to an erstwhile unhappy customer, then dark and gothic coloring may not be the best color theme to convey the joy and happiness that you are providing.  If you are going to provide a corporate, high-tech benefit to a customer, then going pastel or crayola colors won't be sending the proper message.

The content and the product listings should further confirm the message in a standard way, further reinforcing the brand.  If the message is the product will deliver freedom to the customer, then product listings should show real humans enjoying the freedom with that specific product.  Alternate images or views of the product can zoom into the "features" and alternate views of the product, but the initial product view should deliver the same branding message.

Channels

Once the presentation is remedied, we should focus on the channels.  The internet can be considered a “Channel” but there are innumerable tributaries of that one “river”.  The objective of your website is to not only build your own river (by driving traffic to your website), but to also dip your ladle in everyone else’s river so you are diverting that “juice” through your own sales pipeline.  If your website is one tiny channel, there are others such as comparison shopping sites or marketplaces that can also represent your brand and your product to give your merchandise the maximum exposure.

 

Customer Objectives

Rather than thinking about what your website looks like first, we should consider what you want to get from the website as the primary consideration.  These customer objectives are goals that your website has for your various customers and demographics.  Each demographic segment may have a unique set of goals that should be thought out ahead of time.  You may want to generate a sale from a customer while you may want a prospective investor to purchase shares of stock.  You may want to get the email address of a customer while you may want an anonymous visitor to fill out a poll.  These can be summed up as the following:

·         Generate a Sale

·         Gain Critical Insight

·         Build a Relationship

·         Innovate New and Resaleable Solutions

Generate a Sale

While this goal appears to be obvious, it must be examined very specifically.  Most people think that they want sales, so they buy an ad.  Then they stop.  That is hardly a comprehensive strategy but we will focus on the sales generation piece first.

There are several activities that can lead to sales through the website.  These are:

·         Advertising

·         Direct or Return Visits

·         Referrals

Advertising

Generally when you purchase an advertisement, you want the customer to “see”, then to “land”, then to “engage”, then to “convert”.  Many websites may do the “see the ad” piece effectively, but there may not be a clear approach toward making the “landing” very focused or relevant.  Once the customer has landed on a page, there may not be clear instructions on what to do next so they are not feeling “engaged”.  Finally the conversion could be hard to follow or may be more complex than it needs to be to accomplish an objective.  Imagine a website that requires the customer to create an account before the can order a product.  While it seems logical, it intrudes on the critical path of the sales goal of "making a sale". 

There are generally two types of "customers" that consume the website content... Robots and Humans.   Many website that optimize for search engines do a good job of catering to the robots while sacrificinng the customer experience.  Other websites are focused on the customer experience while punishing that of the robots that cruise through the underlying code.  Even others simply cater to the whims of the board of directors without taking into account either the customer or the robots that are the primary target audience.

The advertising copy itself should be examined and optimized as well to maintain high relevance to the landing page while confirming the centralized branding and marketing message.

There are several forms of Advertising:

·         Email Advertising

·         Pay per Click Advertising

·         Presentation Advertising

·         Comparison Shopping Advertising

·         Marketplace Advertising

Email Advertising

Email advertising at its simplest should focus on delivering the advertising impression with the goal of getting the email reader to land on a highly relevant web page.  However, there is an opportunity to begin to pre-engage the customer before they land with good copy, personalization, and a tone that matches the brand marketing message.  Many effective email implementations use teaser paragraphs that show the first portion of the copy with a URL link so they can read the rest of the article.  Some email communications even go so far as to allow a customer to "buy now" and actually complete the conversion objective right in the email.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Paid advertising that only costs when the customer interacts with the ad is a highly effective form of paid advertising.  Metrics should be in place to ensure that when the customer clicks on the advertisement, we gather the maximum information possible about the click... where they came from... what they did... what they landed on... etc.  You can think of pay per click as the sponsored ads on the top of a Google search for example.

Presentation Advertising

Presentation advertising is a higher risk of unfocused advertising that is broadcasted to more channels than the demographic segment needs for a period off 90 days after with the various presentation advertising channels are tuned by effectiveness, and the advertising is scaled back only to those channels that are delivering results.  You can imagine a presentation ad as the graphical banners you see frequently on websites that advertise products and let you click through.

Comparison Shopping Advertising

This form of advertising consists of inserting your product database into other specialized websites that are designed to show your product (and its prices) compared against other similar, related (or identical) products.  This is a powerful form of advertising for two key reasons.  First, it increases the aggregate exposure of your products on additional channels.  Second, your product data is generally shown on high PR value webpages other than your own, with links to your product detail pages.  This will increase the PR value of the destination pages because of the high PR linking to them.

Marketplace Advertising

The only thing better than selling your product in a store is selling your product in thousands of stores.  This franchising or mass market distribution model is duplicated on the internet in the form of marketplace syndication or advertising where you send your product catalog daily to sites like amazon.com, ebay.com  or other online stores.

Direct or Return Visits

Many websites provide little incentive for a customer to "hang out" or to return again.  This is an ancient relic of brick and mortar stores that had a logistical reason for not providing chairs within their store for fear that the customer might linger.  On the internet, lingering is a desirable activity and should be encouraged. There is a lot of work that must be done to open up the functionality of websites to make them more inclusive and more of a place that will let customers come in … sit down… meet he people… and talk to us about their life situation…  Once we understand who the customer is and what they want, then we may sell you something, but the customer will feel included and will feel a part of the community and will bookmark the site or remember the URL and will return over and over again.

There are several sources for direct or return visits, including:

·         Direct Traffic (people typing in the direct website address)

·         Default Homepage (people have their default homepage set to the website)

·         RSS/Screensaver (people who have subscribed to updates within the homepage)

·         Favorite (people who have the website as one of their favorites)

Direct Traffic

Customers are encouraged to type in the website address through a variety of mechanisms.  Your company should include the website address on your business cards, billboards, print catalogs, radio advertisements, vinyl wraps on your car, etc.  These forms of branding are vastly more effective if your domain name is native to the language, easily remembered, and simple to spell without complexities like punctuation, multiple words, reliance on plurals, or phoenetically challenging words

Default Homepage

Getting a customer to set your website as a default homepage is a distinct challenge dominated by Google itself, but may make sense in certain circumstances where you exert unprecedented control over the customer's computer (in-store kiosks, employee desktops, company-provided hardware, giveaway CD Roms, customized browser software, etc).

RSS/Screensaver

RSS or ATOM syndications are xml feeds that tend to be relatively ugly until consumed by an RSS "appliance" such as the iGoogle.com homepage or the my.Yahoo.com homepage of customer accounts on other systems.  Visualization appliances can be made that will make this much prettier for the customer including screensaver applications, RSS readers, Gadgets/Gizmos/Plugins (depending on the underlying architecture), and FLASH wrappers for the RSS provided data.

Favorites

Every website should have an easy to use "add to my favorites" button or link that makes it simple for the customer to remember the website and come back.  Email reminders and communications tend to reinforce this "favorite" concept through consistent reminders with links back to the website.

Referrals

Many websites rely on referrals to gain higher popularity and rankings.  There are several methods of obtaining referrals including:

·         Natural Search Links

·         Link Exchanges

·         Media Mentions

·         Word of Mouth Referrals

Almost all websites profess to having "natural search" as a primary marketing objective.  This is the most well known form of referral advertising.  Many websites do a good job with these, but all of them can be expanded to more fully capitalize on more forms of referral advertising.  Word of mouth is likely the best referral mechanism but some websites make it very difficult to convert these types of referrals if the primary motivation of a customer is to place a phone call but the phone number is hard to find on the website.  Don't make them dig for it.

The key here to understand is that for any of the above methods to work, your website will be measured not by what other sites you link to…. But the importance of sites that link to you.  An ongoing effort should be launched to get other high ranking sites to link to your website to improve all of these referral advertising methods.

Natural Search Links

This is the most well-known method of referral advertising but the way they attempt to tackle it is fraught with misinformation.  In the old days, SEO optimization firms would try to "game" the system and trick the search engines.  This has proven to not only be short-term thinking, but the search engines have started punishing the websites that try to trick them into thinking pages are relevant when they aren't.  Getting black listed by them is a hard challenge to overcome once tagged as an abuser of the search engine formulas.  The best approach here is to be honest and up-front by making your individual pages rich with content, highly useful (with lots of relevant links and a wealth of information that contains rich keyword densities and patterns), and extremely relevant to the keywords, regions, locations, cultures, and languages of the target audience.

Link Exchanges

Many companies use a strategy called "link farming" where they pay an outside service to simply spam thousands of other websites to link to your pages, which gives an artificial and highly irrelevant boost to natural search rankings for a short period of time (until the search engine figures out that the links are completely irrelevant to each other).  This brute force method is destructive over the long term, but companies just keep up the spamming and try to stay ahead of the inevitable punishment.  This is what I call "inorganic link farming" because once the spamming stops, all of the links inherently dry up and blow away and it doesn't take on a life of its own.

The best method of approaching this is "organic link farming" where highly relevant links are solicited with the highest quality business partners (including those with a high PR ranking value).  Some easy ones are online yellow page sites that generally have a high PR value and will link to your site.  Others include .edu (educational) websites that may link to your website if you cite their research or provide materials for their research in exchange for a link.

It is helpful to encourage your customers or constituents to put links to your site on their message boards and forums (without link spamming).  This type of organic linking will continue to grow because it was relevant and others will see the relevance and will pass the link on to their own websites (or those of others).

Media Mentions

This borders on the "traditional" but it holds as true now as it did pre-internet.  You should let the media know what you are doing, particularly when you do something that has a viral quality or is outstanding or newsworthy.  It is important to understand that media outlets are "meat grinders".  Every day the media editors wake up and need to grind meat.  If you are throwing pre-written stories into the hopper each day, it's inevitable that your stories will be picked up, or at a minimum will pique the interest of a writer that may synchronize with a story that they are writing (or will prompt them to write a story).  Standardizing this method of media notification should be a standard business practics.

Word of Mouth Referrals

It may seem obvious, but you should be asking your satisfied customers to pass the message along... particularly if you have an incentive that will benefit them.  By sending a $10 coupon to a customer when they give you 10 email addresses of friends that would be interested as well or other moral, honest approaches that will reinforce your brand while spreading the message could be used with great effect.  Above all the best technique is to do a good job and take good care of the customer... particularly when you make a mistake and quickly remedy it.

Gain Critical Insight

Many companies focus so much on generating sales that they fail to do a post-mortem on client contacts and communications.  Many sites have Google analytics installed, but leave out conversion tracking.  Some implement conversion tracking without establishing goal funnels.  These are all free services that should be exploited and analyzed monthly so you can tune what is working and pour more resources into the marketing efforts that have positive return on investment (ROI).

There are several methods of gaining the insight needed from the website, including:

·         Polls / Questionnaires

·         Feedback

·         Trend Analysis

Polls

Polls provide a sort of breadcrumbed guidance that can be critical for a business without being too onerous to the client.  These little snippets  of information can be aggregated and summarized into very effective cross-sections that can provide necessary guidance on ongoing website efforts.  There is a traffic requirement here that makes any aggregate analysis effective which many websites lack.

There are several categories of Polls that could be utilized on the website (or to the benefit of the website database) including:

·         Profile Polls (polls that occur after a user has logged in)

·         Anonymous Polls (polls where you cannot correlate user responses)

·         Syndicated Poll (polls on other websites that feed into a central database)

·         Social Networks (applications within social networking spaces that deliver poll-style data)

Profile Polls

Profile polls are engineered to slowly collect information about a customer that wouldn't be appropriate to collect in the account creation stage.  You may let a customer register their email address and instead of asking them a million questions, you simply remember their email address (through cookies or microdots) and as they fill out other polls, you will be able to identify new information about them (which is subsequently added to their profile).  For example, you may let a newsletter subscriber register their email address but upon filling out a poll, you discover that their answer they gave was a typically female response to the question.  This will give a hint to their profile that the respondent is female and you can start to tune your response to that account from a female perspective (until you find out differently).

Anonymous Polls

While on the surface it may not make sense that anonymous polls would deliver rich information, they still allow you to find out what a "herd" is thinking... even if you don't have specifics.  Herd mentalities are a challenge to quantify but it's important to do numerically corrected sampling to find out what conclusions you can derive from anonymous polls.  For example, if you have ten thousand poll responses per day and only 10% of them are website complaints/issues, if you suddenly see a spike in the ratio of these anonymous complaints, it may indicate a database or edge caching failure of your underlying infrastructure that needs to be addressed.

Syndicated Poll

This a unique method of extending the reach of your polling engine to other websites.  If there are networks of sites that may benefit from a poll that you are doing, then you can syndicate the web appliance that makes the poll appear and render a response to other websites.  By getting other websites to "syndicate" your polling engine, you remain the centralized repository of information but you are now absorbing the bandwidth and reach of other websites... effectively tapping into their customer base as well as yours.

Social Networks

This relatively new form of "polling" is now prevalent on sites like MySpace, FaceBook, and others.  Even though they take the form of games ("JohnnyB just slapped you with a big red herring!"), they serve as an obtuse form of polling from which information can be gleaned.  If a social networking participant uses your FaceBook "game" to send a taunt from the Steelers to a Cowboy fan, then you have a demographic hint that the sender likes the Steelers and the recipient likes the Cowboys.  You may also be able to derive additional hints such as where they went to college, where they might live, what language they might speak, whether they are male/female, etc.

Feedback

A critical component to any business strategy and particularly websites, the feedback opportunities serve a dual purpose of gleaning non-deterministic and subjective data from customers while letting the customer feel better about having said something (whether in critique or to compliment).

There are several venues for feedback that could be employed:

·         Post Sale Survey

·         Response Forms

·         Email Responses

·         Personal Call / Visit Response

·         Anonymous Survey

Lumped in with these options are events such as seminars, trade shows, and other public events that effectively provide the forum for the above activities to take place.

Post Sale Survey

Closing a deal is hardly the end of the customer relationship.  The best way to get a customer to remember what a great experience they had with their order is to call it to their attention and ask them for feedback on how it went.  It's important to not nag them for this information by lacing the request with a coupon off their next order, or a freebie that they can get in addition to their order if they participate.  It works even better if the freebie is related to the product that they just ordered.  "Thank you for ordering the Blackberry Curve cellphone from our online store.  If you could just take the time to answer a few questions, we will send you a free ring tone for your phone!"

Response Forms

These feedback appliances are prevalent on many websites but are not utilized effectively.  Feedback forms generally take the shape of a demographic splitter that lets us know who they are (whether customers, pre-sale  prospects, advertisers, casual surfers, etc).  These should be analyzed for their relevance to the page (don't show website complaint forms on the investor information page), their ease of use (don't ask for information that you don't need), and the presentation (big input boxes, large fonts, easy to find buttons), and the payback should be there (put some time into the thank you pages and offer incentives rewarding them for "giving back" to the community).

Response forms should be integrated back into the customer profile as a method tracking the health and status of the customer.  Customers that are interested enough to comment (or even complain) are customers that you should engage with to maintain an ongoing conversation.  If they complain, ask them to help evaluate the fix and get their feedback on what you did to remedy the situation.

Email Responses

A consistent thread of email responses should be processed and solicited through the customer lifecycle.  These email responses generally are lost and are not recorded or filtered to the proper customer account.  This information is rich with guidance and information and can help you maintain a pulse on the customer relationship.  A professional approach with filtering and sorting of the inbound email responses should be implemented and used with relish.

Personal Call / Visit Response

Maintaining a personal touch without drifting into the "robotic" is the key to personal calls and responses.  A consistent strategy, particularly for key customers that are transacting or are high potential client should be cultivated and conversed with in person.  Any strategy that eliminates this as a communication tool are giving short shrift to the power of human contact and the inevitable adaptability of a talented telesales or customer service representative.  Some people simply don't trust a robot and need to speak to a human and this fills that demographic void.

Anonymous Survey

Scatter gun surveys that are broadcast to a wide audience can be an effective method of profiling markets so you make more realistic projections, particularly when you are planning on entering a market, you plan on extending a new product into an existing market, or you simply want to gauge the impact of a marketing initiative that expands beyond the reach of your current customer base.

Trend Analysis

Analyzing what is happening with the data that has already been captured is a critical component of any insight strategy.  There does not appear to be any substantive trend analysis relating to the website or the customer service deliveries. 

Some of the methods of obtaining this information include:

·         Traffic Analysis

·         Order History / Billing History

·         Path Analysis

·         Conversion Tracking (with multiple goals)

·         Segmentation Analysis

Without engaging some or all of the above techniques, there is literally no method to evaluate whether any marketing efforts are working or not.

Traffic Analysis

Beacons or micro-dots are used by including a tiny pixel or a javascript include within a page's code that sends a remote data signal to a collection server which harvests key information such as browser, time, IP addresses, operating systems, etc.

Once a customer is logged in or their identity is known, it can be used to confirm their identity throughout the rest of the pages that the customer visits.

Order History / Billing History

What a customer orders is a powerful tool for demographic segmentation and if mined properly can guide us toward what we should be marketing to them in the future.  Simple orders may not be the only things that could be mined.  These could take the form of requests for quotes (RFQ), requests for proposals (RFP), catalog requests or other “transactional” types that are similar to orders.

Path Analysis

This is the technique of not only tracking what pages were hit, but in what order and the times spent on each page.  By analyzing these traffic “flows” rather than aggregate “hits per page”, we can find out how the “juice” flows throughout the website and we can tune these paths.  It is also important to note that search engines can be instructed to follow unique paths that are different from the human traffic that flows throughout the website.  Strategic use of “NOFOLLOW” tags will help guide the search engines to the most concise and highly relevant paths throughout the website.  There are a variety of tools that can be used to analyze paths including:

·         Google Analytics

·         Omniture

·         Tealeaf

Conversion Tracking

There is no point in tracking what happened, unless you map that activity to what you “wanted” to happen.  This grading system for the “Cause and Effect” portion of your site trends and statistics will guide your marketing efforts toward processes that make corporate goals and customer objectives happen more frequently.  If you buy keywords for example and they lead to a higher percentage of conversions (or sales), then you may want to spend more on those keywords to make that happen more frequently.  If the converse is true and keywords don’t convert or convert poorly, then you may want to draw back your budget on them (there are times when you shouldn’t even do that however).

Segmentation Analysis

A good analysis of the market segmentation of your traffic will be hugely beneficial.  You can identify patterns of certain demographics that tend to pour through the website in certain ways to streamline your traffic.  For example if you find that men generally go in a certain direction through your website while women take a different route, you may want to do demographic splitting on the front page (by placing a Men and Women button) so they can instantly split off and enjoy their own customized experience.

 

Build a Relationship

Many times companies lose focus that the end customer is the 100% objective within the business plan. It is also assumed that customers buy from a website simply because they needed what the website was offering. This is rarely the complete motivating factor.  Generally, people buy  from companies because their happiness is  increased.  They also tend to buy from those companies because of the relationship they have with the principals or sales representatives more often than a driving, compelling need for the product or service to be provided.  In most niche markets, this couldn't be more true.

There are several techniques that will drive relationship building among the customer base:

·         Building Trust

·         Conversations

·         Clubs or Exclusivities

Your website can provide a haven or meeting place where a combination of rich information, interactivity, and fellowship can combine to bring customer groups together.  By including them in the “club” they get not only the feeling of being part of something, but they also can serve as live testimonials of your products.   Be sure that you admit mistakes and address them immediately if that occurs, and work with your teams of fans or members to help improve the situation so next time it won’t happen again.  This will endear them even more tightly to the cause and will blunt a lot of the criticism that comes from being so exposed on the internet.

Building Trust

Developing a relationship intimates that there is an underlying foundation of trust within the relationship.  This extends beyond friendship or an adequate matching of product features to customer needs.    There are several vehicles available to you that will engender this type of trust building that must occur for a proper relationship to exist:

·         On-Time Delivery

·         Expectations Were Met

·         Problems Were Resolved / Compensated For

·         Help from the Customer was Recruited

Over time, by engaging in the above techniques, level s of trust can be built.  Note that some of these seem counter-intuitive.  In general, people do not expect perfection... they simply expect to be treated with respect and when things go wrong, they are addressed in a humble and honest fashion, with sufficient notice so the customer can work around road blocks.

It also seems counter-intuitive that customers would volunteer to help a vendor, but it couldn't be more true.  People, in general, like to be needed, and by providing them with opportunities to serve the vendor or to participate or be a part of the solution delivery, it reinforces the relationship and drives the relationship deeper as they become more invested in being part of the solution.

On-Time Delivery

Be sure that whatever your promise on the website, you deliver as instantly as possible.  The web is full of instant expectations, but it’s ok to commit to a certain timeline… just be sure that you are prepared to deliver what is committed to.  Over time, this trust will engender respect among your customers and they will reinforce that to the other customers in their fellowship groups.

Met Expectations

Some marketing firms believe that customers are stupid lemmings and are content to being led by the nose.  This is not a true reflection of what customers really are.  They are savvy, have the internet to research at their fingertips, and have communities of people where they can ask for opinions about your product.  It’s very important that you take your own brand as your most treasured asset and it should be safeguarded at all costs.  Meeting expectations follows a very simple formula: 

D - E > 0 ä

Delivery – Expectations  > 0

What you deliver should either far supercede what you have promised them, or what you promise should be understated to be less than what you are able to deliver.  It’s very important to understand this distinction because in a high energy sales environment, the tendency is always to overstate the expectations to a point where the delivery can never meet what is expected.

Good training, an honest and open approach, and a focus on quick remedy when expectations run away with the sales person or with the customer can be a good strategy here.

Lots of communication will help regardless so the customer is always aware of what has happened, what is about to happen, and what could happen… all while setting and reinforcing the expectations of the client.

Problems Were Resolved / Compensated For

Problems come up and those come at a cost.  If you can setup some mechanism where when you make a mistake, the customer receives 10 points or 10 customer service bucks, then you can ameliorate any negative publicity or PR that may come from a mistake.  If you use non-cash compensation for this (points, etc), then you can adjust the hard cost of these concessions while still giving the customer the perception that you accept the criticism and you’ve done something of value to fix the issue.

Help From The Customer Was Recruited

Asking your customer for help fulfills a deep psychological need of the customer.  A study done by the ecumenical council of the protestant faiths found an interesting discovery about churches that never required any commitment from their parishioners… they simply left the church.  People need to be needed and it your obligation and opportunity to involve them in the process, whether it’s market research, approvals of new websites, etc.  I don’t mean by this that you should just survey your customers.  These ring hollow these days.  Instead, post an interim URL for your new website update.  Warn your customers that it’s coming soon and now is their chance to comment on the updates.  Read your email so it’s not a hollow promise and respond to their critique where appropriate.  Let the specific customer know that you listened and made a change.   You will find that such direct involvement is invaluable and you will end up with customers for life.

Conversations

There are many ways to engage in conversations with customers, but not all of them require a real human being on both sides of the conversation.  Some examples of this technique include:

·         Video/Animation

·         Phone Contact

·         Email Newsletter

·         Personal Visits

·         End of Life Communication

·         Featured Articles

·         Testimonials

Video / Animation

Video and animation can have a powerful draw on a client as it appears that the conversation is more "real" than any other method.  Investing in video can be done inexpensively but is a critical piece of the total conversation that should occur between company and client (or prospective client).

Phone Contact

Phone contacts are critical on an ongoing basis and are very inexpensive to perform and maintain.

Email Newsletter

Email newsletters serve two purposes... that of communicating with the client on a consistent basis... and as a vehicle for fleshing out more content updates for the website with rich, relevant keyword data interlaced with many external links.

Personal Visits

Personal visits can never be underestimated.  Face to face communication serves a critical role in the development of relationships with customers.

End of Life Communications

Many of these seem relatively apparent, but the End of Life communication is generally less well-known.  As a customer leaves as a customer, it is important to communicate with them and reinforce the relationship upon their departure.  This has many benefits, if only to confirm to the internal staff that our goal is to truly care for our customer's success... whether they remain a customer of ours or not.

Featured Articles

Featured articles give us a chance to "give back" to the customer in a form of congratulatory praise of their project, while serving the dual purposes of content development and keyword expansion.

Testimonials

Testimonials are one of the most compelling aspects of effective conversion improvement on the website and the customers are generally grateful to provide them as well... which endears them to the project.

Clubs or Exclusivities

It is human nature when faced with a locked door... to desire to be able to pass through the door.  While this innate desire is hard to explain, it nevertheless exists and can be exploited on the website in a variety of ways including:

·         Discount / Membership Clubs

·         Peer Fellowship and Forums

·         Social Networks

·         Profile Rankings

Discount / Membership Clubs

Membership clubs satisfy a core human motivation to be included and serves a sort of purpose that a membership card in a wallet offers.... Every time they look in their wallet, it's a reminder that they can get something special by coming back to the website.  It is important to back this "faith" up with real incentives and reminders.

Peer Fellowship and Forums

Peer fellowship gives the customer a venue, without our moderation or control, where they can converse, communicate and get additional information about their product lines and their daily lives while using our products.  This peer group can form very strong external bonds that can help keep them attached to our products.

Social Networks

Social networks can have a powerful influence on the club membership mentality and if exploited in the appropriate manner, can be simple to deploy.  Effectively we are leveraging the existing (or nascent) clubs of other networks for our own purposes.

Profile Rankings

Profile rankings are a sort of "star on their forehead" reward that due to simple human psychology is a compelling draw to keep customers linked to our products.

Innovate New and Resaleable Solutions

Taking the available information about current products and then trying to create new products that will cater to the same or to new audiences is a critical business objective of any successful website.  We should always be on the lookout for new revenue streams while we ensure that the base strategies are sound and are being implemented properly.  There are several major approaches to further innovation within the organization including:

·         New Products

·         Usage of the Existing Products

·         Cross Sales of Products

New products can come from the technique of "productization" of what were previously simple services that we provided.  If an analysis is done on the service offerings with an eye toward services that we perform often, by systematizing them and bundling them into a product offering with the necessary branding and marketing that goes with that, we can still be engaging in the delivery of services, but it's now treated as a resaleable, branded product line.

As customers use our products and services, we should be able to analyze and track how they are being used.  This will give us a key understanding of what the product is to them and what they are doing with it.  By analyzing this, it will help steer us toward more innovation as we try to improve the product for that specific application.

By analyzing what other products are purchased or used in tandem with the services and products that we provided, we will start to see what other products make a good complement to the originally purchased product.  This will help us know whether to expand our product to include that cross-sell item, or will help us analyze what other "filial" products we may expand to start offering.

New Products

New products should come as each customer solution is analyzed, commonalities between them are established, and through grouping, targets of possible new applications can surface.  The analysis of existing clients started to deliver patterns among the customer base that illustrates this.

There are several methods that will further the development of new products:

·         Market Research

·         Discovering or Tapping Into Additional Channels

·         Expanding the Market Horizontally

·         Expanding the Market Vertically

 

There is also the possibility of expanding along horizontal market segments.  This includes leveraging the same products for other competitors within the same market space (whether on behalf of existing customers by proxy or directly).

I believe that few of these types of analysis are being done through the website (or due to the website).

Market Research

Market research consists of analyzing the totality of the markets in which AMS competes and learning the size and penetration of AMS and its competitors within that market segment.  This will inform you as to whether there are needs for the services that you are providing, and how much of a gap exists between the market demand and the supply that is being generated.

Discovering or Tapping into Additional Channels

In the process of doing the market analysis, other channels can be discovered for the same products, in new and unconventional ways. 

Expanding the Market Horizontally

There are other channels and products that can be leveraged in tandem with what you are already selling.  By examining your core demographics and analyzing what other products would appeal to that same customer group, you can find additional products that can be layered into your same marketing efforts (or the same types of marketing efforts) so your infrastructure doesn’t have to expand but your ratio of revenue to expense can increase.

Expanding the Market Vertically

In addition to finding additional channels for new products, there are methods of expanding along supply chains.  This includes the literal supply chain for our core products, but it also involves crawling up and down the supply chains of our customers.  If we have a manufacturing customer as a client, then that company does business with suppliers, distributors, dealers in their vertical supply chain that we may also be able to serve with the same solutions.  This is a diagram which illustrates the product lifecycle and the tiers within a vertical supply chain:

 

Usage of the Existing Products

Customers can tell you best how your products are being used and we should be asking them to share with us and get involved in the innovation aspect of the marketing strategy.  There are several methods to exploit this:

·         White Papers

·         Vendor Recommendations

·         Bundling

·         Includes or Compatibles.

White Papers

White papers should be generated for each application of our products so that visiting prospective customers can be seeded with more ideas on how our products are applied to real situations.

Vendor Recommendations

Vendor recommendations are valuable because they already have done much of this market research and they can help drive sales through marketing resources and other concepts, materials, co-op advertising funds and other resources.

Bundling

Bundling can increase the delivery of solutions to customers by attaching one product or service on the back of any other new product or renewal.

Includes or Compatibles

Includes or Compatibles refers to the analysis of what products are used along with other products (or which products would have synergy with others).  Analyzing these will help expand the aggregate sales with the same sales effort.