Archive for the ‘Retail’ Category

Re-defining e-commerce sales

December 7th, 2011

What defines an e-commerce sale? This may seem like a question with an easy answer, “sales made online”, right? Not necessarily. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Darrell Rigby titled “The Future of Shopping” points out that the influence of e-commerce on sales is not simply about the daily report you receive about yesterday’s on-site sales.

The article asks “is it an e-commerce sale if the customer goes to a store, finds that the product is out of stock, and uses an in-store terminal to have another location ship it to her home? What if the customer is shopping in one store, uses his smartphone to find a lower price at another, and then orders electronically for in-store pickup? How about gifts that are ordered from a website but exchanged at a local store? Experts estimate that digital information already influences about 50% of in-store sales and that number is growing rapidly”.

These scenarios and many others highlight the blurring lines between e-commerce and traditional bricks and mortar shopping, yet this is a topic that many traditional retailers have not begun to understand.

This blurring of the lines creates a host of issues for traditional retailers. How do you market to consumers in the digital age? How do retailers properly track what sources are driving revenue? In terms of marketing to digital age consumers it is apparent that the days of viewing digital channels, in-store marking and traditional advertising in isolation are coming to an end. A focus on creating the easiest and most rewarding shopping experience for the consumer will need to take precedence across retail marketing, creative and advertising agency offices with a focus on coordination of messages.

Marketing efforts will specifically need to increase for mobile and tablet devices as consumers are becoming increasingly savvy at utilising the power of these devices as tools help them shop for the best deals.

The article points out one particularly interesting example of this, citing Tesco’s brand in South Korea called Home plus. In an effort to “bring the store to the consumers at a point in the day when they had time on their hands… Home plus covered the walls of Seoul subway stations with remarkably lifelike backlit images of supermarket shelves containing orange juice fresh vegetables and meat, and hundreds of other items. Consumers wanting to do their food shopping could simply scan each product’s Quick Response code into their smartphones, touch an on-screen button, and thereby assemble a virtual shopping cart. Home plus then delivered the physical goods to the shopper’s home within a few hours”.

In addition to changes in the way retailers market themselves, another aspect of the traditional retail approach must also be addressed. How will various stores, the retailers’ website and marketing channels be credited for sales?  Most retailers still approach sales reporting on a per store basis with the website being counted as one store. As the example above clearly shows this approach is not necessarily relevant in the digital world.

If one store, for example, has a great sales staff but limited stock, it is very possible that consumers could be purchasing online as result of their experience in store. Who gets credit for this? Shouldn’t the great sales staff get some credit? Retailers that think of how to model a reporting system that gives credit where credit is due will likely be ahead of the game in relation to their competitors. They will be in a better position to encourage sales staff to meet all of the consumers’ needs rather than only the needs that can be met within the confines of the walls of the store.

As we can see the definition of an e-commerce sale is changing at a rapid pace and will continue to do so over the coming months and years. Retailers that look ahead and begin to address these changes no are likely to be at big advantage in the years to come.

Blog post by Mike Jennings Director at Reform

The new domain name game

September 12th, 2011

Starting in January 2012, companies will have the opportunity to register new tailored domain names. Traditional naming conventions such as .com and .net will continue to exist, but brands will be able to use other words or phrases, such as their own brand name, as their domain name. For example, Reform.com could use reform.reform and other variations thereof using the .reform structure.

What will the cost for this new domain structure be? There’s an application fee which costs around £180,000, plus an annual running cost around £25,000. So, for many businesses, this kind of investment will prove cost prohibitive.

At Reform we’ll be monitoring what effect, if any, these new naming conventions have on search optimisation best practices. Will Google and other search engines favour one domain name over the other, and if so, could it lead to an unfair advantage in preserving top rankings? This will be an interesting space that we’ll be keeping an eye on for our clients.

Additionally, the new domain naming convention .xxx has been approved by ICANN after eleven years. Although some countries, such as India, have already started banning the new naming convention, brands and individuals now have less than a fifty day window to register to ensure their assets are not used in the adult online industry.

While the benefits of the .xxx domain include heightened parental control, as well as the hope that people will be less likely to unwittingly stumble across adult content, the 15,000 domain names that have been reserved are almost certainly not enough to protect all the people that may be affected. What about everyone else’s reputations?

ICM Registry’s chief executive Stuart Lawley said, “Regardless of what your personal views are on the existence of pornography on the internet, at least .xxx will give people the information they need to make a choice.”

Reform provides a bespoke brand monitoring service that can help you to ensure your brand is not misrepresented. With these new developments, it is more important than ever to invest in the right amount of diligence to protect your brand. Get in touch if you would like to know more.

Blog post by Anthony Dobson, Business Development Executive at Reform

Why businesses need a digital audit

August 16th, 2011

Economic recovery or double-dip recession? Business targets achieved or way off the mark? Regardless, now is an optimal time to assess your digital marketing capabilities, to shave off any inefficiencies (both in terms of Pounds and practices) and to bolster your revenues and profit margins. Yes, you heard me right: digital can be inefficient. Comparative to traditional marketing it might come cheaper, but there are swathes of improvements to be found and made. These are improvements that lurk in the data and in day-to-day operations.

The best way to make these improvements is to have a digital expert audit your SEO, PPC and social media efforts. An audit provides the best opportunity for you to discover meaningful ways to extract full value from your digital endeavours. This is because an audit not only tells you where your digital practices stand in relation to current industry best practices, but also gives you an actionable strategy to close whatever gaps exist between where you are and where you ought to be.

It’s easy for the people behind brands to become overwhelmed by and abandon the very technology meant to enhance their digital efforts; technology can be a false friend that way. It’s also easy for the people driving a brand’s digital presence to get complacent once their efforts have achieved a certain level of success. With today’s economy demanding more output from less resource, unless a strategy is failing outright, people don’t have the time to see if that strategy could be improved. It’s easier still to leap into new digital channels before creating a sustainable strategy because of the sense of urgency created by the impression that every other brand is already on Facebook or Twitter. You feel like you need to run to catch up, but what you wind up doing is running just to stay in place. And along with all that wasted effort is wasted money.

The easiest thing of all, however, is to seek expert assistance in assessing and addressing the gaps between where your brand currently stands and where it would stand if you optimised your approach to digital.

Reform’s SEO audit takes into account overarching brand objectives and makes suggestions for website changes in that specific context. It also provides a thorough examination of every aspect of your website and guidance on how to comply with SEO best practices, adherence to which will culminate in the brand’s increased presence in natural search results.

Our PPC audit uses the same holistic approach. Rather than examining individual AdWords campaigns, a brand’s PPC strategy and performance are looked at in their entirety and refined to better meet the brand’s online objectives. This can range from increased share of voice on Google to increased website traffic and increased revenue from ecommerce.

Our social media audit simultaneously demystifies the world of personas as well as the best methods to engage with customers. It lays the foundation for the brand’s influence to grow and to improve its ability to listen to, interpret and participate in important conversations. Consultants performing a social media audit are careful to identify different target markets and create optimal strategies for each. They also take the time to build your brand’s personas; they don’t just look at what the competition is doing. This is not an exercise in keeping up with the Joneses; it is an exercise in developing a mature, sustainable strategy to drive your brand’s objectives.

Each audit will separately improve a brand’s digital performance. Taken together, the audits provide a powerful mechanism by which to enlarge a brand’s entire digital footprint.

These audits – separately or together – also save money by increasing efficiency and making digital efforts more effective. Ultimately, the consultants who perform audits deliver strategies that allow brands to squeeze more out of less by creating greater efficiency and greater efficacy – a fitting solution in today’s economy.

Blog post by Samantha Horwitz, Product Development and Projects Director at Reform

How businesses should (or shouldn’t) react to Google’s latest update

May 20th, 2011

SEO has come a long way in the past decade, with companies focusing on search as a key component of their digital marketing strategy. And while you can probably guess I would be in the position to say such a thing, the truth is that SEO can indeed make or break a business on the web, leveling the playing field in this day and age between big names and local startups.

Companies around the world have started to use a good portion of their overall marketing resource based on how they perform in search. This is great, but it seems to me as still less of a “plan to action”, and more of a “knee jerk reaction”. The recent Google Panda / Farmer update was a major example of this – with companies “reacting” left and right wondering what they did wrong. While we love the fact that in today’s marketplace, many businesses are watching their search engine marketing performance much more closely – unfortunately, many are also believing everything they hear! So yes, SEO has indeed come a long way – and companies won’t fall for just anything, but there are certainly are still a fair bit of misconceptions going around the industry.

One recent example was the Overstock.com SEO Spam incident that you may have heard about on both the major news sites like CNN, or industry sites such as Search Engine Land where the major US retailer was penalised in the Google algorithm – supposedly (but this reason was never fully confirmed) for having a link building strategy that consisted of bulk .edu links. Weeks later, Overstock itself issued a statement saying that they had made the fixes Google required and sure enough they were back in the index – and all was well.

Some people simply assumed that Overstock had simply fixed things up, while some people complained that it was unfair that the big companies get such an advantage and got reinstated (not bothering to check why), while most companies only remembered the first part of the Overstock story, spending the time since chasing their SEO team, consultant or agency about some other new story that made the rounds in the industry or mainstream press. Perhaps direct competitors did look a bit closer at the overall situation, but we cannot confirm this, and thats not the issue here anyway.

Either way, it seemed like no one from any of the groups above double checked the story. If Google says no to bulk link acquisition and Overstock got banned from Google, does that mean Overstock’s bulk link acquisition got them in trouble? No. It was a poor misconception, an assumption that A+B=C. Clients should expect more from an agency, consultant or in house team, especially when monitoring competitor activity. We in this industry should be looking at the full answer and not taking other people’s word all the time. The EDU links by the way are still quite active in many places (example: http://www.alumni.ncsu.edu/s/1209/index.aspx?sid=1209&gid=1&pgid=632) – and so what changed then? Well, on the pages that got penalised for generic terms such as “living room furniture” – Overstock.com had pop-up/expandable text coded within the tags of their page. The pop-up text was filled with keywords and was in Google’s cache and visible to text browsers (screenshot of this example below).

The text strategy was reported by a competitor and got penalised shortly after. Yet, when Overstock was allowed back in, what changed? The links stayed, yet the hidden text is no longer there. Could this have been the “real” reason why the penalty was imposed in the first place?

No one will know for sure, but the point is that many companies will go by what they hear/read and that there are still many misconceptions about SEO as a whole. Here at Reform we make sure we try to not just throw some excuse about why sites perform the way that they do, but examine closer into it and find out what the real reason may be – instead of a “one size fits all” answer. With this extra insight and custom approach to your overall digital marketing strategy, SEO can become more of a natural approach, rather than a mystery. Not necessarily the wrong answer or right answer, but exploring multiple answers and possibilities and avoiding any potential misconceptions is key to any project we take on.

You can take a horse to water…

May 10th, 2010

The web is a marvel that has transformed the way consumers interact with the suppliers of goods and services, but it has not changed some of the basic rules of merchandising. Over the last few years the BBC has run a few series featuring Mary Porter the ‘Queen of Shops’, where our inimitable heroine has been challenged to improve the retail performance of an assortment of different shops, ranging from the super fashionable to the charitable end of the perspective.

Some of her focus has been on signage and window displays in an effort to attract more visitors to the individual shops, but far more emphasis has been placed on what merchandise is bought, and crucially how this merchandise is displayed. Online retailers of both goods and services would do well to understand the importance of this distinction. It is all very well developing a highly optimised website that ensures that relevant keyword searches drive traffic to your site, or indeed targeting specific paid-for-search copy to attract visitors to specific features within your site.

However the key to successful deployment of search budgets is the adoption of a holistic approach that goes beyond making your site findable, but also facilitates transactions for prospective purchasers. This means considering the usability of sites both from the point of view of being able to quickly identify the specific goods or services within a site, and also being able to complete an informed purchase with the minimum of hassle.

As the Queen of Shops would tell you, there is no point having your best selling items in a dark room at the back of the shop and only having one till operator for a queue of thirty customers; especially if you have just spent thousands painting the outside and dressing the window. The same applies to search, where the most effective budgets will utilise search spending as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy and the best search practitioners will understand the wider ramifications for servicing the customers that they drive to your site.

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-Executive Director of Reform

Adding value to online retail: the in-store shopping experience

February 21st, 2010

With time to kill in between appointments last week I found myself in Top Shop’s flagship store on Oxford Street in London. Not for the first time I was struck by how different the shopping experience is. Indeed Top Shop is less of a shop nowadays, more like a nightclub-cum-youth club-cum-beauty salon. With TVs and music blaring, girls of all ages (thirteen up to forty!) were browsing, chatting, phoning, texting. Oh and there was some purchasing going on too. Top Shop is a real-life social media experience.

Back in the virtual world, in December 2009 £5.46 billion was spent online in the UK, a 17% increase y-o-y. According to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, the Clothing sector saw an 18% annual increase in online spend and Accessories in particular saw a phenomenal 101% annual increase. Driven by a quest for shopping on demand, online retail, or e-tail, is certainly thriving.

The challenge for both online and bricks and mortar retailers is that the Millennial generation – defined as the mid-teens to late twenties who have grown up in a digital world – are a fickle bunch. They want social interaction but they also want a highly personal experience. They expect you (the retail brand) to know exactly what they want, and they want to have it now. They have been spoilt by the instant gratification of Google, and the infinite choice of niche sellers that the Web has to offer. It’s all about me, or “me-tail”, after all.

Customer acquisition and retention strategies must therefore be cross-media and highly targeted. Indeed, in its Industry Report entitled ‘The “me-tail” revolution’, Accenture urges retailers to radically reinvent themselves, and cite the example of Domino’s Pizza’s use of Facebook and mobile phone apps – as well as TV – to facilitate orders, and Best Buy’s leveraging of Twitter to answer customer queries.  According to Accenture, it won’t be long before this new generation of always-on customers spurns the concept of retail grazing.

Whereas for the last ten years, retailers have been trying to work out how their websites might add value to in-store spending, the tables are now turning. What is clear from the Top Shop experience is that the physical store space must now add value to the price-led, convenience and personalisation of shopping online.

This blog post was written by Amanda Davie, Managing Director, Reform.