Prénatal Ecommerce Metrics

            A look at the web page for the success stories of Adobe’s analytical software suite Omniture is a veritable “who’s who” of organizations from the financial services, retail, media, entertainment, and life sciences industries.  Amongst this grouping of companies is Prénatal, a Milano, Italy-based online hub of information for mothers-to-be that prominently features a social exchange, localized support forums, and an ecommerce offering which specializes in the sales of products relevant to the expectant mother.  Likewise, Prénatal manages 437 brick and mortar retail locations throughout Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East (14 countries, total) that are based upon an “open store” philosophy featuring spacious aisles and a friendly atmosphere in which a potential customer can approach any staff member for assistance.

            As with most companies, Prénatal recognized that in the “Web 2.0” world, an ecommerce solution’s success is often times predicated upon the community a company builds around their offering.  But the company’s efforts were managed entirely by an external interactive agency that provided no way for Prénatal representatives to manage content or oversee social collaboration.  Going forward with a multi-channel approach, Prénatal implemented Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite for Web Experience Management, an incredibly comprehensive ecommerce engine that allows marketing personnel to be agile in their efforts.

            The agility afforded to Prénatal comes in the form of easing the burden of web authoring and publishing by including easy to use templates that can be filled with many different content types including text and images, as well as SWF (Flash) files and promotional displays.  Likewise, the suite provided the company’s dedicated eBusiness department to manage entire sites and stores, as well as create their own web page types and structures to be populated with whatever content they chose.  This new “ownership” of company content freed the marketing division of the company from having to collaborate with an outside source, including their Information Technology department, and they are now free to implement workflows and monitor their publishing for multiple country-localized sites once.

            Prénatal’s efforts are based upon their use of Adobe CQ, a content management systems (CMS) that allows for the delivery of digital content across many channels at once.  According to Adobe’s website, “Adobe CQ is the foundation of the Adobe Experience Manager solution. It provides digital marketers with easy-to-use, web-based applications for creating, managing, and delivering personalized online experiences” (Adobe CQ).  In particular, Prénatal will rely on Adobe’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) to serve as a repository for access to digital assets like videos and images used in the creation of company marketing materials.

            Likewise, Prénatal engages in content targeting, a methodology whereby mothers-to-be are presented with very personalized content based upon demographic information gleaned from their user profile.  Prénatal provides a rich experience by allowing shoppers to customize their experience based upon three categories – Themes, Needs, and Time Period.  As mothers progress in their pregnancy, the website’s content will shift dynamically to reflect information pertinent to their experience including help and support articles, social content, and products recommendations.

            Included within their efforts to move away from the classic one-sided “Web 1.0” ethos and provide a more communal feel to the website as a whole, Prénatal also launched a company blog, a user discussion forum, and a rating system that lets customers rate product effectiveness by leaving post-purchase comments.  The community surrounding these new-age offerings allows the company to both passively observe customer commentary and to communicate directly with potential consumers.  Doing so provides the intimate setting the company so badly desired and provides Prénatal with an infinite source of feedback regarding an expectant mother’s needs and questions.

            Overall, Prénatal has benefited greatly in a number of different ways.  First is that their web development work is now able to be handled completely in-house with very little input from technically adept staff.  While a content management system like Adobe’s CQ undoubtedly costs money, its implementation has the potential to save Prénatal a great amount over an extended period of time by releasing their efforts from the grasp of the interactive agency they once worked with.  Likewise, with the myriad data collection tools built into the website (forums, product commentary, etc…), the company is able to gather extremely specific information on their target demographic just by these women’s participation.

            Yet for all of the company’s internal web efforts, Prénatal does not appear to effectively harness social media as it is today.  Granted the company maintains both Twitter and Facebook accounts, it does not maintain localized versions of those accounts in the same way that it does for their websites.  An example of this is that while the company has a following on Facebook 60,000 users strong, all of their postings are in Dutch.  Likewise, each tweet on Twitter is in Dutch – a strange notion considering the company’s headquarters is located in Italy.  The company could benefit greatly by creating these localized accounts for their different retail territories and building individualized social media experiences around the cultural norms their potential consumers embody.  While their forums exist as a medium with which mothers-to-be can share information with one another, differences in belief systems and values from one forum poster to another could understandably create a cacophony of noise that could leave visitors with a bad experience.  This, in turn, could affect their decision to shop with Prénatal.

            Similarly, as Prénatal is also using Google Analytics for their web metrics collection (UA-2449851-1), the company could benefit greatly from analyzing which of their overall traffic is derived from their social media efforts.  Identifying external networks where consumers are engaging with their content and comparing that to traffic volumes generated by direct visits can lend a great amount of insight into where their marketing efforts should be focused long-term.  As well, the company could get a better understanding of the communities that crop up around their products and services that they do not necessarily control.  Customer engagement beyond the confines of the company website is incredibly important.  According to Patricia Redsicker of socialmediaexaminer.com, “Invariably people who have engaged with you online become customers at higher rates, and they in turn tell their friends about you, revving up your marketing engine over and over again” (2012).

References                               

Adobe CQ (n.d.) Retrieved December 9, 2012 from http://www.adobe.com/products/cq.html

Redsicker, P. (2012, November 29) 3 Easy Steps to Engaging Your Customers. Retrieved December 9, 2012 from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/engagement-marketing-book-review/

Taking Action with GA Goals, Funnels, and Filter

            The fundamental notion behind the use of Google Analytics is that the suite provides statistical information designed to help an individual or an organization meter their website with the end goal of affecting a positive change in its overall web traffic.  Likewise, the service provides a wealth of insight into the many ways casual, first-time web visitors can be converted into returning visitors or long-term customers.  While understanding the myriad ways in which visitors can and do enter a website is paramount to increasing its visibility online, it is equally important to dissect that traffic once it has arrived in order to direct the flow to the most important content within.  This traffic can be better guided through the use of goals, an understanding of funnels, and the addition of filters to more accurately disseminate these visits.  The use of this trifecta of tools can provide content owners with the ability to advance their conversion efforts whether they operate an ecommerce store, a general interest blog, or any other type of web property.

            To begin, a conversion is a web visitor that has moved from one point to another within the website along an expected route and has performed some series of pre-determined actions to get them there.  While a classic ecommerce website might set the completion of an online sale as their primary conversion objective, other websites like personal blogs and corporate-owned entities can set their own unique goals based on their personal or business needs.  Such goals can include completing an online contact form and reaching a confirmation page, or a search for some information within the site itself ending in the display of a search results page.  In such cases, a visitor reaching a certain web page after they have performed some action can be considered a qualified goal.  While they differ in nature from one organization to another, conversions simply represent the attainment of those goals.  And with important information being spread throughout a typical website, it is often times important for the site’s owner to guide visitors to their goals via a funnel.  A funnel in GA is the literal representation of the path one must follow to get to a different point and complete a goal.  Yet all of the information GA collects is not equal, and some is even unnecessary.  For the purpose of generating reports, some visits deemed irrelevant to the goals can be left out.  One interesting feature of GA is the ability to create filters to remove this unwanted information before reporting.  These filters allow one to include or exclude traffic from certain domains, certain IP addresses, and certain subdirectories.

            From both a design and business perspective, each of these individual tools allows for a culling of clear data so desperately needed for making good decisions, and for implementing efficiencies needed to get a visitor from one point to another.  While it would be logical to assume that the majority of visitors arriving to a website do so via the site’s homepage, this is not always the case, especially considering the traffic that modern search engines provide.  This fact alone adds an unparalleled level of importance to creating and monitoring goal pages, visualizing exits and abandonment of a funnel, and separating that traffic into important categories.

Goals

            To assist in the realization of goals, it is important to include key elements in each page, possibly through a template, to entice visitors to look further into a website.  These elements, which might take the form of a site wide navigational menu or an always up to date news ticker, should lead to goal pages in order to track their success, and the goal pages should be part of the funnel that web traffic is expected to follow.  According to Google, these goals “…are a versatile way to measure how well your site or app fulfills your objectives” (Set up Goals).  Businesses can use these goals in order to determine the overall effectiveness of their website.  A very low conversion rate through these goal pages allows for a unique visualization of what “breakdowns” might exist in the system and the ways in which web managers can take action to increase the likelihood that goals will eventually be achieved.

Funnels

            Funnel visualizations can be helpful with a number of different types of websites, but are uniquely useful on ecommerce properties.  In particular, it is often times important to understand whether visitors are exiting the funnel and leaving a business’ website altogether, or are exiting but staying within the same domain.  As stated by Dave Sparks of sixrevisions.com, “You can then look and see where people are dropping out and this can easily highlight problematic or broken forms and links or long-winded pages that people simply give up on” (2010).  Armed with this information, a company can set out to increase their sales conversion rate by making the process as easy as possible for client to move through.

Filters

            As previously mentioned, some traffic to a website should not be counted as it does not accurately represent true visitors or customers.  A unique example of this is a corporation that refers to their own website on a daily basis to answer customer questions.  While employees get information from the site in much the same way that customers do, they don’t necessarily represent the company’s target market.  In fact, their visits to the website can cloud and skew the monthly data and provide a false positive to its meaning.  In a case like this, it is important to scrub that information from the results before they are presented.  As stated by Google, “Filters allow you to limit and modify the traffic data that is included in a profile. For example, you can use filters to exclude traffic from particular IP addresses, focus on a specific subdomain or directory, or convert dynamic page URLs into readable text strings” (About profile filters).  Through the addition of filters, GA provides a quick and effective way of removing this information and is aimed at providing more accurate visitor statistics.

            The best way to make good decisions is to begin with clear data.  The information provided through these tools allow an organization to better visualize the way traffic moves within a website beyond the standard traffic flow report GA provides.  Taking action without this information can have a detrimental effect on one’s web offering.

References

About profile filters (n.d.) Retrieved December 2, 2012 from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033162

Set Up Goals (n.d.) Retrieved December 2, 2012 from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1032415

Sparks, D. (2010, March 14) Google Analytics in Depth: Goals and Funnels. Retrieved December 3, 2012 from http://sixrevisions.com/tools/google-analytics-in-depth-goals-and-funnels/

Marketing for Non-Profits : Salvation Army

Since we can now officially say “’Tis the season”, and the red buckets are showing up outside the front doors of a lot of retailers, I’ve decided to write about an interesting campaign I came across a little while back involving the Salvation Army, a Portland, ME marketing firm, and a bit of guerilla marketing.

First started in San Francisco in 1891, the annual Red Kettle campaign has been the Salvation Army’s most prominent fundraising effort. In 2010, despite the economic recession, the group brought in a record-breaking $139 million, all of which was used in the communities where it was collected (Salvation Army Red Kettles Set New Record). But despite their honorable work during the holiday season, the Salvation Army’s marketing efforts have always been quite slim. As the group’s Development Director Craig Evans put it, “The Salvation Army has not invested heavily in marketing or advertising, we’ve prided ourselves on good stewardship…83 cents of every dollar going back to services.” (MacLean, 2009)

In 2009, with the intake of donations down 20-30 percent from previous years, the group turned to Portland, Maine-based marketing agency Via who agreed to help with their marketing needs at no cost. As Via copy editor Mike Irvine states, “We embraced the idea that we had no money–and so that’s where the idea started, let’s do a campaign that cost nothing.”

The campaign itself consisted of guerilla-style marketing incorporating the use of stamped messages on everything from pizza boxes to coffee cups, and used inspirational messages inscribed on glass surfaces in restrooms and on vehicles that would be driving around town. The effort took a great amount of coordination on the part of Via and included the help of 50 local businesses who agreed to help. As Evans further elaborated in the article “I look back at our origins, we started as a street ministry and sort of a guerrilla movement, why not use these guerrilla tactics…it’s a good fit.”

A campaign like this is effective for a number of different reasons. First and foremost, the Salvation Army enrolled local businesses into their efforts whose participation cost them nothing extra. Doing so meant that even though they maintained the collection buckets at larger stores like Wal-Mart, their campaign had greater reach through added exposure than in the past. Likewise, the target message was very clear, thought provoking, and relevant to the medium they chose. An example would be the stamps used on the products of local businesses. One such stamp read, “This ad cost nothing. The money we saved advertising on this hot cup helps us provide warm food for the homeless.”

For the IC statement, I would imagine it went something like this: “With your help, the Salvation Army provides for those in need each holiday season and throughout the year.”

Please check out the original news report video at this link to see the actual executions, and view the Salvation Army case study by Via Marketing at this link.

References

MacLean, M. (2009, May 14) Salvation Army’s edgy new marketing campaign. Retrieved December 24, 2011 from http://www.necn.com/Boston/Business/2009/05/14/Salvation-Armys-edgy-new/1242352124.html

Salvation Army Red Kettles Set New Record (2012, March 16) Retrieved November 25, 2012 from http://salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf/vw-dynamic-index/EC697EA3613F2070852576E8004C7DCB?Opendocument