Posted by: Interview - Dave Chaffey on November 14th, 2008

Dr. Dave Chaffey, is the Director and lead consultant for Marketing Insights Limited, an independent marketing consultancy. He is also the best selling author of Internet Marketing books used by digital marketing professionals and on many University and College Courses globally. His latest book, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, which features Arena Flowers’ case study is out in December 2008. Dave blogs regularly at digital marketing blog. He can be contacted at dave.chaffey@marketing-insights.co.uk.

Dave has been very kind in agreeing to our request for an interview for Flowers…Uncut. He shares his views on the challenges online Retailers, particularly small/startup businesses face in the online marketing environment and offers suggestions on improving website conversions to drive up sales. Read on…

Arena Flowers: Hello Dave. The Internet is a powerful channel of communication and commerce and has opened several new marketing avenues for small businesses. At the same time, it has also made possible many competitive threats and challenges. What are the main challenges online retailers face in the coming years and how should they react?

The biggest challenge for all online marketers has to be gaining and keeping attention, what the academics call “customer engagement”. Despite the Google monopoly, the search engines are still great for gaining attention for businesses that make the effort to understand the details of best practice.

SEO and Pay Per Click give a wonderful opportunity for small businesses since they level the playing field a little with more established businesses. Although the odds are still stacked in favour of the larger business because of their scale, small businesses that are more agile and follow the latest best practice in SEO and really understand the AdWords quality score can still compete online as the growth of Arena Flowers shows.

Keeping attention is a challenge due to online media fragmentation and more of us spending more time in social networks and reading blogs. Email marketing is vital as a customer retention tool, yet research by RedEye shows that around 60% of a typical permission-based list is “emotionally unsubscribed” or inactive over a 6 month period – subscribers never open or never click. To counter this you need to deploy what I call a “right-touching” contact strategy. Use the power of technology to automatically target customers with triggered email promotions and personalized web messages and where that fails offline contacts, according to their position in the lifecycle and their recent activity measured through recency, frequency and latency.

Arena Flowers: How do you see the role of search marketing and online advertising within the overall media mix, now and going forward?

With 90% of searches in the UK completed using Google according to Hitwise, we’re really talking Google marketing. It’s frightening that Google is now used to mediate almost every buying decision with most purchases starting with a search. The important point to understand is that the majority of searches which reach a retail site for a well-known brand are navigational – including <brand name> + <product name>.

So small businesses have to try to create a compelling brand experience which means that they are searched for by name at some point in the selection process. Large businesses such as Directline.com invest heavily in print and TV to establish this brand association with product, so small businesses are at a disadvantage here, but it shows the potential of tactical offline communications for small businesses. Many businesses who have analysed it have found that although online display ads have low click through rates, they do help in creating awareness and can add a brand onto the prospects consideration list.

Arena Flowers: The ability to drive traffic to a website is only a part of the objective for online retailers. The ultimate objective is to retain customer’s interest throughout the shopping experience to ensure higher levels of conversions. However, many retailers face a challenge of converting customer visits to a sale. What are main issues an Online Retailer should address to maximise conversions?

I have written a free article called the Perfect Landing Page which gives further tips.

Arena Flowers: What are your five golden rules for online businesses?

I’m a practical person, so these are practical rules: I’m assuming the strategy is in place targeting the right product at the right customers and the cost of acquiring new and repeat customers is being carefully controlled.

First, you have to put the time into reviewing and acting on the analytics once its setup. In many large businesses, not enough time is put into this, again smaller businesses can win here.

Second, and an example of the analytics you should be reviewing, all online businesses should measure and act on bounce rates for everything – different referring sites, different AdGroups, different landing pages, different product types. Work from the bottom up to increase overall conversion.

Third, become experts at Search Engine Marketing and online PR – it’s too important to outsource everything, you need to develop the internal expertise.

Fourth, become experts at all aspects of email marketing which affect response starting with a communications and targeting strategy to deliver relevant, timely messages and then going through to more technical issues like making sure your emails are delivered and render well in the inbox even when images are blocked.

Fifth, you have to get direct customer feedback on what works and doesn’t work for them in the experience to make improvements for the future. There’s only so much you can gain from analytics tools.

Arena Flowers: Which online businesses do you particularly admire?

Many traditional businesses translate their existing offers online. I admire businesses who use the unique facilities of the web to offer more than other channels to add to the brand. I call this the Online Value Proposition.

Looking at multi-channel companies, I admire the way that Dell really use the web to listen to their customers from their Ideastorm site to various blogs and YouTube Channels. Many businesses I speak to don’t see the value of the blog and are missing out due to their fear of the unknown.

The big travel companies like Thomson (Tui) and Thomas Cook have also worked really hard to use the web to support the customer in buying online. Thomson has it’s labs section much like Google Labs and will trial ideas, but pull them if they don’t work.

Of the online pureplay companies, I admire Euroffice for the way they are building an online brand in the Office Supplies sector and the way in which they use “right touching” through email and the web to deliver personalized offers for the customers. And of course, I have to mention Arena Flowers which shows how a new company can grow rapidly and profitably if they harness the latest technology and choose the right marketing approaches.

Arena Flowers: That’s great. Thank you for your time!

If you liked this post, you might enjoy our other posts on Brand Reputation Management and Protecting Website Content.

Filed under: General, Matters Webby on November 14th, 2008

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