This document discusses key factors for maintaining online commerce customer retention. It covers the 4 C's: conversion, automated channel crossings, cooperative communications with third parties, and clarity of messaging. Retention is increasingly important as ecommerce growth shifts from acquiring new customers to retaining existing ones. Data analytics and personalized messaging are critical to understand customer behavior and increase engagement of high value customers through relevant promotions.

1. Customer Retention:
Learn Critical Factors
for Maintaining Online
Commerce
By Dawn Marie Yankeelov, Aspectx

2. Tech To Be Covered: 4 C’s of
Customer Retention
• Conversion
• Automated Channel Crossings
• Cooperative Communications w Third Parties
• Clarity of Messaging
• Conclusion

3. Do We Still Need Websites?
--”Think wholesale, less retail. Think
distribution, less destination. Think serving,
less selling.
--Websites are important because you own them.
They feed into your database, and the users
they attract tend to more loyal and viral, a big
reason we should never give short shrift to
direct feedback flows.”
---Pete Blackshaw, Ad Age, August 2010

4. Ecommerce: Recession?
• The number of online shoppers through May 2010 at
the sites of Akamai clients was up 11.87% over an
average day in 2009—which the Akamai Online
Shopping Data Visualization Tool sets as its
benchmark.
• Last year shoppers were 6.23% below that average.
• Transactions 2010 were up 36.71% over the average
day vs. 21.2% on Memorial Day 2009, and sales were
up 37.44% vs. 24.33% last year.

5. Ecommerce:
Maintains Annual Growth

6. Retention vs. Acquisition
• 2000-2007: Ecommerce growth averages 20%
annually
• Focus on acquiring large masses of increasing new online
shoppers
• 2007-2009: Ecommerce growth totals 10%
• Focus shifts to retaining highly valuable customer
bases and maximizing conversion of visitors to
buyers
• Packstream Research, 2009

7. Key to Retention and Conversion
lies in the Customer Experience
“Customer experience is the hot concept of the moment in
business circles. It's certainly not a bad thing to be pleasant
with customers and make them comfortable, but too often
companies are using ‘customer experience’ as a firewall
between themselves and customers. The other half of customer
service -- and the thing that balances out ‘Have a nice day!’ -- is
overt and outbound customer engagement.”
--Denis Pombriant, Managing Principal of the Beagle Research Group in CRM Buyer,
2010

8. Conversion Rate Possibilities
In November of 2008, almost one-third
(30.6%) of all visitors to ProFlowers.com
made a purchase — the highest conversion
percentage among all retail websites,
according to Nielsen.

9. Conversion Begins with Greater
Message/Product Relevancy
…greater Product Relevancy begins
with Consumer Analytics

10. Usability Increases Conversion
• Analytics can help test site
usability
• Eddie Bauer decreased
home page departures by
41% through Coremetrics
usability tests.

11. Altered by Behavior (Maxymizer)
1. U.K. mass merchant TheHut.com discovered
that moving its “Add to Basket” button off of its
category pages boosted conversions 64%.
2. A red circle placed at the top of every product
image indicating the discount from the regular
retail price worked.
3. Not having the Add to Basket icon at the bottom
of each product listing left more room to show
more products on a page without having to scroll
down as far.

12. Tied to
Google
Analytics

13. New Class:
Ranging from $49 to $499

14. Also Helping Increase Conversion:
More Relevant Search
• May 2010: thefind overtakes Yahoo Shopping to
become No. 2 search engine for retail queries,
according to comScore
• Trailing only Google, thefind’s search engine helps
users make buying decisions before visiting the retail
site

15. Survey Said….
• A picture is worth a
thousand words.
• 77% of surveyed
retailers currently are
or intending to
incorporate images
into paid search.

16. Conversion Includes Social
Media

17. 5 Social Media Trends to Watch
1. Crowdsourcing
2. Group Buying
3. Mobile Ads leading
to Payments
4. Comparison Pricing
5. Having a Social
Media Policy

18. Best Practices/New Tools
Digital River clients that deploy its
new SocialStream tracking tool can
send any product promotion or other
announcements through their
Facebook and Twitter accounts and
receive reports on how much traffic
and revenue they generated,
conversion rates, and other metrics
such as revenue per visitor.

19. Case Samples: Dell, 1-800 Flowers, P&G
brand Pampers, MyEtsy, Threadless
Social E-Commerce Services
BrandMe
Creating Virtual Models for effective on-
line shopping. Are you ready for the
runway? Create your own 3D virtual model
for women, and dress up with the latest
looks.
Social Store Builder
The solution enables merchants to push
their products onto social networks sites
such as MySpace and Facebook.
Off the Wall
$30K plus 8%, a selling app for your
company in FB status updates.

20. Hot Stuff: Discounts of Day

21. Twitter Climbs on board

22. Amazon: Watch It Unfold

23. The Gilt Plan

24. A whopping 27%
of all Yelp
searches come
from their iPhone
application.
Over half a million
calls were made to
local businesses
directly from the
iPhone App, or
one in every five
seconds.
Nearly a million
people generated
point-to-point
directions to a
local business
from their Yelp
iPhone App last
month.

26. The Mecca: The
Recommendation Engines
• Personalization delivered through ‘mass
customization’
“The more targeted the offer, the fewer gimmicks you
will need to sell it. It will sell itself because it is what
people want.”
--Edwina Dunn, Dunnhumby

30. Proving in Metrics

31. Conversion:
The Spenders Matter

32. Getting Them to Notice
--Women utilize the Internet at a slightly higher rate than men
for professional information or enrichment (Pew Internet).
--Women still appear to be time-starved purchasers.
--There is a small but significant increase in the amount spent by
women as work hours increase. Women with high-speed
connections, who research products and who participate in
Internet auctions spend more online.
--By far, though, the largest effect on spending (for both women
and men) comes from having an online deferred payment
account.
Brendan Hannah and Kristina M. Lybecker,
Colorado College Working Paper 2009-02
May, 2009

33. Following Best Practices on
Cross Channels
Best in Class Performance shared several
characteristics:
1. 56% use campaign performance to optimize future
campaigns
2. 52% optimize all cross channel efforts by eliciting
input from agencies, partners, and other in the value
chain
3. 50% update customer profiles based on customer
interaction --Aberdeen Group, 2009

34. The Ultimate Truth
Focus on High Value Customers
to Increase Return on Marketing
Investments.
It’s Cheaper to Upsell or to Cross-Sell
to Existing Customers
than
it is to New Customers.

35. Strategic Measurement
A. # of Loyal Shoppers. % of brand purchased by loyal
shoppers; % of marketing budget allocated to loyal
shoppers.
B. Create More Value. Basket size, categories shopped,
visit frequency.
C. More Relevant Product Assortment by Key
Shoppers.
D. Quality Trials Vs. Brand-Equity Advertising.
Shopper Marketing Magazine,
June 2009

36. Questions to Ask
• Can we send individualized communications to our top
shoppers? Personalized URLs, for example.
• How can we understand our price-sensitive shoppers, and the
prices at which we hold and grow their business?
• How can we create a new product line that is very relevant to
our high value shoppers?
• How can we reflect shopper behavior and put our brand where
our shoppers will expect to find it?
--from Dunnhumbly USA white paper,
2009

37. Move to Micro-Targeting
• To identify and reach people that will
consume these more relevant items
• Companies switch spend from mass
broadcast to highly targeted attention
grabbing activities for tighter
segments
• Consumers interact online through
“relevant published content”

38. Methods to Target Consumers
A. Rules-Based: Show Items Based on Rules
B. Comparative Filtering: Show Items Based on
User Ratings
C. Behavioral Targeting: Show items based on
inferred behavioral segments
Key Fact: Text and Content Characteristics
Have a Measurable Effect

39. Behavioral Inference has
reached the Web

40. Video Tops the Cross Channel
Campaign List

41. Video Stats Lift Performance
• According to Forrester Research, the percentage of the
top 50 US online retailers that offer videos on their
sites increased to 68% in 2009 from 18% in 2008.
• Numerous case studies have also confirmed that
visitors who view product videos are more likely to
buy than visitors who do not. (Emarketer Survey,
2009)

42. Product Videos Work

43. Incentives and Payment Cards
On the Rise

44. Mobile Marketing
Target understands the importance of
having multichannel mobile retail support.
• In May 2008, Target launched its mobile site, where guests could view products,
read reviews, check ratings, find the nearest store, browse the Weekly Ad and view
latest marketing campaigns.
• The retailer launched the Target iPhone application later that year, in November
2008.
• In 2009, Target extended the mobile offerings on its iPhone application and for
mobile in general, just in time for the holiday season.
• During the 2009 holiday season, the Target iPhone application ranked as high as
No. 1 in the free lifestyle application download category.

45. Cooperative Communication to
TurnTo Networks, a
Third Parties
leader in social
commerce, today Facebook Open Graph
announced the general package: sites will have
availability of the access to a one-click
"Like" button that
TurnTo social
connects to Facebook,
commerce suite, more "social plug-ins"
providing online to pull an individual
retailers with next- user's Facebook friends
generation social and their activity into
shopping tools… by third-party sites, and a
over 35 online stores, toolbar that aggregates
and adds the new all these features as
well as live chat.
social purchasing
sharing product to the
line-up.

46. WinBuyer Corp.

47. Third Party Listings

48. Google Product Search

49. Reviews and the Like

50. Google: Your Friend

51. Value of Biggest Fan
• Track Fan’s Level of Engagement by
• Sweepstakes
• Contests
• Promotions
• Lists
• Polls
…..right on your fan pages…..

52. Packstream
• Retention marketing software delivering
relevancy at the point of package delivery

53. Adotas.com Reports
Fan cross applications see a seven to 10
times increase in interaction rates with their
social media content and often
quadruple sales…..
….and consumers can be analyzed
for upsell…..

54. The Summer Romance: 2010 Cross
Channel Couple
Amazon friends Facebook
The world's largest retailer is using the social
networking giant to serve up personalized
product recommendations. Consumers can
log in to their Facebook profiles through
Amazon.com to receive tips for movies,
music and books.

55. Clarity of Messaging
• Dynamic Pricing Possibilities
• Languages of Choice
• Payment Options
• Insider Deals, Content, Access to People
• Listening to Feedback and Building Lifetime
Relationships

58. Clarity of
Messaging
101:
Dynamic
Promotions to
Individual
Customers

59. WrapUp
• CLARITY OF MESSAGING
Customer Retention means Targeted
Messaging to your Public Audiences
• MicroTargeting
• Customer Feedback and Crowdsourcing

60. Wrapup
• COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATIONS
Customer Retention means Social
Business/Social Media
• Calls to Action
• Engagement (contests, solicited
feedback, acknowledgement of top
buyers)
• Comparative Pricing
• Reviews, and Participation

61. Wrapup
• CHANNEL CROSSINGS
Customer Retention means cross
marketing amongst a number of
mediums
• Watch for more Mobile
• Sophisticated Customer Profiling
• Touch Often theTop Valued Customers

62. Wrapup
• CONVERSION
Customer Retention means reviewing
online actions and converting them to
sales and upsells from the most loyal
customers.
• Data Analytics
• Outbound Customer Engagement
• Product Relevancy
• Usability Tests

63. Aspectx
• Dawn Marie Yankeelov, Founder of Aspectx
• dawny@aspectx.com
• Twitter: @dawnyaspectx
• Facebook, Linked In, Plaxo Pulse
• www.aspectx.com