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Thursday, June 30, 2011

Five Common Mistakes of Product Recommendations Campaigns

This article first appeared on iMediaConnection, here. 


“Consumers who viewed this product, also bought that product…” Amazon’s been doing it for years, and for them and other ecommerce pros who are getting it right, product recommendations are a very effective way to beef up shopping cart sizes and pull in more revenue per customer. This specific form of online targeting, however, hasn’t always been so easy for marketers to achieve. The good news is that with new automated solutions in play, they can now easily execute similar types of cross-sell and up-sell campaigns on their site.
As they venture into what may very well be new territory (despite being relatively commonplace), marketers should avoid making the following five common mistakes that plague product recommendation campaigns:
Mistake #1: You try to manually set all the recommendations rules
Until now, teal-time targeting and recommendations have been considered too difficult for marketers to implement because only rules-based models/technology existed.  And let’s face it: we’re only human. It’s nearly impossible to predict all possible behavior combinations and rules necessary to target and tailor to shoppers needs and wants. Think about the number of products you hold. Now, multiply that number by the number sold per month (or even per day) and the amount of site traffic you have… The mathematical logic here is enough to make anyone’s head spin.
But now automated solutions exist that empower marketers to achieve this level of targeting without creating complex matrixes and rules, or bogging down their web developer and IT resources. When it comes to recommendations, your best bet is to find a software that automates the process for you, that employs a predictive model that learns and adapts about consumers behaviors over time, that can perform testing within your campaigns and of course, easily integrates with your POC system. Make it easy on yourself—the ROI rewards alone will be worth it.
Mistake #2: You don’t test your recommendations
Anyone who runs a complex ecommerce site has probably already done a fair amount of A/B testing and Multivariate Testing to test user journeys, shopping carts, search, buttons…and anything that impacts conversion rates and the user experience. You feel you’ve got content optimization down and are ready to move on to the next big thing: product recommendations.
But a common error most marketers make is forgetting to perform testing on the actual recommendation campaigns. The truth is, just like every thing else on the site, the “how” and “where” of the product recommendations’ presentation, including  their content and design—is just as important as the  recommendations themselves. Your site and consumers will always be evolving, and therefore testing and optimization is a continuous process for all important conversion elements.
Mistake #3: You recommend products that are out of stock
Next to a poor site experience, there’s nothing more frustrating than getting a customer interested and excited about a product only to find that it’s unavailable. Bottom line: Don’t kill your recommendations efforts by pushing a product that’s no longer available.
This is an easy one to avoid: your back-end POS system should carefully track stock quantities and this knowledge can be easily integrated with your product recommendations technology to ensure that no out-of-stock items show up in your campaigns.
Mistake #4: You don’t integrate product reviews
Next to price, product reviews have one of the biggest impacts on customer buying decisions. Whether you’re selling a hotel room or a cell phone, consumers want to be reassured about what they are buying—and will go looking for reviews wherever they can find them. If you haven’t already, test out placement of product reviews in the buying phase and make it easy for the consumer to retrieve the information they want about products buy hosting product reviews from both a previous buyer and editorial perspective. Don’t risk them wandering away from your site and abandoning the check-out process.
One caveat here, though: leave the product reviews for the pre-shopping cart phase. Once your customer has already performed the “Add to Basket” or “Book Now” click, don’t distract them with information that isn’t imperative to entering credit card details and hitting a complete button.
Mistake #5: You offer a distracting or competitive product in the shopping cart
Your recommendations technology offers you insight that allows you to predict products your visitors might be interested in, and therefore, by default, products they either wouldn’t be interested in or those that will distract them. Distracting products are those that compete with known preferences. For example,  if your technology recognizes that a visitor has added a Blackberry to his or her shopping cart, it should not recommend a DROID. This type of recommendation not only interrupts their buying thought process and make them reconsider the purchase path they’re already on, it eliminates the opportunity to offer them complimentary items, such as a case or headset at the time of purchase. These recommendations increase cart sizes and overall revenue, rather than disrupt the flow of the purchase.
Another recommendation that might work here would be a “Buy one Blackberry, get a second for half-price” deal.
Bottom line: your recommendations campaigns are meant to enhance, not distract.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Customer Experience Management: How Online Travel Companies Can Increase Engagement and Loyalty


Last night I flew to Miami, along with several members of the Maxymiser team to attend one of the best events for online marketers in the travel industry: EyeForTravel's Online Marketing Strategies for Travel 2011. This morning, I'll be keynoting on a great panel about "Keeping Pace with a Rapidly Changing Online Travel Distribution Landscape." This is such an important topic for online travel marketers, and one which I am highly passionate about. Today, travel customers have increasingly high expectations of brand, it's important to understand what movements in the field of Customer Experience Management have led to improvements in loyalty across different marketing channels.

Prior to the show, I had a chance to sit down with EyeForTravel to discuss the power (and necessity) of personalization to improve the online booking experience. This originally published on eyefortravel.com here. 

Q: Which according to you has been the most striking or potentially path-breaking development in the travel sector in the last six months or so? Would you call it a real innovation at this stage?

Mark Simpson: With the shift of owning the customer moving back towards suppliers the need for competitive sites which relate to each individual visitor is more than ever. This focus will create innovation. However, the biggest innovations are actually happening outside the travel industry, but have a dramatic affect on the way in which travel businesses need to operate in order to compete and be successful.

Social, Mobile, Coupons, Group Buying and Customer Experience Management all hold massive potential upside for travel businesses who get their strategies right.

Q: It is considered that travel personalization is still in its infancy. Considering the myriad of options available for planning and booking, what do you think are the major challenges that travel suppliers and intermediaries are facing today? How can their websites enable them to overcome challenges pertaining to optimizing relationships with their audience?

Mark Simpson: There is no doubt that the travel market is more competitive than ever with suppliers competing with intermediaries and OTAs, as well as each other.

The biggest opportunity to increase engagement and loyalty is in customer experience management – empowering customers to give direct opinion on how your digital sites should look through A/B and multivariate testing (which sets the base line) and personalizing the customer experience – so you become the most relevant travel brand for that individual.

There are now solutions on the market that drive content in real-time based upon a visitor’s online behavior to be more directed to the needs of each individual at that point in time. For example, if a traveler returns after starting a reservation, the experience could be more targeted to enable that visitor to complete the reservation.

Content decisions may also be driven by a traveler’s loyalty status and reinforce their loyalty status and importance during the online interaction.

Q: What do you recommend when it comes to developing customer experiences based on objective, data-driven decisions and continuous website optimization?

Mark Simpson: The leaders in the online space – Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc - have one thing in common: they have never gone through a major website redesign. Instead these brands have continually iterated their sites, testing every change before rolling it out to all visitors. This daily, weekly and monthly iteration allows customers to "tell" companies what they like (and don't like) through real interaction. The data driven results are un-contestable. This is available to every company now, and in recent developments pioneered by Maxymiser, the control of content testing and personalization sits with the business, rather than IT, so the speed required for true iteration is now a reality.

Q: Can you elaborate on how new travel sites are setting benchmarks for the industry to follow?

Mark Simpson: Gone are the days where markets are slow moving. If you're not innovating and continually improving how you interact with your customers you will fall behind. If your competitors don't overtake you can bet your bottom dollar that there is someone in their bedroom focusing on doing what you are, but in a different way. Recent research has shown that 1 in 5 travelers encounter problems when booking their travel. These people are young and tech-savvy, and a third of these people's first port of call when problems arise is to find a solution with a different company.

Q: In your opinion, how can travel sites go about utilizing features such as videos, blogs etc and set specific, measurable goals related to business metrics, and then track them regularly and measure the ROI?

Mark Simpson: The only way to accurately measure the performance of new content, whatever that content may be, is to test it in a live environment against a default, and measure the change in desired response(s).

Every site change needs to be measured by its impact on conversion rates, revenue, lifetime value and overall success of the visitor completing the objective, no excuses. The biggest failing is not to try. If you aren’t trying, you aren’t moving forward. It’s easier than ever to safely try new and innovative content using a dynamic testing platform.

Q: Travel sites are connecting more with their customers through social media and interactive website features, including mobile applications or offering a Live Help feature. How do you think sites are starting to move beyond the traditional price/ date/ destination search criteria to provide more flexibility to customers?

Mark Simpson: Companies have had to move beyond traditional search methods. Customers are looking in many areas and through other channels for travel ideas, advice, research, information and booking methods. This breeds opportunity, particularly for travel companies to touch the customer with targeting and personalized messaging as more is known about their preferences and behavior.

Q: Can you elaborate on the latest trends pertaining to conversion management? How do you assess the maturity level of A/B and multivariate testing solutions in the travel sector?

Mark Simpson: Content testing has become mainstream thanks to significant innovations in the market coming from Maxymiser. The ability to test without touching IT is the single biggest leap as it empowers marketers - truly allowing testing anywhere, anytime with a low total cost of ownership. Some of the claims of incumbents in the market are only now playing out due to these advanced solutions.
Automating the use of learning algorithms is another major step forward allowing for faster testing, less risk and substantially increased flexibility, which in turn enables companies to be able to test without encroaching on day-to-day business practices.

Q: How do you think the travel industry is going about machine learning and is leveraging semantics dynamically to understand what people might like at the moment they search, creating a unique personalized filter through which they can see what’s most relevant to them? What do you think have been major breakthroughs for machine learning considering that its still early stages for the same?

Mark Simpson: I see very few travel companies doing this successfully right now, However, for the first time it is easy to achieve this with SaaS-based solutions. So the good news is there is no reason not to try it.

Thursday, June 02, 2011

Mark Simpson to Keynote at EyeforTravel 2011


Mark Simpson, Maxymiser's Founder and President, will be a featured keynote presenter to kick off the EyeForTravel Online Marketing Strategies for Travel 2011 on June 7-8 in Miami, FL. Mark will speak alongside Gareth Gaston, SVP Global e-Commerce, Wyndham Hotel Group, Krista Pappas, Global Travel Industry Director at Bing.com, Microsoft, and Tom Bacon, Former VP Revenue Planning, Frontier Airlines, to discuss how to "Keep Pace with a Rapidly Changing Online Travel Distribution Landscape."


For nearly a decade this well established event has helped hundreds of travel marketers, get ahead and stay ahead with the world of online marketing. The highly researched program line-up never fails to deliver insightful presentations, case studies and poignant debate.


Mark is also set to moderate a session track on Day 1, entitled, "Create the Perfect Travel Website - Inspire, Engage and Convert". He will be joined by speakers from National Park Trips, Nickelodeon Hotels, ICE Portal and Accor North America.


A travel industry veteran, prior to Maxymiser, Mark headed up online marketing and business development for Travelport, focusing in particular on the acquisition and integration of ebookers, Octopus Travel, Hotel Club and RatesToGo. Latterly Mark headed-up the Business Development, Search and PPC teams for Travelport.


Maxymiser still holds a few extra FREE conference passes for anyone who would like to attend the premier online travel event of the year. We hope to see you there!