One of Outriders long term clients NetSuite recently hosted an event roadshow on the subject of Cloud Computing starting with Sydney on November 15th then moving on to Melbourne on the 17th and concluding with Manila on November 22nd.

Outrider was in attendance for the first event at the majestic Sydney Opera House on November 15th 2011.

It was a packed auditorium to hear a range of speakers talk about the new wave of Information Technology evolution, Cloud Computing.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson welcomed the crowd and then went on to present a visual representation of the brief history of cloud computing, including initial skepticism over the concept.

The Cloud Enabled Business

Next on the agenda was Rod Moynihan, the Cloud/SaaS Director for Accenture Australia with over 15 years of experience in all aspects of Business Applications, Cloud Computing and Outsourcing.

Rod opened his presentation by showing the audience a video on Cloud Computing.

The video highlighted the fact that for the next wave of consumers (kids) the internet has always been there, technology is not a restriction or an excuse and should be fast moving and adaptable. They are the future customers and competition of businesses today. Cloud Computing will be expected to be the norm as technologies rapidly evolve.
Optimising IT systems is no longer just a concern for IT executives, but rather any business executives looking to implement key business applications sooner, improve processes and foster growth.

The critical element to meeting these needs is flexibility and customisation – which Cloud Computing rather than version locked IT systems offers.

Before moving ahead with a cloud based IT system business owners need to ask themselves the following 5 questions.

- Is my business ready?
- What customisation options are available?
- Do I need to throw away existing ERP content?
- What are the risks involved?
- What are the future options available?

Further to these 5 questions Rod summarised a few key recommended steps for implementation;

- Have a robust and defined strategy
- Start small and work your way up
- Scale your system as fast as possible

Equipped with the answers to the above questions and following the recommended steps for implementation business owners are in a good position to make an informed decision on the future of IT for their company.

Cloud Computing: Revitalising the Enterprise

The next presenter was Anil Sabharwal, who is Head of Enterprise Product Management Australia and New Zealand for Google.

Anil opened with an analogy of missed opportunities, referencing Ronald Wayne, who most likely no one had heard of. Ronald Wayne had a 10% share in Apple before they were a large and profitable company. He didn’t see the business going anywhere, so he sold his share back to Steve Jobs prior to Apple launching for $2500. Had he kept his initial share he would be worth billions in 2011.

How can Ronald have predicted the future of technology? How can anyone?

The point is to be as educated as possible on new trends and developments and ensure you are prepared for whatever comes up.

Anil described the three major “patterns of disruption” at the moment as being Mobile, Cloud and Social.

These areas should be primary businesses focus for 2012, but most companies probably won’t place it as a top priority.

Cloud Computing Security

Security is a big concern for many individuals who rely on IT systems to run their business and store their personal data.

Anil gave the analogy of a bank vs. keeping money under the mattress. Initially this idea was met with resistance by people who were accustomed to always having their assets within reach and felt a significant degree of vulnerability placing their asset management in the hands of others. Over time of course the banking solutions proved to be far superior to self-managed finance solutions, as 3rd party entities are able to provide a much higher and scalable degree of security.

Cloud Computing too offers a higher degree of IT security than traditional systems, which suffer the significant disadvantage of having to rely on physical locations to store their data and the inherent maintenance requirements that come with it.

The internet is also a far more reliable and secure platform than maybe a lot of people realise. If your company building suffers catastrophic damage you will still be able to recover all of your data and software on a cloud system – merely in minutes or hours compared to weeks or months.

Cloud Computing – Competitive Edge for Success

Zach Nelson came back on stage to go into detail on how Cloud Computing can offer a competitive business edge for success.

Primarily his address focused on the dramatically higher productivity and reduced technology costs of a Cloud system compared to traditional IT systems.

Software and application updates on a Cloud system occur in real time, and do not require an IT team to action. Cloud systems are not version locked, and thus the Cloud software any person is using will always be the most current one.

Having a single data source through Cloud Computing allows all your individual business systems to be integrated seamlessly, from e-commerce, final, HR to Marketing. Different permission levels can be easily configured ensuring only the most appropriate staff member has access to each business area.

Cloud Computing Product Demo

Philippa Cail from NetSuite then went through a product demo of NetSuite’s software with the audience to demonstrate how effective cloud computing can be for managing finance and HR requirements.

Panel Discussion

Several businesses currently implementing cloud computing IT systems led a panel discussion with the audience to go through their businesses experiences using a cloud computing IT system.

Conclusion

Cloud computing represents a fundamental shift in the way users operate online.

Not only a shift from a business perspective but also from an individual user perspective. People are increasingly on the move and need to be able to access the information they want anywhere and at any time. They don’t want to be held back by the limitation of physical data storage systems. The gap between work, home and play is dramatically decreasing. There is a need to have all of these systems seamlessly integrate with one another.

Younger generations who have known the internet to exist their whole lives will one day become participants in the global market, either as business owners or customers. This will also have an impact on search behavior. For them, technology will not be a barrier or limitation.

This will have an impact on search behavior as there will be a growing requirement for larger volumes of data to be stored. It just isn’t practical to create more and more server space to store all of this data.

IT systems constrained by physical hardware and requiring staff to maintain them are on their way out.

The future is in the clouds.

A perk of working at Outrider is that we get to visit the cool Google head office in Pyrmont for various educational and networking events. Conveniently, their offices are located directly across the road from the Star City Casino! This week, myself and a colleague had the pleasure of attending the casino… I mean, Google’s head office, for an event aimed at assisting advertisers in increasing the effectiveness of their ads.

The hosts for the day consisted of Google’s senior management team: Nick Leeder, Managing Director Google Australia & NZ and Aliza Knox, Director of Sales & Operations APAC. Speakers for the day were keynote Mel Silva, Google Industry Lead, talking about “The Perfect Ad for Everyone” and Brendan Forster, Google Product Specialist, who went through some of the “New Innovations in Search”.

The Perfect Ad for Everyone

Mel Silva believes that there are four elements that make a perfect ad:

• Personal – Ads that connect to your audience on a personal basis have increased effectiveness. A case study used for this was the “Hunter Shoots a Bear” TippEx Youtube video, which allowed the audience to personalise the ad by telling the hunter what to do. TippEx saw sales in Europe increase by 30% as a result of this personal ad.
• Social – Ads that make the audience feel they are “part of something” are more effective in engaging customers. To demonstrate this case, Mel used the example of MINI’s CountryMan Competition. This social campaign utilised smartphones with built-in GPS to allow players to home in on a virtual MINI on their iPhone, catch it and then run as fast as they could out of its orbit to prevent other potential takers from swiping it. The player with the virtual mini at the end of the campaign won a real MINI car. In a week of this being live, MINI had 11,000 participants and massive brand exposure due to following of the competition which literally “stopped traffic” in areas where the virtual car visited.



• Relevant – The more relevant an ad is to a user, the better the reaction. Mel used Travelocity’s customised retargeting ads to demonstrate the impact of increasing relevancy of ads. Last year, the travel site changed their online display ad strategy and ditched generic messages like “Find low fares on Travelocity. Book now.” Instead, Travelocity display ads incorporated new remarketing technology to serve custom ads based searches done on the Travelocity website. For example, a customer interested in flights from Chicago to Las Vegas were served display ads that contained “Find low fares on Travelocity. Book Chicago to Las Vegas flights now!” The results drove Travelocity’s cost-per-transaction down 79%. It also saw a 230% increase in bookings; click-through rates jumped 651%.
• Speed: Mel highlighted that an intriguing ad that’s rapidly distributed can have positive results. Examples included VW’s superbowl ad that received 41.7 million views across the world and the Old Spice Ad, both of which went viral as a result of effective online channels.

Innovation & the Future of Search

Brendan Forster is the Product Specialist at Google and is renowned for always wowing the audience with something new from Google. This day was no different when Brendan demonstrated the latest developments in the Google search engine.

• Google Instant: A new built-in feature that enhances user experience of the search engine by pre-loading websites that are included in the Google search results. This new feature slashes 2-5 seconds off each search process.
• +1: You can now +1 any search engine result or sponsored ad of Google. You can also +1 any webpage that has the plug-in installed. These +1 buttons allow Google to further enhance the relevance of search engine results. Studies show 90% of online consumers trust recommendations of peers when searching and 71% say reviews help in deciding online purchases. The key takeaway from this – install the +1 plugin on your website!
• Google Voice Search: Google technology allows for searches to be performed by speech. This feature again enhances user experience through making it easier and faster to search. Importantly, this will result in searches becoming “longer” as less effort is exerted to obtain better results.
• Google Image Search: Ever been on vacation and taken a pic of a landmark only to forget what the name of the landmark when you get home? Google image search solves issues like these by allowing images to be uploaded to the Google search engine as a search query.

It’s obvious that Google is doing a great job at continually enhancing the organisation of information on the web. Attending this event, it’s clear to see that Google is still the “black jack” of the industry.

It was a great experience getting to speak with Amanda Connors from Priceline at Online Retailer on the 27^th of Sept. The topic we discussed was our journey last year building the new Priceline website; and how SEO helped build the key foundations to their overall online success.

Here are some of the tips that were mentioned about developing a website with SEO in mind:

• Understand your online users and how / what they search
• How do these search terms integrate as part of the content strategy?
• Alleviate technical roadblocks during the development to save production costs for your website
• Identify the SEO requirements and integrate this with the CMS build
• Consider search accessibility at the wireframe phase
• Repurpose existing digital assets such as videos, images, PDFs – the eMags for Priceline are a good example of this
• Most importantly, think about migration, migration, migration!

Layering the SEO foundation is like icing a multi-tiered cake! The key elements include:

What did this all mean to Priceline?

Amanda was kind enough to take us through Priceline’s success in creating a website which acts as their hub to all other multi-channels.

The highlights include:

• Building pages and content that caters to their target audience groups has helped segment the website. It provides these women with what they would look for in a Priceline store, in the online space:  Inner Girl, Savvy Woman, Spiritual Woman, and Contemporary Woman.
• Increase website exposure through all channels to gain: 350,000 page views, which included a 18% growth in organic traffic!
• Living the success of better brand visibility through organic results
• The organic conversions grew by 35%
• Priceline now have over 3.1 million members

The innovation doesn’t stop here for Priceline… the team at Priceline are evolving their website to include an eCommerce system where the Priceline store can be accessed anywhere online! As part of this expansion, SEO is yet again a key element that Priceline are embracing to maximize the exposure of their brand through the search engines.

Overall the presentation was exciting to be part of!

Here are some of the questions we were asked & their respective answers:

Q: What impact did SEO have to the page views growth for Priceline?

A: As we track the organic visits to any website, we can attribute that 18% growth was seen for Priceline in the search engines.

Q: Is there any tool which allows an old page to be compared to a new page?

A: Although there is no ‘magic tool’ which highlights the success of an old page vs. a new one, analysis and benchmarking can help determine what worked in the past and how this can then be integrated into the new website. A good starting point for the analysis would be to use a simple cache of the old page to highlight what the search engine saw of that page and compare this to the new page.

Q: What do I tell my developers when migrating the old site to a new website?

A: Ensure the developers migrate the old website using the right type of redirect! (server-side 301 redirect). This will help minimise the loss of links and facilitate a smooth transition for the new website to get indexed by the search engines.

Thanks again to anyone who attended the session and visited us at the Online Retailer booth.

We were in overdrive at the conference on Wednesday. So much to see and hear about, so much to share and blog as a result!

Here’s part 2 of our wrap up from Online Retailer on Wednesday. Enjoy!

KEYNOTE: Adventures of a Fast Growth Web Retailer – What We’ve Learnt So Far!

Presenter – Mark Rowland, StyleTread.com.au Co-Founder

Summary – Josh

While the online retail industry is still at infancy stage in Australia, Mark believes that smarter customers demand smarter online solutions. Style Tread was inspired by the Zappos business model of “delivering happiness”. It was a somewhat nostalgic session for me as the insights that Mark shared resonated with the keynote by Zappos during Online Retailer’s first conference in 2009.

After 18 months of exponential growth, Mark presented 9 lessons learnt, in order of importance which led to the business’s success:

1. Talent and culture is king

Wise words from a rich man. The core belief is that if you want to deliver happiness to your customers, your staff need to be even happier! Mark talks about various team building activities and the use of the “house” system, where everyone in Style Tread is part of a different house and competes against other houses in team building events.

A key takeaway with the house system was ensuring that each house had a mixture of members from different departments, to foster true team building as opposed to creating vendettas between Packaging vs Marketing teams.

2. Customer happiness

Need I say more?

3. Building meaningful relationships with all stakeholders

That includes your competitors! If your competitors offer a product which you do not have, why not refer a customer to them? Remember, delivering happiness comes first!

4. Be brilliant at the basics, and do the little things well

Paying attention to detail, and doing the little things well all contribute to the success of the bigger picture. Particularly when you’re dealing with tens of thousands of customers each month, it’s important that each customer get the support and attention that they expect for a great shopping experience.

5. Build for scalability and capitalise on growth opportunities

Scalability means cost efficiencies. Reducing costs means you can make your budgets work a lot harder for your business!

6. Be bold, celebrate your mistakes and create an entrepreneurial spirit

We learn best from failure. Having said that, they try not to make the same mistakes more than twice. As Albert Einstein says,

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

7. Realise that online retail is different to the bricks and mortar world

Coming from a bricks and mortar background, Mark stated that while he could apply learning from previous experience, online retail is a completely different ball game which requires a different business approach.

8. Make search engine marketing and analytics a core discipline

I could not agree more with this.

9. Consequently shift marketing budgets towards channels that deliver on CPCs and CPOs

Makes complete sense – make the channels that perform, perform stronger for you. Capitalise on it and make them work even harder for you!

Keynote, Pure Perfection: How ASOS is winning online customers today!

Presenter – Jon Kamaluddin, International Director, ASOS.com

Summary – Shad

We started this session with a few facts about ASOS. Below are just a few:

• ASOS was 7^th as Biggest Australian Online Retailer in 2007. By 2011 they have moved to 1^st
• 2 months revenue in 2011, amounted to the total annual revenue for 2007
• They stock 850 brands, distribute to 196 countries & have 2,400 staff
• The website receives 13 million Unique Browsers per week
• They generate 12 terabytes of data a day which is about 9million songs on iTunes and would take 17 years to listen to this
• The ASOS warehouse could fit 5 MCG stadiums
• 62% of the likes on Facebook are from international users

Jon started by explaining that you must give the customer what they want, as they are the heart of the business. One of the biggest core parts of the ASOS business was to make sure that there was free shipping worldwide, which seems to be a big feature that resonates with us here in Australia.

He also mentioned that ASOS is always trying to be domestically competitive in whatever country they’re in. They either try to match or better what their closest competitor is doing in that market.

He believes that competition is always growing. The battle for market share in Oz is increasingly aggressive, especially due to new entrants from the UK and China. He goes on to assure us that mobile is crucial, you must have a mobile site. Why? For Jon, 60% of ASOS users are purchasing on mobile! The user experience is vitally important, so along with the mobile site ensure you build a Mobile / iPad APP.

His final thoughts – Enjoy it! And experiment, as there is no rule book at this stage.

Keynote: Battle Plans: How Walmart will compete on the new multi-channel frontier

Presenter – Steve nave, SVP & General manager, Walmart.com

Summary – Shad

Steve talked about the multi-channel journey that Walmart went through from the year 2000, what lies ahead for them and some key learning’s from his own experience at Walmart.

2000 to date…

It kicked off with the perspective of Online Store vs. Physical Stores. Originally Walmart Online was not the same as Walmart Stores and as a result customers were getting confused.  This wasn’t helped by the fact that staff who worked in the stores didn’t know what was happening online and vice versa. This was due to the fact they were seen as different businesses entities and were kept in silos.

Walmart decided to bring an initiative called ‘Site to Store’, where they brought the products online to the store.  For example, if you wanted something online, you could order it in online for you and you could get this in 7 – 10 days at your store.  They realised this took too long and streamlined the process.

They introduced ‘Pick-Up Today’, where if you found it online you could pick it up the same day at your nearest store. This was a huge success for them and is still growing today. The improvements in the pick-up time, has brought increased customer satisfaction.

What lies ahead

Next, Steve discussed what lies ahead for Walmart. Social Media has been and will continue to be a big focus for Walmart. This is so they can see what customers want ‘today’ and how they are engaged with the brand. Another area of focus is delivery. With the growth of online and the evolution to ‘Pick-up Today’, there is the opportunity to develop new stores such as express stores and create new layouts for stores as well. Online has given Walmart an opportunity to create smaller stores which house fewer products. The remainder of their products will sit online. Finally Mobile is a growth area, people are relying on mobile more and more, so Walmart need to get on board with mobile shopping.

Key Learnings

Lastly, Steve shared his key learning’s. His first point was to ‘let the customer shop the way they want to shop’ i.e. don’t let the shop show the customer how to shop. His second point was to keep it simple, keep a low price online and to make sure you have fast delivery.

Winning Cross Platform Strategies: From website to mobile to iPad and back again

Presenter – Josh Hamwish, VP, E-Commerce Solutions, Diapers.com/Saop.com/Wag.com

Summary – Shad

Josh began with listing the three key areas that are a focus for retailers: 24/7 customer service, free next-day shipping and making sure you have a wide variety & selection of products. His own business objectives are – lifetime value, women as a target market and converting customers from low margin sites to high margin sites.

Josh stated that there is a ‘secret sauce’ to success. This sauce is to:

1. Understand the 3 shoppers & which one is your type of shopper
2. Sync your customer click path
3. Shorten the path to the product page.

The 3 shoppers

These are: Searchers, Browsers and the person has the answer in front of them. Each of the three are a unique type of shopper.  The searcher usually just goes to a site and searchers (funny that!), the browser is purely navigating through your site and the final shopper type is person who takes what’s in the middle of the page but just didn’t know it. Each site may have 1, 2 and maybe all 3 of these shoppers as their target market, so make sure you optimise your site to accommodate this.

Sync your customer click path

This is all about letting the customer go to where they want, listening to the customers signals and understanding the purchase funnel.

When understanding the purchase funnel this starts from getting the person to what they’re after on the site quickly and keeping them interested. This means providing them with the right search result and having strong product page. All of this helps to encourage them to buy!

You must also improve your hit ratio by directing multiple sections of the webpage to the same page i.e. the page that you really want them to go to! Give them a reason to stay on your site and give them a reason to buy.

Shorten the path to the product page

Josh concluded with best practices for mobile and iPad. Ideally it should only take 3 minutes to complete a task. Keep the search simple and remove other options – all helps to improve your hit ratio. He also said to include lists, a consistent checkout cart across the bottom of the app or site and make sure the flow is really easy. For Mobile and iPads it’s more about making the picture a tap screen selection as this builds better experience.

That’s all folks for this update – over & out!

Online Retailer is done and dusted for another year.

Outrider’s office was like central station yesterday with all the comings and goings! The flurry of activity was all down to plethora of sessions the team attended throughout the day.

Without further ado – summaries of sessions are outlined for you below.

Happy Reading!

Site Design and Optimisation: Increase Website ROI through Testing: Using A/B and Multivariate Tests to Find Optimal conversion for Your Site

Presenter – Craig Sullivan, Belron / @optimiseordie

Summary – Andryo / @andryoandryo

Craig started off with discussing a design process of a website. A company or brand typically involves these people when designing a website:

• Web / Online department
• Marketing
• Brand
• Legal
• CEO
• IT
• Some random new kids in the company that gives nothing but trouble

Do you see anyone missing, whom should really be involved in the process? That’s right, it’s the customer! They are the most important aspect, and whom the website is designed for. So why not involve them in the design and iterations?

Then the session continued to Craig’s approaches for MVT (Multivariate Testing) and Split A/B Testing. He used the analogy of pizza chefs / restaurants trying to figure out the best ingredients to be included in a pizza recipe. Firstly, identify the key ingredients, then mix randomly with other ingredients creating many versions of pizzas. From there, once tested, filter out the winners from the losers, and list out which ingredients are the winners. Think of this like a qualification on a Champions’ League Football (soccer). Then we have the quarter finals, semifinals, final, and then voilà: The winning team.

There are many types of MVT we can test, for example:

• Funnel test
• LPO (Landing Page Optimisation)
• Cross channel test (chat, telephone, other contact means)
• New features

And there are many tools available out there to do these tests:

• Visual Website Optimizer
• Google Web Optimizer
• Optimizely

Another analogy in optimising a website, think of it as a leak model. If for example the water supply comes to your house, but it is leaking all over the place through your pipes and gives you weak pressure. To get a better pressure, would you increase the water supply to your home, or fix the leaking pipes? We might want to fix the “leaked” conversions (bounced traffic) first, before launching any paid campaigns to increase our traffic.

Some of the learnings from Craig’s testing so far:

• Less is more
• Copy is king
• Create a large- distinct goal button
• CTA above the fold (don’t let the user scroll down just to find your gold button)
• CTA wording, headlines, copy, framing
• Never split attention from CTA (available save, print, back, and cancel buttons)
• Use goal oriented CTA wording (e.g. “Fix my window”, “Order cheap pizza”)
• Maintain a scent (E.g. users land on your site from a certain keyword, keep the “scent” on their journey)

One key message at the end of Craig’s presentation is:

MVT and A/B Testing need only lower effort and lower cost with big return if we compared to other optimisation efforts.

Happy testing people!

The Ultimate Roadmap for Driving Maximum E-Marketing ROI  (track A – 3pm 28/9/11)

Presenter – Dan Salter from Salmat Limited

Summary – Wayne

Key topic for this session was about how crucial it is to track attribution for conversion metrics analysis. Fine tuning and placing effort in this data collection process is as important as putting out the bin. The longer you leave it, the smellier it gets!

Key points of the session were:

1. 20-90% of all orders placed online will happen no matter what (ref. www.shop.org 2011)

2. 25-50% of buyer traffic will come from an email

3. Multi Chanel shoppers spend up to 6 times more than average shoppers (single channel)

Even though, given the headline of this event saying, “Learn in this session the latest strategies and winning techniques for: Fool proof data-driven decision-making”, the speaker perhaps, did not have the time required to go through the technique(s) as indicated.

Nevertheless, the event was insightful, relevant and important sauce for any online business venture.

Dan Salter words were primarily from his own case studies and experience.

Online Fraud 101 – Key Tips and Debunking The Myths

Presenter – Justin Roche, Director, E-Commerce (Aust & NZ), Visa

Summary – Wayne

Key points for this session were:

1. In 2010, there was an increase of online fraud by 38% (The most important point for this session – in my opinion)

2. The solution is to enlist “Verified by VISA” (a global VISA ‘product’) that uses Dynamic Authorisation Technology

Dynamic Authorisation Technology (from Verified by VISA) simply is a process where the assigned merchant cart page is plugged into VISA’s servers for the authentication process. It is basically an extra password layer, thrown into the mix, when making a purchase online. The extra password layer (allocated dynamically) is designed to keep the customer 100% satisfied, the merchant totally free from any responsibility if an act of fraud takes place and finally, keeping the hackers out of the loop!

You would not be mistaken thinking that this session was nothing more than a product advertisement for VISA.

Nevertheless, this product/service (or similar) should certainly be given a close look at, if one is considering setting up (or managing) an e-store of any description.

Translating the Anaconda In-store Experience to Online: The Adventure Starts Here!

Presenter – Andre Javes, CEO, Anaconda

Presenter – Joel Thorsen, Group Account Director, Bliss Media

Summary – Mat

This session focused on how national retailer Anaconda launched into the e-commerce market and brought the in-store experience online.

Key points relating to the website launch were;

• Anaconda launched a new website primarily to build online presence for their Bricks ‘n’ Mortar stores.
• The home page is designed heavily in flash to give the users a lot of interactivity. And then more SEO friendly pages have been used as the user delves deeper into the website.
• Supplying online orders via the closets store available, similar to that of Coles, dominos etc.. meaning the single website is generating revenue for many of the stores.
• Introduced a “members club” where members receive discounts and special notifications.

Overall it was a quick talk about how the integrated their In-Store presence with an online presence, they ensured that any catalogue offers we also made available on the website.

Website Analytics to Improve Website Performance

Presenter – Paul Robinson, Marketing & Communications Manager, ABCShop.com.au

Summary – Mat

This session focused on providing more comprehensive website metrics to give business owners a better idea of the performance of their online campaign.

• This was a study done on the ABC website where they did a little researched into Neuro Science/Neuro Marketing AKA The “Common Sense Approach”.
• They performed a lot of Multi Variant Testing and produced some interesting results. They identified that the colours used on their call to actions have a direct effect on the conversion rates, additionally the colours used on the website have a seasonality about them. Meaning that during summer they might use a certain colour scheme and then in winter it could change.
• Placing popular keywords into the on-site search bar increased the searches to that keyword (Obviously), however it also increased conversions for that particular product.
• They also talked about how they removed steps in the “Click Path” to produce faster conversion. Similar to that of our fissure reports. Sharing converting organic results with paid, and vice versa.
• 1 in 20 visits are coming from iOS devises (iPad’s and iPhone’s).
• TV/Console Web browsing is growing (Watch This Space), this was just a point they made adding to the iOS research where they explained they are seeing a growth in search coming from devices other than mobile and computer.
• Only the first 3-4 slides in a “Special Offer” or “Featured Products” slide show return value, after that click through diminishes.

Overall this presentation was about how they used multi variant testing to optimise the ABC website and lightly touched on the use of Neuro Marketing (Commenting on how Neuro Marketing is still in its infancy).

Panel: The new Retail Realities
Summary – Marion

Q: What is retail today?
Q: Did technology really change the way to sell products?
Q: Does the lowest price always win online?
Q: What is the future of the retail space?

These are the questions that have been asked to some of the most interesting retail players in Australia.

Dan Ferguson – Country manager – Vistaprint.com

“Everyone that is willing to work in retail today needs to embrace technology and not be scared with data.”

Clark Hamilton – Group Manager Sony Branded Channel ANZ, Sony Electronics

“Today a retailer needs to do more than putting a product on the shelf.
He needs to create an interaction, engage the customer, add a value.
The new KPI in retail is experience, not sales.”

Daniel Jarosch – Founding Director – Brandsexclusive

“The smartphones will be the next focus for retail in the coming years.”

Laura Yeomans – Country Manager, Shopstyle Australia

“When it comes to online retail, the lowest price doesn’t always win.
Don’t underestimate the value of the brand and the service.
Giving free delivery can have more effect than you think.”

Patrick Terrell – Marketing Director – Surfstitch.com

“When you’ll enter in a store in 5 to 10 years, the shop assistant will access a profile and will be able to give you recommendations according to your taste.
The future of retail is personalisation.”

Online Retailer Summary

Phew! Outrider would like to thank all of those involved who put in long hours to man the booth at the exhibition and also express our appreciation for all the speakers who presented at the event.

It’s conference season!

Have you checked out Online Retailer this year? If you’re there, make sure to stop by the Outrider booth (number C41) today for a chat!

Day 1 is done and Day 2 is well underway already. The team have been busy attending sessions and learning. Shad, Josh, Marion & Liz all provide their thoughts on the sessions they attended yesterday for us below.

Happy Reading!

Online Rag Trading: Lessons Learned & Making Smart Investments

Presenter – Deborah Papazoglu, E-Commerce & Digital Manager, Glue Store
Presenter – Justus Wilde, Online Strategy Director, Amblique
Presenter – Tim Griffin, Search Marketing Director, Amblique
Summary – Shad

This presentation was to provide insights from Glue Store and their Online Strategist team from Amblique about their online retail journey over the last 9 months.

Glue is fashion store in Australia predominantly in Urban Wear.

In the last 9 months Glue have achieved month-on-month growth and have already reached their annual targets for the year.

Amblique set out to identify who their target market was. They went on to define the Glue Stores KPIs in terms of goals, traffic, ROI as well as how much budget would need to be invested to get them there. An over-arching marketing plan was then developed to help schedule and execute activities.

Three crucial areas Justus believe are key to evaluating if a multi-channel strategy is successful are measurement of:

1. Traffic
2. Engagement
3. Revenue

Glues KPI s were to increase:

• Revenue
• Conversion rate(s)
• Average sale value
• Time-on-site
• Facebook likes
• EDM subscriptions
• Open Rates (of emails) and
• ROI

Deborah had two tips for multi-channel strategy. The first was to include your URL on all you offline marketing pieces. The second was to create a dedicated in-house team to work across your ad creative, web design, graphic design and models, as this enables you to be more proactive and reactive.

Some actionable insights from Amblique were to capture as much data as possible and to make sure you segment the data. This helps to see user behaviour and interaction with your website as well.

Striking Gold with you custom content and social media investments

Presenter – Steve Groenier, VP Marketing and Sales, Artbeads.com
Summary – Josh

Steve reminds us that ‘content is king’, and shows how any online retailer can be ‘content kings’ by learning how to identify and reuse what he refers to as ‘content gold’.

Content gold (CG) can be anything that meets the following criteria: it’s inspirational, entertaining, educational, or helps a customer in need. Content is more than just text on your website. It can be an image, a video, a blog, a user review… even Facebook posts (that don’t just reiterate your website/blog) both by the company and by fans should be seen as opportunities to find content gold.

I thought that Steve almost describes CG as mainly being user generated content. He makes reference to the idea that content gold is buried and that you can mine for CG through constant monitoring of your social properties such as YouTube or Facebook for what users like and comment on. A great personal example he used to illustrate his point was with a fan using Artbeads to make vintage jewellery, who then shared the creation on their Facebook page. Seeing as it had gotten a huge response on FB, Artbeads wrote a blogpost around the topic of vintage jewellery with the photo of that fan’s jewellery as the hero image. This later got shared by others and came full circle when the fan discovered that his/her jewellery was featured on Artbeads blog, who then advocated and shared the blogpost.

The Store With No Walls: Increasing Conversion rates across your site through effective Behavioural Merchandising

Presenter – Nicklass Larrson, sales and partnerships director at AVAIL
Summary – Marion

Nicklass gave some valuable tips during this session on how to optimise every step of an online purchase with merchandising.

The category page

The customer is more likely to leave if there are too many choices of product categories – they become overwhelmed. After different tests run on a client, it was found that sales decrease if more than 6 categories are displayed on the page.

The product page

The risk on this page is that the customer leaves to search for more options. The key is to make them feel they do choices by giving them alternatives or recommendations on this page.

The Basket

On some websites the customer clicks on “buy now” but nothing happens. The product has actually been added to the cart but it is not visible to the user. The customer might end up adding the product twice, thinking the website is down. Or they may even just leave. Nicklass recommends to always clearly communicate every action to the customer.

The checkout

When you’re in a store, you always find some products next to the cashier. The logics of merchandising apply online too: before checking out, it’s time to highlight relevant specials and items that might interest the user. All of these feed into boosting conversion rates and sales!

E-Commerce Talent – “Mind the gap”…skills gap that is

Presenter – Martin Newman, Global E-Commerce Leader, CEO of Practicology
Summary – Shad

Martin walked everyone through the shortage of e-Commerce specific education that is available in Australia and the UK. Be it at University level or school level, there isn’t specialised avenue for people to learn.

He explained that e-Consultancy would be coming to Australia soon, which will help bridge the gap when it comes to lack of education. We can expect them to arrive in about a year’s time.

Martin went on to describe how there is a high churn rate for e-Commerce jobs. Currently the resources are very limited. As a result head hunters are always looking for e-Commerce specialists and throw fantastic high salaries to entice them to change jobs.

One way to combat this and encourage your e-Commerce specialist to stay is to incentivise them by providing a short-term and long-term bonus structure. Alternatively, provide tailored and clear career progression for your staff.  The aim is to keep your talent within your business!

Finally, Martin discussed about who should own e-Commerce and where it should sit in the business. Traditionally it sits to one side but Martin explained that it needs to be integrated across all other channels. An effective e-Commerce channel requires resources from other business areas, such as: Content, Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Merchandising to name a few.

Multi-Channel Retail – Manoeuvre your business in line with customer expectations

Presenter – Kees de Vos, VP – Business Consulting, Hybris Software
Summary – Shad

Kees de Vos started off with the fact that e-Commerce is the new face of retail. As both the customer and the demand have changed, retailers need to reposition their business accordingly. He stated that retailers do not drive multi-channel strategies but it’s actually customers who drive it. He illustrated the three key areas that have changed in e-commerce for retailers are: Economic, Technology and Social Media.

He described that internet is accessible from almost anywhere. Consumers are becoming increasingly internet savvy. They are also changing how they connect, using range of devices, such as smartphones and iPads to name a few.

Kees explained that that technology is growing and evolving incredibly fast. We adapt to these changes at a very high speed. He went on to state that that our social life has moved to social online and that we now form our opinions using Social Media. This is very important for retailers to be aware of.

An interesting point Kees brings to our attention to, is that there are so many channels in multi-channel marketing.

Each channel in the consumer purchasing journey must be consistent and not exists in silos. This is to ensure your brand message is consistent and there is a good brand experience. You need to avoid saying one thing about your brand when people are researching online, another when purchasing online and something different in store.  All of this would lead to poor user experience and will impact brand engagement.

Creating a better user experience and prevent consumers from switching brands is vital! In order to understand this better and to create a successful multi-channel strategy, you need to have data. A good source of data helps you to understand each of the channels you use as well as how your consumers interact with these respective channels.

Online Retailer: Are you getting the most from your number 1 revenue driver?

Presenter – Sam Shennan, the Managing Director of Clicks 2 Customers
Summary – Liz

Time to discuss my session! Sam Shennan talked about how to get more from SEM. Sam’s presentation was divided into three sections: Enhanced ads, Mobile, and Agencies.

Enhanced Ads

Google Shopping is in Australia now, so you can have Google show your products with images and prices. If you link you Google Merchant Center with your AdWords account, your products with big beautiful images or with links and prices can show up within your ads. This is obviously great as you get more real estate on the page, and you get something that stands out from the competition. Sam said that less than 10 major Aussie retailers are doing this now. If you’re not one of them, get on it, and quick! This is an easy win.

Sitelinks are another version of enhanced ads. These allow you to drive customers to better converting pages. Instead of sending someone to a home page, or just one landing page, you can give them a choice to go deeper into your site at a page that’s more relevant for them. This isn’t a new thing from Google, but now you can have 6 site links instead of only 4. More real estate on the page = good. Get on it!

Mobile

Yes, everyone at this conference (and every other conference) talks about mobile. Sam knows this. But 10 – 20% of your customers are already coming via mobile devices and 90+% of the attendees in the room didn’t have a mobile site. By Christmas, he says this will grow be 25% of your customers coming via Mobile. You need to have paid search campaigns specifically to target mobile users. Costs are lower (he claims 50 – 60% lower!) because there’s less competition. For best practice, you should have separate campaigns for mobile devices than laptops/desktops. The people are different. Your ads should be different; your budgets should be different. If you just click a button to add mobiles into existing campaigns, you’re missing the point.

Agencies

Sam discussed the need to ensure your agency is working for you and adding value. He listed metrics that clients should hold their agency accountable for: Overall sales (or leads), Cost of Sale (COS), and Cost per Acquisition (CPA). He went on to state that targets need to be set and you need to work with your agency to make sure that you’re both getting the most out of your relationship. I couldn’t agree more. Set goals, realistic ones that both client and agency are comfortable with, and work toward those goals. As with any successful partnership, communication is king!

So there you have it!

Look out for our thoughts tomorrow on how Day 2 went.

We are very excited to have Outrider’s very first guest blogpost in the lead up to the Online Retailer Sydney 2011 Conference!

Ben Liau, who will be speaking at the event, is a digital marketing enthusiast who specialises in developing digital marketing strategies. His forte includes SEO, SEM, email marketing, social media marketing, web analytics, & ecommerce. He is very passionate about online marketing and web start ups, and blogs about new updates and trends in the digital marketing world at www.digitalonlinestrategy.com . You can follow him on twitter @benliau . He is also the marketing manager at www.mooo.com.au

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Multi channel marketing for an online retailer is essential for reaching their valuable customers.

In this day and age a business cannot depend solely on one marketing channel; it needs to use the right mix of digital marketing techniques to be successful.

The key to being successful is to integrate your digital marketing channels for extra effectiveness and to boost your multi channel marketing strategy.

Here are 3 techniques that you can use to integrate your digital marketing channels to boost your multi channel marketing strategy.

Getting better SEO with help from SEM

For an online retailer a good example of integrating marketing channels is integrating SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing), which usually would go hand in hand. With any business, choosing the right keywords for their website is essential. Everyone knows that it is not easy to rank for high traffic keywords and ranking for specific keywords does not mean that you have chosen the correct keywords. You can use SEM to instantly advertise for different keywords and see which ones bring in the right amount of traffic with the right amount of conversions. So by leveraging SEM to find out which SEO keywords are performing for your site, you can optimise your website for the right keywords, and double your sites effectiveness on the search engines like Google.

Integrating marketing channels to test, measure, and scale!

Digital marketing channels have the advantage of being a lot easier and quicker to test, measure and scale.

A good example is using SEM like Google Adwords to test different advertising promotions.  By A/B split testing two ads with different promotions, you can determine which promotion is most appealing to customers before using it for other channels. And knowing which promotion is converting with customers, you have the additional insight that can be used when sending out EDMs (electronic direct mail) to customers.

Another good example of testing advertising copy or brand visuals is through email marketing. You can send out an EDM (electronic direct mail) to your subscriber list, and split test different advertising copy or design visuals. After a few tests, the variations with the best results (opens, clicks & conversions etc) will determine the winning ad copy or design visuals.

The results can be then used to update copy on your website or change your branding visuals to enhance your brand BVL (broader visual language).

Leveraging marketing channels off each other = double the effectiveness.

The real value in integrating marketing channels is so they can leverage off each other and become more effective then they would be, just operating in isolation.

A simple example is leveraging social media with email marketing. Getting new fans on a new Facebook page or Twitter account can prove challenging at the start. But if your business has been operational for a while, and you have an existing subscription list of customers that you regularly email, you can leverage off your subscription list by emailing your list and asking your members to join your Facebook.

You can also provide them with a share-to-social option to allow them share it with all their friends. Having your customers as fans on your Facebook page, will double marketing effectiveness and increase traffic, because of the viral nature of social media networks.

This works in vice versa as well; you can easily build your email subscriber list from your Facebook page, by offering incentives to fans for signing up using Facebook sign up applications.

Conclusion

I’ve only outlined a few examples here of integrating digital marketing channels, but there are many more ways you can integrate marketing channels together to boost your multi channel marketing strategy.

As long as there is good communication, and you are measuring the correct metrics and working toward the correct goals, marketing channels can be easily integrated with each other to produce more effective results.

The recent research commissioned by Outrider Australia into online consumer purchase behaviour has delivered some very powerful insights into how Australian’s are researching and buying products online. As many of you know, some of the findings were presented at last weeks AIMIA sponsored event, Online Retail: Brand Engagement in a Multi-Channel Environment.

One of the key insights which has been doing the rounds in the media for the past week has been that brand and shop terms have overtaken generic terms when people begin researching to buy products online.

49% of people were also more likely to click on a brand they trusted compared to 29% of people clicking on a link relevant to their search. This is a significant change when compared to the 40% of people choosing relevancy over brand (39%) in 2009 (See below).

Q: Why did you click on the search links you picked? (Check all that apply)

The findings raise some interesting factors for marketers to consider when designing their search strategies.

1. With brand search continuing to increase, the first is brand protection. Google allows advertisers to submit their trademark to them for consideration, to prevent other brands from advertising under it. This is fairly critical, otherwise you leave yourself open to competition advertising under your brand and leveraging your investment into other marketing channels to generate brand related search traffic.

2. With the ‘pool’ of generic searches becoming a smaller percentage of overall searches, add to this more brands and businesses advertising online than ever before, it is absolutely critical that you have a multi-pronged approach. The smartest brands are now using search at the core of their digital marketing strategies and leveraging an integrated approach across search, display, EDM and Social Media to maximise cost efficiencies for brand awareness exercises and not be at the mercy of rising paid search and affiliate marketing click costs.

3. From a brand exposure perspective, search is still very cost effective, and for smaller brands that may not have the marketing budgets of the bigger players, search is still an extremely important channel. But in saying that, it is getting harder to get the results you may have achieved with the same budget a couple of years ago, especially with more of the major traditional bricks and mortar retailers waking up this year and investing in e-commerce and online marketing. This means you need to be more vigilant in addressing other aspects in the consumer purchase journey. Elements like site design, website user experience and targeting are now more important than ever.

Outrider is happy to provide further insights into the research and work with you to practically implement some of the key findings into your current digital marketing campaigns. We welcome you to contact our Commercial Manager, Victor Navarro on (02) 8968 4068 or victor.navarro@outrider.com with any questions or to arrange an appointment.

Today I attended Digital Now Australia 2009, pulled together by GroupM and Google.  The seminar series focused on digital but predominantly  social media, mobile and a little search.

Firstly I was so pleased in the shift in priority digital has made.  When I joined the digital industry ten years ago we were struggling to communicate that media consumption was shifting, and media budgets should follow.  To be fair, targeting, aside from the type of web site your ad appeared on, was limited, and Google was a babe in arms.  Times, and consumer behaviour, have changed!

Today 70% of marketers in the room were already investing in paid search.  Around 30% were already investing in social media in some form.  And it’s not just the Dells, AMEXs and online players of this world.  Marketing representatives from Coca Cola and Canon were also on the panel of experts.

So aside from me being impressed with the fact that digital is now a major channel, what else did I learn?

I learned that, according to Jonathan Stinton from tns, Australia is a country of voyeurs.  As a nation we’re much less likely to contribute to a blog but will happily and avidly read them.  The older we are, the less likely we are to contribute.  The one stand out and surprise for me was that apparently 31 – 44 year olds were the most likely to use Twitter. 

I learned that, along with being voyeurs, Australians like official information.  It varied by industry but consumers like to know that they can trust the information they’re being presented with.

I learned that, while multi-tasking by watching TV and playing online, 61% of people predominantly focus their attention online.

I learned that both the UK Royal Family and the Vatican have official YouTube channels.

As a search marketing professional I didn’t learn, but was happy to hear reported, that 73% of search is stimulated by offline.  Research showed that both brand and category searches increased during periods of high TV and offline media, and so companies can benefit from up-weighting their search campaigns whilst they have TV in market, and also when competitors do, to take advantage of the growth in category searches.
 
I’ve learned that the mobile industry is convinced that 2009 is actually the year of the mobile – that the addressable market in Australia is in the vicinity of 15.5 million handsets and there have been more than 200 mobile campaigns in Australia this year.

I learned that PayPal has a mobile payment platform.

I learned that you should consider having a Dark or Crisis site that comes into play when a crisis happens.  American Airlines used this during the recent plane crash on the Hudson River, which Fergus Kibble of Hill&Knowlton used as a show case to outline the role of digital media as this story unfolded in a space of 4 hours (during which time American Airlines uploaded 3 press releases to their web site, streamed a statement from their CEO and reverted to their Dark site.  Oh and there were at least 30 Facebook groups dedicated to the pilot).

And I learned that a bakery in the UK is doing a first class job of using social media to drive business by sending out a tweet when their buns are freshly baked from their ovens.

So we need to take care when building fantastically fresh participatory campaigns and work harder to ensure they appeal to a country of voyeurs; we need to strongly align search with TV and offline media; we need to experiment with mobile; we need to plan to ‘lose control of our brands the right way’ (to steal from Fergus) and be prepared to quickly, openly and humanly respond to social media commentary on our brands; and we need to have a real objective and plan when dealing with Twitter.
 
A couple of things to think about?

The Outrider Sydney team were amongst the record number of visitors at this year’s ad:tech Sydney. Here’s what our team are saying about the ad:tech presentations that they attended.

The Relevance Of Twitter

Having been on Twitter for about six months prior to this but really not participating I was really glad to go to this session.

Relevance of Twitter session

Twitter certainly is becoming a powerful medium online in the United States but the panel of speakers including Mike Hickinbotham of Telstra expect that Twitter will become more and more used and useful here in Australia as a means of engaging with real people and real customers.

The list of Australian brands on Twitter just keeps growing, making it harder to write off Twitter as a fad and more of a force. Household name brand including the ABC, AFL, BigPond, Domino’s Pizza, Fairfax, Jetstar, NRMA, Rio Tinto, Virgin Blue, Vodaphone and even Westpac are on Twitter. Certainly, time will tell if Twitter grows in its revelance here in Australia.

For those who didn’t attend but wish they did, check out speaker Laurel Papworth’s coverage of the session on her blog where she kindly includes the slideshow used for her part of the presentation.

Data Portability – Definition & Business Benefits

The speakers at this session were Ross Dawson, Chairman of the Future Exploration Network, Phil Morle, co-founder of Pollenizer and Danny Housseas, Community Manager of The Data Portability Organisation.

Data portability means becoming part of the world-wide ecosystem of user data across the web. For example, portability would allow us to move user data to different applications, or places on the web, so it can be used in different ways (Think Facebook Connect, where you can bring your ‘friends’ network to new applications as metadata, and you can share information outside of Facebook, such as blog posts, restaurant reviews etc). If we were to consider the internet similar to a stand-alone desktop PC – with portable data, no downloading is necessary, as we can easily edit files or information online.

There is huge potential for data portability, as the internet moves more towards ‘openness’, all the data pools will begin to merge. One of the biggest challenges facing the area is privacy laws and security – who owns or controls the data? When you open a Hotmail account, who owns the account? You or Microsoft? There are many social and moral considerations involved in sharing data across the web.

The speakers were all very passionate on the industry, and will be at the forefront of the new world of ’social’ data sharing on the internet. Data portability has a fairly substantial potential impact on the world of social media, so the next few years will be interesting. I was particularly impressed with Ross Dawson who is a best selling author, with over 100 published articles, as well as being a keynote speaker and leading expert on the future of business.

Measuring Social Media

Unfortunately I was slightly disappointed at how the whole debate was prepared. All the speakers were exposing their own thoughts one by one without really agreeing in the end on how to measure properly social media. Thus it is not an exact science, I was still expecting something a bit more precise. I was hoping for a conclusion at the end of the session. Measuring your audience and popularity or success depends on each and every website.

A brand on Facebook might be looking at how many fans they have, how many people have interacted on their page by posting comments or notes whereas a brand on a video website such as Youtube would be looking at the number of views, number of times its videos have been set as favorites, how many subscribers they have, how many comments on their posted items, etc…

Even when you have exact figures about how your brand is performing on social media, it still does not tell you if you’re performing well or bad! For instance, 100,000 views might be an amazing performance for one brand but a very poor performance for another one.

In the end, measuring social media is still in its infancy but it is something that will hopefully become more and more clear in the short term.

Managing Brand Consistency Across Digital Channels

The speakers are well selected coming with different experieces, each had a different angle to look at the topic from
Was your session well attended?: The session was well attended although it could have been bit longer.
There were a lot of insights to learn, especially learning about the combination of different marketing media and how it significantly increases ‘Aided Brand Awareness’.

Digital media is however shown to be the most efficient medium for automotive marketing in the main case study – but this efficiency largely depends on other media use. So if you put all the media budgets to the digital only, it wouldn’t be as efficient.  Synergy is important.

Further to this, Michale Hauser from Tourism Victoria presented their experience in combining different marketing media as a case study which was quite insightful.