Infographic: e-Commerce Shops Ship Free or Peril

22nd February 2012 by Lauren Proctor

Online retail spend is expected to reach $300 billion in the U.S. alone by 2015, but how can you make sure your e-commerce store reaps the benefits of this fast growth? Offer a good product, market it well, optimize your store, and then follow up with free shipping.

“A free shipping offer that saves a customer $6.99 is more appealing to many than a discount that cuts the purchase price by $10,” says Wharton School of Business Professor David Bell. In other words, free shipping creates a perceived value that far outweighs the cost to the shop owner. Free shipping also increases average order size and reduces shopping cart abandonment.

Today nearly half of all retailers are offering free shipping, but these kinds of numbers prove that free shipping is moving away from a “point of difference” benefit to become part of the built in cost of running an e-commerce shop that hosts tangible goods.

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For the Best Facebook Engagement, Talk About Your Product

20th February 2012 by Lauren Proctor

After focusing on the conventions of acquiring likes en masse, marketers are starting to internalize the importance of a much more meaningful metric. Engagement is emerging as the holy grail of social media marketing, but how do brands get fans talking?

By now companies are accustomed to wooing fans with free samples and sweepstakes exchange for likes, but the principals of engagement are slippery and less formulaic. Brands like Johnnie Walker and BMW emerge as clear leaders in the area of engagement, but what is it that they do differently than the likes of Burberry or Chanel? Perhaps more important, what kinds of posts get people talking?

We analyzed hundreds of brand posts to find out and discovered that the answer is surprisingly simple. Product highlights on Facebook outpaced company information, questions, and customer education and special events with an engagement rate of 0.21 percent percent.

What’s even more interesting is the fact that contests and promotions received such low engagement rates (0.08 and 0.07 percent respectively). Study after study shows that users like brands for free offers and discounts, but even the most successful contest-based like campaigns don’t drive high engagement.

Free samples might create community growth, but engagement rates are showing that fans didn’t actually join for the free swag. They are there to learn more about products, and the brands that give users this information in the most compelling way will prove most successful in mobilizing fans into action.

Dreamy Search Engine of the Future Would Deliver Profundity

20th February 2012 by Lauren Proctor

It might be the English major in me, but I can’t help but wish a search engine existed with the express purpose of delivering profound results for the people. “Aha” moments would dominate the search rankings while information you can get everywhere else falls behind the work of daring thinkers.

This technology, of course, trickles into the ever difficult world of semantics. We’d have to answer “What is profound? How do we determine what resonates with some people while other pieces of information prove repetitive or outside the realm of understanding?”

It’s hard enough today for normal search engines to classify and rank information by search term relevance, but in the future I see tremendous value in reclassifying and making sense of information in entirely new and unheard of ways. Think Pinterest, for example. The social network thrives off of the idea that people collect things they’re fond of. Take this a step further and really what you have is a classification of information based on personal affinity.

The real accomplishment here is that Pinterest didn’t have to devise some grand algorithm or fuss with crawling the web. The social network turned users into the sorters of information, and in many ways that’s what makes Pinterest special. It’s no search engine, of course, but the information that trickles to the top is the well liked.

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