Best Search Practices for E-Tail
Top catalogs and retail sites share search strategies.
Top catalogs and retail sites share search strategies.
Overture CEO Ted Meisel preached the power of search engine marketing (SEM) in a keynote at the Jupiter/ClickZ Ad Forum this week. Many in the audience belonged to the converted. They’ve been using paid search, or helping others to tap its power, for years. Meisel shared data that indicates search is by far the most prevalent online activity that precedes a purchase decision. Mainstream marketers are taking notice and experimenting with search marketing. More often than not, they’re pleased with the results.
Search marketing plays a growing role for catalog merchants and retailers who want to build online presences, drive revenues through their sites, and support offline activities.
Pick a product. Chances are, a host of merchants are active in paid placement and paid inclusion, fighting for a share of valuable search traffic. Like many direct marketers with a strong online presence, Christine Aguilera, CFO/general counsel at SkyMall, and Theresa McMullen, SkyMall’s director of marketing, are successfully testing SEM.
They’re cautious, testing every media that can be tested before allocating resources. Only media that deliver buyers under the allowable cost per order (CPO) are renewed. The products, sold through the catalog and on the site, are often from brand name catalogs: Hammacher Schlemmer, Plow & Hearth, Sharper Image, and others. They’re presented in a combined format. To avoid conflicts, SkyMall doesn’t bid on brand names in the search engines. Instead it focuses on products and product categories. As with other catalog merchants, the Web is a great place to expand the number of stock keeping units (SKUs) with no incremental cost, unlike printed catalogs where space is limited.
John Rogers, Orvis’ director of online marketing, is so on top of his game he won four Catalog Age awards and the Silver I.Merchant award. When I spoke with Rogers about search strategies, tactics, and campaigns, he shared wisdom other marketers should heed. Orvis factors in lifetime value when setting campaign objectives. It recognizes not all shoppers are alike. Rogers uses information about shopping patterns to differentiate Web from catalog shoppers and parses customers by product segment. Not every visitor is ready to purchase immediately. Some are in an earlier stage of the buying cycle. That doesn’t make their visits worthless.
With so many marketers diving into search, the search industry needs to get more of them up to speed on best practices to take search marketing to the next level. This will benefit everyone in the long term. The best marketers who have the best products or services, pricing, sites, and operations are often the ones who can afford to be at the top in paid placement search. These are the same companies customers buy from every day in retail and catalog environments. One way to bring less adventurous (but highly capable) marketers into the fold is to share best practices. Each marketer who has had success in paid placement search has her own strategy, but some themes repeat themselves. These are the best e-tail practices:
Many best practices for e-tailers apply to business-to-business (B2B) and service companies. To immerse yourself in SEM best practices, you might consider attending the Jupiter Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose next month. Hope to see you there!