CONTENT &COMMERCE

ALPHAZETA INTERACTIVE WHITE PAPER SERIES

Guidelines for Managing Your eCommerce Site for Success

By: Tom Font, AlphaZeta Interactive and Beth McEnery, EPiServer

Why is content important to an eCommerce site?It takes a lot of content to run an engaging eCommerce site. Depending on what you are selling, the site will contain some, if not all, of the following types of content: product descriptions (short and long), product images,how-to videos, ratings, reviews, product blogs, pricing information, product SKUs, multi-lingualversions of content, landing pages, customer service pages, mobile sites, micro-sites and more. When all of this content is then multiplied over a moderately sized catalog of 1,000 items, an eCommerce team can become quickly overwhelmed.

Many eCommerce companies are finding “content marketing” to be an effective technique to draw traffic and leverage across social channels. More so, supportive content related to the use, care or ongoing maintenance of a product is the lead driver of traffic to the product page view.

In addition, content-hungry search engines must be considered. An eCommerce site, whether it is a B2C or B2B site, must have a presence in search engines. The recent trend in the Google search algorithm has beento move away from link building because of the abuses in link farming and other external factors, toward an even greater emphasis on high quality, frequently updated content.

The most effective eCommerce sites recognize the best user experience combines SEO-friendly content with well-written marketing content. This content cultivates the kind of user experience that will draw customersback to your web site time and time again. From title tags to star ratings and product reviews, Google tracks how visitors interact with your content and rewards those sites with content that is both scannable and rich inInformation.

TO HAVE AN EFFECTIVE ECOMMERCE CONTENT STRATEGY, THERE ARE FOUR VARIABlES THAT MUST BE CONSIDERED.

• A Framework to think about how content can impact your eCommerce site

• People and Processes to support the Content Types necessary for eCommerce success

• Tools and Platforms to manage and merchandise your content

• Measurement and Testing to continuously improve

“Organic search allows you to drive new traffic to products. Effective search engine optimization requires a constant analysis of trends, keywords and understanding the ways people search. With that information, create well thought out, useful content and you will increase your worth to Google while boosting your rankings and contributing to higher sales and profits”

-Brent Payne, CEO of Loud Interactive and SEO expert

Framework

62% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site with user reviews, increasing conversion rates as well as brining in more search traffic. When combined with structured data, reviews can also increase the click- through rates on your search results too.

STARTING WITH THE BASICS — ECOMMERCE 101We use the 4 P’s of eCommerce when we want to improve the performance of an eCommerce site.To understand the 4 P’s of eCommerce, we can draw a correlation to the 4 P’s of marketing.

Place Marketers’ select a variety of distribution strategies for their product mix.

Product What are you selling? What are the needs of the marketplace that your product fulfills?

Price How much is the customer paying for the product and what is the perceived value?

Promotion All methods the marketer utilizes to let the world know about the product – ads, PR, direct marketing, etc.

An eCommerce site needs to be able to create, manage and maintain a wide variety of content to be successful. Forrester identified the most common types of content on an eCommerce site in “The eCommerce Content Conundrum.”

People, Process & Content Types

• Product• Merchandising• Marketing• User-Generated• Customer Service• Informational• On-Site Advertising• Template Level or Instructional

Once your content types are defined, you’ll need a team to create and manage each type of content. If possible, we recommend having at least one full-time employee whose job description and compensation are tied to content development and maintenance. Next, we recommend creating a merchandising calendar to guide content development and publishing. The merchandising calendar should outline when promotions are released and then be used to guide changes to other areas of content on the site(s) that need to be updated.

Once content is being created, you need the ability to easily publish content into social channels to support your content efforts.

Finally, you need to create an editing process to ensure that the content is edited and approved before it goes live. This should be handled in your eCommerce and web content management system solution to leverage the workflow capabilities inherent in those systems.

Organizational Processes and Team Management Best-Practices

The next consideration to managing and merchandising your content is the ever-important technology platform. The challenge presented with eCommerce platforms is that many are designed to only complete transactions, not manage content. And, if such platforms do support content management capabilities, the breadth and scale of these capabilities is limited at best.

Internally developed solutions and stand-alone web content management (WCM) systems present other problems. Internal eCommerce solutions often have not received the attention required to nurture customer experience and optimize content marketing efforts. Stand-alone CMS technology is notoriously difficult to integrate with an eCommerce system. In addition, a WCM system that offers personalization capabilities, customizations, and a stand-alone eCommerce system to support that functionality can add up to a lengthy, expensive and technically complex project.

Tools & Platform

Disconnected Systems

Integrated Systems

According to Booz & Company, the revenue generated through social commerce is expected to reach $30 billion by 2015. This shows that if you want to get the most value from your eCommerce efforts, you must leverage social media.

Longer, better product descriptions with more complete information will not only support your search efforts, but will give consumers the in-depth information they need when researching and shopping. The reality of shopping on the web continues to become increasingly complex. Consumers’ expectations are at an all-time high for a shopping experience with every ounce of information available at their fingertips.

Businesses that place people, rather than content or technology, at the center of their business model are thriving and in some cases outperforming incumbents.”

- Paul Adams, “Grouped – How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web”

Give The People What They Want Content That Powers Commerce

Measurement & TestingIt is important to recognize that we need to continuously test and measure our content efforts. Testing can be as simple as running an A/B test on a landing page or as complex as conducting a multivariate test of navigation.

It is surprising how many small, continuous improvements in page layouts, content and landing pages can add up to big improvements in site performance. The key is having the tools to manage, test and measure the changes you are making.

Finally, testing and measurement are about keeping track of what is working and doing more of it than anything else. So do not be afraid to try new things. If they do not work, roll the site back to the previous version and try something else.

Final ThoughtsThere is a lot to consider when it comes to properly managing content on your eCommerce site. With the right framework in place for people, processes, technology and testing, you can create a unique and personalized user experience that ultimately drives conversion.

How do you bring all of these things together?It all comes down to alignment. Alignment of people and process. Alignment of content. Alignment of measurement and testing. The result of these alignments is a successful eCommerce experience that drives results. On average, we see these types of customer results: • Conversions increase 20-30%

• Average order value (AOv) increases 10%

• Average lifetime value increase two-fold

Now the question is: Do you have all the pieces in place to create alignment in your organization?

Thank YouFOR MORE INFORMATIONTom FontVice President, Business Developmenttfont@alphazeta.com(312) 263-7028, ext 230www.alphazeta.com