The biggest takeaway from the State of Video in E-Commerce that we published several months ago, citing conclusions from SundaySky’s Q4 2010 report, was that the large majority of online merchants have thus far underutilized or altogether neglected this simple yet potentially very valuable medium.
The latest release from SundaySky includes new data from the first quarter of 2011, and while relatively little has changed in terms of retailers’ widespread adoption, it appears that consumers’ appetite for e-commerce video continues to grow.
The increasing interest from online shoppers, combined with retailers’ general inability to meet that demand, presents a unique opportunity for ambitious merchants both large and small. Below are some of the key findings from SundaySky, which paints a very convincing picture of why you need to implement e-commerce video as soon as possible.
Give consumers what they want
The number of subscribers to online retailers’ YouTube channels increased 21 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011. That number climbed to 571,000 subscribers to retail channels, totaling 420 million views of retail videos on YouTube alone – a 13-percent increase. Meanwhile, the number of retail videos posted on YouTube reached nearly 96,000 during Q1 2011, which represents a 9-percent increase. Shoppers are consuming e-commerce video at a significantly faster rate than merchants are providing it, but that window of opportunity is closing.
All or nothing for major retailers
Among the largest online retailers in the world, it seems that video is either being mass-scaled or all but ignored. Thirty-two percent of the top 50 online merchants boasted more than 1,000 videos on their sites in Q1 2011, compared to 22 percent in the previous quarter. However, 36 percent of the top 50 had fewer than 10 videos on their sites, and a staggering 68 percent of all retailers are not yet exploiting the obvious and accessible rewards of on-site e-commerce videos – in any way, shape or form.
Time to act is now
While the large majority of retailers continue to ignore the benefits of video, a definite shift is taking place in the e-commerce industry. The number of major retailers posting more than 100 videos on YouTube during the first quarter of 2011 increased by 15 percent since the fourth quarter of 2010, indicating that the race may be on. Still, that number represents the minority, with 48 percent of the top 50 surpassing the 100-video mark.
Enormous SEO benefits
According to the SundaySky report, nearly 18 percent of the major search engine results pages during the first quarter of 2011 contained video results, and most video results for retail-related keywords were posted only on YouTube. In an analysis of 34,000 top keywords within 17 categories from Shopping.com’s top searches, computer gaming had the highest presence of video results while furniture had the lowest.
Getting results
Zappos has for a long time been a benchmark of many online retail best practices, and its use of e-commerce video is no exception. The company annually generates more than half a million dollars in incremental revenue simply by following video SEO guidelines, and the amount of traffic accredited to video results is estimated at more than 77,000 visits per month.
While Zappos is one of the top 50 retailers to adopt e-commerce video on a massive scale, smaller retailers simply need to get into the game rather than watch from the sidelines. From posting a handful of simple product videos onto your site to leveraging your company’s own YouTube channel and building out your brand, the power of video is growing and too many retailers are missing out.
Category : Advertising &E-Commerce &Internet &Search Engine Ranking &Web Design &Websites
The Time Has Come to Increase Your Time on Site
Most online marketers and website owners tend to measure the success of their online business by the amount of traffic they are able to generate (and, of course, revenue).
While increasing the number of unique visitors is most definitely important (and something that everyone should be concerned with), it is arguably only half the battle. Unique visitors and visits alone should not be the only means by which you are measuring success.
It is easy to understand that there is little in the way of benefit from attracting a visitor to your website that quickly clicks the back button and leaves. Often, website owners and online marketers spend more time thinking about how to attract people to a site and less on how to encourage those visitors to spend considerably more time on your website. Take heed – there is a a direct correlation between the amount of time spent on a website and its success. So how can you increase time on site (and profits)? Follow these three simple strategies.
- Design Smarter (and Write Longer) -
Of all the different site types, it is the content marketers that either have the best or the worst time-on-site averages. While one suggestion might be to simply write longer-form content, another option would be to take the longer-form content you have or will develop in the future and commit to splitting it into multiple sections. This is a common approach that has been used on sites like About.com and many newspaper sites for years. For example, a 1,000 word article could be split into four sections of 250 words each. Some content management systems have this functionality built in, so explore that feature if available to you. Another benefit of splitting content is that it gives publishers the ability to generate more advertising impressions – a big draw particularly for those selling on a CPM basis.
- Create More Relevant Jump Points for Content Showcasing -
Would you rather feature content that is timely or timeless? There are arguments for and against both, but those publishers that concentrate on identifying areas where they can showcase their best information are those that often have the highest time-on-site averages. These jump points are areas where publishers can profile/push the most popular pages, the most heavily commented upon content items or most linked-to items. There are, of course, many places to do this, including at the end of articles/posts, within sidebars, and within the content itself. There is actually some SEO benefit to creating links to this type of content on your site as the number and relevance of links to internal pages is (arguably) an important factor in search engine ranking.
- Introduce Supplemental Formats: Multimedia & Applications -
Many content publishers, to their own detriment, opt to stay with the content format most familiar to them – whatever that may be. Consumers, however, often have very different demands when it comes to their consumption preferences – offering just one only gives you one chance for one type of visitor. Start introducing supplemental formats and you’ll be surprised about the positive effect it has on time on site. For example, if you’ve got a long-form article, why not fire up the webcam and produce a short-form video about that article’s key points or takeaways. If you publish a list of events, why not introduce a calendar application which is a terrific way to increase the number of clicks on your site as well.
Category : Advertising &Internet &Marketing
According to the Chief Marketing Officer Council’s 2010 State of Marketing Report, nearly 50 percent of U.S. companies will be enhancing or overhauling their digital marketing and advertising infrastructures this year. Fifty-eight percent of the companies surveyed said they would be training and developing existing staff members in different areas of digital marketing, while 36 percent were planning to hire new talent specifically suited for social media, SEO, display advertising and mobile marketing.
Lost in this outpouring of love is potentially the most valuable marketing channel for any Web business — affiliate publishers. Most affiliate marketers will continue to go it alone in 2011, deprived of many of the advantages that other marketing channels receive such as the continuous exchange of important product information and analytical data, not to mention additional opportunities for training, education and financial reward.
This Internet-age-old phenomenon makes it considerably harder for affiliates to successfully market, promote and sell a merchant’s products or a company’s services, yet countless business owners attribute lackluster performances to a lack of motivation on the part of the affiliate. That is why the most successful online business owners learn how to get inside the minds of their often misunderstood partners, which allows them to give their affiliates the same consideration afforded to members of their own staffs.
That may include anything from sending a weekly email to say hello to a generous holiday bonus given out annually. The important point is that — like anyone else you encounter in the business world — the more you can do for your affiliates, the more they will do for you. Following are the four steps required for building prosperous and productive relationships with your affiliate marketing partners:
1. Set them up to succeed
Affiliates are often doomed to fail before they can promote their first offer. If your company hires a new director of social media marketing and invests a salary and benefits into the success of this new employee, how much of that success are you — the business owner — responsible for? Would you outfit this new hire with an old rotary telephone and an outdated computer in an oversized broom closet, and then check on their progress every three months? Your new employee would never succeed if you did, but this is the equivalent to how many affiliates get started on a new campaign.
You are doing your company, your customers and your affiliates a grave disservice if you do not give the affiliates every chance to flourish. That requires providing each affiliate partner with quality products they can sell; engaging creative content that will appeal to the most qualified customer base; highly targeted promotional campaigns and the proper technology to effectively deploy them, and thoroughly researched sales leads. Most important of all are compelling offers that your affiliates can sell.
“Probably the most important thing for merchants to provide for their affiliates, the thing that the affiliates are most interested in, is a real compelling offer that’s going to stand out to consumers,” says Greg Bayer of performance-based marketing solutions provider Adknowledge’s affiliate division. “That, more than anything else, motivates an affiliate to say, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to promote that offer
more than any other.’ ”
The more you focus on SEO strategy, the more you might begin to think you can outsmart Google. But Dharmesh Shah argues in an article at MarketingProfs.com that gaming the system with sneaky SEO techniques is, in the long run, a losing proposition: “It’s safe to assume that if you try to exploit a hole in the algorithm today, your advantage is going to be temporary,” he says. “More importantly, you carry a significant risk of having your Web site penalized or banned.”
According to Shah, some slight-of-hand tricks you should avoid include:
Link farms. Most SEO professionals agree that the number of inbound links plays a critical role in search rankings. Some less scrupulous practitioners, therefore, create a group of dummy Web sites for the sole purpose of linking to the actual Web site.
Keyword stuffing. Once upon a time, the constant repetition of certain keywords might have manipulated rankings. But no more–search engines got wise to this practice, and it’s now a wasted effort.
Hidden text. Placing white text on a white background–visible to spiders, but not to humans–is a seemingly invisible way to load a page with rank-improving content. But, he notes, “Regardless of how sophisticated the approach, it is still going to be detected at some point.”
The Po!nt: “An Internet strategy that is predicated on outsmarting Google is not a smart strategy,” says Shah. “Working with search engines instead of trying to exploit them is the only approach that works in the long term.”
Category : Advertising &Blog &Business &Design &E-mail &Internet &Marketing &SEO &Websites
- Product is what you sell, whether it’s a physical product or a service, idea, or yourself (like when you search for a new job).
- Price is not only the list price or sticker price of a product, but its also any adjustments to that price, such as discounts.
- Placement is where and when you present your product to customers.
- Promotion is all the sales activities, advertising, publicity, special events, displays, signs, web pages, and other communications designed to inform and persuade people about your product.
- People – Referral Marketing is a powerful marketing force where your customers serve as a sort of “mini” sales force for you. They refer others to you because they’ve had a positive relationship with your people.
Category : Advertising &Blog &Design &Internet &SEO
E-mail marketing, if done correctly, can be an inexpensive and quick way of reaching a very large audience. E-mailing advertisements (with permission to have the recipient’s e-mail address) can still become redundant and the recipient will likely ask to be taken off the mailing list unless you:
- Offer new discounted products or services regularly
- Provide very targeted mailings
- Offer some content
Even two or three sentences of original content can provide a reason to read your e-mail. It can also support the advertising that otherwise may be deleted. Short bits of information, such as five tips for a healthy lawn from a lawn care company or dressing for success from a clothing retailer are ways to keep your audience reading your e-mails. Establishing your own newsletter (which may only be a few paragraphs) can draw the attention of your readers. When e-mailing customers, you also need:
- A catchy headline
- A recognizable company name in the “from” box so they’ll know it’s from your business
- A simple one-click manner in which they can get more information on specific products or services
- A means of reaching customer service
Since you may only have one second to capture the reader before he or she hits delete, it’s to your benefit to make sure something interesting shows up in the window that displays part of the e-mail prior to the reader actually opening it. This window can literally provide you a “window of opportunity” to grab their attention. Make this about “them.” Unlike a press release, which tells the media what your business is up to, e-mail marketing needs to focus on benefits to the customer. Once you’ve got them reading, you can put as much as you’d like about your company farther down the page. They can elect to read it or not. Nonetheless, the farther down the reader scrolls, the more advertising and marketing information he or she will have absorbed.
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Category : Advertising &Blog &Business &E-mail &Internet &Marketing &SEO &Websites
I thought this was an interesting chart. I was surprised to see the iphone to be gaining in this area.
With the addition of email client reports for all our customers, we took a step back and analyzed 6 months of data covering more than 250 million opens. The result – a birds eye view of email client popularity and usage trends over time.
Below is the email client market share as of March 2009. These numbers are not exclusive – some people used more than one email client during the month, and so that will register a vote for each client used.
| 33.20% | Outlook 2000, 2003, Express | |
| 16.19% | Yahoo! Mail | |
| 15.29% | Hotmail | |
| 6.62% | Outlook 2007 | |
| 5.77% | Apple Mail 3 | |
| 5.27% | Gmail | |
| 3.97% | iPhone 2.0 | |
| 2.09% | Apple Mail 2 | |
| 1.84% | Lotus Notes 6-7 | |
| 1.54% | AOL Desktop 9.1 |
Category : Advertising &Blog &E-mail &Internet &SEO
So, what are keywords and how do they help to increase traffic to your website? Keywords are words that depict for the search engine what your website is all about, this will then cause search engine to rank you so that surfers can find what they are looking for. Truthfully speaking, I am a good example for improperly choosing keywords in the past, I’ve setup sites with keywords that I thought were good and relevant to my website and the thing is, they were. The question is though, does the users associate this keyword with the niche of your products and services.
Do your research! Properly choosing the right keywords for your website can be very helpful in increasing your websites ranking in the search engine. Well, a lot of companies have an idea about what keywords are relevant for their products or services for their company, but these keywords may not be what users are searching for in the search engines. Doing your homework, and research to find what your potential clients associate with you products and services can be very helpful in increasing traffic to your site.
If your website is optimized for the keywords or keyword phrases that people are actually using to find solutions that your company offer, you will increase traffic to your site and in turn lead to increasing sales.
Here you can find out more about choosing keywords and search engine optimization.
If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to post them below. I will do my best in responding and answering them.
Category : Advertising &Blog &Internet &SEO &Websites
