As competition intensifies, coming in all new shapes and sizes, global e-commerce organizations face challenges in differentiating their offerings with key audiences. To succeed, marketers cannot afford to miss opportunities to improve the effectiveness, reach, and return of their marketing and sales programs.  Yet, a recent survey we conducted with 160 global retailers found the majority are missing out on significant opportunities to use tools that already exist in their arsenal to improve theROI of marketing campaigns.

According to the survey, online retailers are prioritizing their e-commerce platform, site search, and SEO, as well as mobile and customer-focused analytics. Still, nearly 60% admitted to not using site search reports and information to enhance marketing programs, and only 25% say they integrate site search data into email marketing campaigns to better customize offers for customers—implying there is still a great deal of value organizations can pursue, from integrating site search information to integrating their marketing campaigns.

Interestingly, half of the survey respondents said they are not doing more with site search to enhance marketing and sales programs due to limited resources, while nearly 30% say they just aren't sure how to do it and 10% note that their existing site search solution does not allow for integration with marketing programs.

Savvy online retailers reap rich benefits from site search

Every retailer knows site search is a must-have element of any online business—yet it's clear they're not taking full advantage of the rich benefits site search can provide to marketing and sales strategies.  With the right approach, online retail marketers can glean valuable insights into visitor habits and buying behavior to help them deliver a richer user experience—which, in turn, can encourage a purchase.

Take, for example, gourmet candy maker Jelly Belly, which uses site search data to ensure that the appropriate top-searched keywords are incorporated into press releases, advertising, and marketing materials. Jelly Belly also uses site search merchandising capabilities to tune results and create landing pages for customized product groupings.

For a previous Cinco de Mayo promotion, Jelly Belly grouped various beans together to create “recipes” for tres leches cake and Mexican hot chocolate. The company then used the URLs of those dedicated landing pages for display advertising, retargeting, and email campaigns. Jelly Belly also dropped a banner tool onto the page to tie the promotional assets from the email or banner ad to the landing page. The result was an 85% increase in open rates for direct mail campaigns.

Site search improves decision making

You don't have to be a master at harnessing a large amount of data in order to make the important information work for you. Data gleaned from site search can be incredibly helpful in the decision making process.

According to our poll, half of retailers currently use site search data and analytics to enhance their business offerings or processes, while 28% use site search data to make smarter decisions related to inventory selection, 26% use site search data to enhance customer service, and 18% use it to augment predictive analytics practices.

The majority of retailers say they have not implemented site search features such as auto-complete with graphics (55%), mouse-over pop-ups (59%), personalized search history (64%), refinements (43%), or a floating search bar (80%). Most merely rely on site search features they have already, such as auto-complete (62%) and refinements (43%) to do the job—a significant miss for these retailers.

The good news is, nearly half (47%) of retailers plan to change their ways, and will work to incorporate more features, functionality, and data gleaned from site search to enhance marketing programs throughout 2014. As they do, there will be more effective ways to propagate information to their consumers, suppliers, and alliance partners that will lead to better online shopping experiences, brand-building opportunities, and revenue generation.

Tim Callan is the CMO of SLI Systems.

People have little interest in purchasing a bed; what they want is a good night's sleep.

Some folks would sleep on a cardboard box if it meant they’d wake up refreshed—that’s what makes it a real problem in need of a solution.

Entrepreneurs must go beyond simply building products; they have to sell what their product will allow customers to do.

If they don't, you know they’re inexperienced. Take a look at this quote from investor Dina Routhier:

The most common thing that pegs an entrepreneur as an amateur is when they come in and immediately start talking about their amazing new technology, and forget to start the discussion with, “What big problem in the market am I trying to solve?” If they don’t start with the problem, then I know they are green."

Let’s look at some examples of how benefits help sell products.

"Lose 30 Pounds in 30 Days!"

(Thanks, Mega Shake!)

As an armchair observer, it's all too easy to scoff at over-the-top late night infomercials. And yet, these ads are making sales, often far more than that super neat-o new web app everybody talks about but nobody wants to pay for.

In fact, the infomercial industry is still growing. It's even gone on to eclipse the TV industry itself:

Why bring this up? If there is anything that infomercials are good at, it's selling benefits. For one, they understand that people can be coaxed, not driven.

Claude C. Hopkins once said, "Prevention is not a popular subject, however much it should be." It is far easier to sell around existing desires than it is to create desire.

Infomercials might all sound the same, but they work because they sell solutions that are perpetually in demand. It’s similar to how the most successful tech startups take a problem that already exists / has always existed, and make their solution easier, faster, cheaper, or more accessible.

There's also the effective use of selling a system. "30 pounds in 30 days" is appealing because you know what you're getting. Magic diet pills use this dishonestly, but with legitimate workout programs like P90X and Insanity, the language is the same. Nobody actually wants to buy a workout program, they want abs and better conditioning in a reasonable time-frame.


 

What's In It For Me?

Let's step away from infomercials and observe the effectiveness of selling benefits in the "real" business world. This stuff works, sans sleaze.

Apple understood this when they released the first iPod. MP3 players were nothing new, and the technology trounced CDs. The problem was marketing; the right pitch hadn't been made to explain just how much better customers’ lives were going to be once they owned an iPod.

How do you think Apple decided to frame the magic of the iPod? Around its technical prowess, or what customers could do with it?


 

The message was persuasive because, in the words of Seth Godin, it was all about "Me, me, me. My favorite person: me." Gigs of data have nothing to do with me, but a pocket full of my favorite songs certainly does.

The irony is that those who most often admire Apple and Jobs—those in the startup community—tend to have the biggest problem with selling. Many a HackerNews thread is filled with vitriolic commentors who insist that he who lists the most compelling technical features wins.

This has become such a problem that Justin Jackson recently wrote a very popular article reminding software developers that they aren't "normal" in relation to their customers:

Increasing the technical challenge while creating a product does not increase the chance for more sales. This surprises us. We get an idea for a thing, think about the technology we’d use to build it, and get excited. 

“I could build this on the Twilio API!” “I could learn that new CSS framework!” “I could use this new tool I just purchased!” 

The problem is that all of this is focused on us, the creator, and not on the customer, the consumer.

There's a natural inclination for craftsman to want to talk about the craft.

But remember, customers generally won’t care about the cogs that make your product turn. What they want to know is, "What's in it for me?"

A Better Version of You

In a well-stated case for solution selling, Belle from Buffer argued that people don't buy products; they buy better versions of themselves. As Jason Fried noted:

"Here's what our product can do" and "Here's what you can do with our product" sound similar, but they are completely different approaches.

As with many aspects of marketing, it all comes back to having a compelling proposition of value. This is what many miss, and it’s why you'll see ill-informed comments like this crop up from time to time:

I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy'... I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples... I love building things that people enjoy using but I hate sales and marketing."

Apparently, you're supposed to sit in your basement and build things without ever trying to sell them to the people who need them the most.

Bullshit!

Take a look at the homepage of a great company like Bidsketch:



It reads an awful lot like the "benefit selling" we've discussed throughout this article, but to my knowledge, you won't find founder Ruben Gamez on late night TV exclaiming, "But wait, there's more!"


 

The “selling” here is beneficial to me as a customer: I find out what you provide and what I can do with it without being forced to slog through details I don't need.

As an example of what not to do, I once came across a SaaS app (that wasn't made for developers) that stated in their sub-heading, “Proudly made with Ruby on Rails.”

“What's Ruby on Rails, a level from Mario Kart?” Ninety-nine percent of customers won't know and simply won't care. It’s like shoving the schematics in their face before they even have a chance to decide, "Is this what I need?"

Kudos to many bootstrapped companies, who tend to deeply understand the value of selling benefits (perhaps because they actually have to make money).

Freckle doesn't even mention the word "software" before you're reminded of your biggest problem when using time-tracking apps.



SerpIQ knows prospects will say yes to their question. Once the benefits are clear, they learn about how and why it's a faster and more accurate tool.


 

Features Still Matter

Obviously, letting features "tell" still matters a great deal—once you've sold a prospect on what you can do for them, the details ease their decision-making.

Take buying a car; what you need is a car spacious and safe enough for your family, but when it comes down to a split decision, you might select the one with the heated leather seats. Until the benefits are obvious, stuff like this is just eye-candy.

Features can often connect the dots and put the benefits into a greater context. There are two important ways they do this:

• Justification: Esurance uses comparative pricing to explain why their insurance is cheaper (through features). The savings are gained from their lean operation, which was "born online." Once the benefit is sold, features are used to explain how you'll make it happen. If a hosting company says your site is totally secure (hooray!), features show you how and why that claim is a guarantee. Sell the benefits first, then highlight the great features you offer to close.
• Differentiation: Describing your point of difference means elaborating on your features. We often tell Help Scout customers about how most help desks outsource their email parsing. Ours is in-house, which allows us to do email integration and voicemail support that others can't do (only after the "help desk headache" issue is addressed does this feature become important).

My personal persuasion hero, Claude Hopkins, has a useful tactic on how to correctly frame features and benefits:

There is one simple and right way to answer many advertising questions. Ask yourself, “Would this help a salesman sell the goods? Would it help me sell them if I met the buyer in person?”

Would you, making a sale in person, talk about the titanium frame or the nickel-cadmium alloy mix of your brake pads before addressing the benefits to a customer?


 

Remember that by not selling on benefits, you're doing a disservice to customers. Give them what they want by showing them why your product is that "one thing" they've been searching for.

 

What’s the secret to a successful E-commerce site? Is it graphics; ease of use; loading time. or something else, something harder to define?

As anyone who has ever attempted to find their place within the saturated E-commerce market will know, while traffic levels are indeed part of the battle to succeed; it is in fact a whole new challenge to convert that traffic into sales. Your products might be unique, crafted with quality and have an attractive price point for consumers; but it could be your website that lets your brand down leading, to lost sales.

Vouchercloud has collated the latest statistics and data within this new infographic demonstrating how consumers respond to various features within the checkout process and how they can lead to cart abandonment and lost sales.

Infografic Source: Vouchercloud

Tweet These Stats

• 57% of online shoppers will abandon a site after waiting 3s for page load, 80% won’t return Tweet this

• 92.6% of online shoppers say visuals are the top influential factor affecting a purchase decision Tweet this

• Offering multiple product views and alternate images leads to 58% more web sales Tweet this

• 57% of online shoppers have more confidence in purchasing a product after viewing product video Tweet this

• 52% of online shoppers say they are willing to stay longer on sites that use product videoTweet this

• 45% of online shoppers are more likely to return to a retailer who integrates video into the website experience Tweet this

• 85% of consumers read online reviews for local business before purchase, 79% trust them as much as a personal recommendation Tweet this

• 41% of online shoppers will abandon a checkout due to “sticker shock” Tweet this

• 29% of online shoppers will abandon checkout if asked to register (24% of ecommerce sites require reg) Tweet this

• Only 10% of online shoppers will abandon a checkout process they perceive as “too long”Tweet this

• 50% of ecommerce checkouts ask for the same information twice Tweet this

• 81% of online retailers pre-check newsletter opt-ins in registration (40% of consumers don’t want them) Tweet this

• 59% of consumers consider shipping costs when making online purchase decisions Tweet this

• More than 80% of consumers feel safer seeing logos of trustworthy payment options on a site Tweet this

• 40% of online shoppers say they have more confidence with sites that offer >1 payment option Tweet this

By BLUE