SMB ONLINE BEST PRACTICES

Marissa Tarleton, SMB OnlineNovember 2009

SUCCESSFUL SMB ONLINE BEST PRACTICES1. Listen to your customers

2. Uptime is king – fix site stabilization issues first

3. Maintain a simple and intuitive site

4. Establish, forecast and adhere to reliable and rigorous metrics

5. Develop robust email, online demand generation and search programs

to drive traffic

6. Optimize your entry points

7. Strong promotions, navigation and merchandising drive conversion

8. Always be testing

9. Don’t forget to upsell

10. Prioritize and develop technologies that yield significant business results

11. Engage with customers online using online community tools

12. Track your core competitors

13. One size does not fit all – target

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SUMMARY OF ONLINE LEVERSCustomers

Browse

Store (Configurator)

Cart

Checkout

Order

TRAFFIC

CONSIDERATION

CONVERSION

REVENUE PER UNIT

MARGIN PER UNIT

LEVER HOW TO MOVE?

Price/promotion, merchandising, navigation,

targeting, content

ODG, natural search, affiliates, partners,

community/social media, email

Price/promotion, merchandising, store pathing and length,

checkout experience and payment options

Product mix, S&P/Services up sell

UNITS PER TRANSACTION

Targeting, Promotions, S&P

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ENSURE SITE STABILITY• Downtime impacts your customer experience and bottom line

• Build processes to monitor site uptime and accuracy (applications, network and content)

• Establish an automated audit an notification process for site issues

• Obtain root cause reports to prevent future recurrence

Small Business Site Orders by Hour

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16

Dec 11 - Dec 12

Dec 4 - Dec 5

SITE

DOWN

Customers returned, but revenue still lost

Downtime impacts both financials . . . and customer experience:

4.19

2.56

4.32

0 1 2 3 4 5

24 hrs after

9pm - 7am

24 hrs before

Servers down, site slow

Buyer satisfaction rating

Very unsatisfied Very satisfied

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TRAFFIC – FOCUS ON QUALITY & MAXIMIZE THE ENTRY POINT• SEO and SEM are critical – B2B Internet users use search engines first to find out about a

product or service (83% use Google)

• Email – Grow an opt-in email subscriber list aggressively, provide clear benefits to subscription and track opt out

• Consider segmented OA/email programs that add value beyond just promo/price

• Offer value-added and exclusive promotions to affiliates

• Monitor your mix of traffic from ODG vs. Unattributed – ODG is often higher value

US SMB ODG:• Higher conversion% and RPV

• Higher intent of buying

• Increase awareness in customers about the Brand and Products

• Quicker returns as compared to organic search or other non ODG vehicles

Tip: Avoid landing pages that don’t convert. UPHV will go up as bounce rate decreases

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• Almost 20% of all retail site visits come from search engines and directories (is this US data?)• 35% of all search engine queries are commercial in nature• Both Paid and Natural Search deliver strong results

high speed internet

Organic Search ResultsResults generated algorithmically – unpaid

SEMSEO Paid Search AdvertisingTypical Models are PPC

Ticket to Entry

1) Site Structure• URLs• Accessibility

Relevance to Customer Searches

2) Content• Primary Subject Matter • Keyword Usage &Density• Browser & Page Titles• Headlines• Multimedia Filenames & Alt text

Critical for High Ranking

3) Links• Internal Links within Dell sites• External Inbound Links to Dell sites• Keywords Used as Links

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TRAFFIC – SEARCH CONTINUES TO BE A CRITICAL

CONVERSION – KNOW CUSTOMERS EXIT IN THE FUNNEL

Effective Traffic Browse Config Cart

• Page design• Path to most effective pages• Comparisons• Targeting• Strong internal search

• Optimize entry points

• Targeting by traffic source

• Simplified Config• Learning content• Improved search

• Payment approvals/options• Simplified checkout

1000 Visits

(example)

60% or 600 visits to product

pages

62% or 369 visits enter

config

Total Checkout

21% or 77 visits enter

cart

40% or 31 visits

advance to checkout

45% or 8 visits place a system

order

=0.8% global site conversion OR 2% global store conversion

51% or 16 visits

complete checkout

System Checkout

• Persistent Cart• Saved cart

email/outbounding

• US SMB: ~98% abandon rate and from config through checkout for systems• Explore ways to shift the funnel & reduce leakage in each stage of path

TIP: Focus design, data and testing on highest leakage areas7

CONVERSION/CONSIDERATION – SITE MERCHANDISING

Consider the site as an extension of the sales force

– Call to action with phone number, chat, lead gen forms should be hard to miss

– Control the Sale and Upsell

Navigation & Design– Make forward-moving navigation clear. Side

paths can provide additional information, but should always lead back to the main path

– Provide ways for customers to filter– Provide product detail/comparisons– Provide robust comparison and filtering tools– Enable various sorting mechanisms: Deals,

Top rated, Best Sellers, All– Integrate relevant content in addition to just

selling products for customers there to learn– Integrate content/customer stories/insights– Integrate with marcom/evalue code

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Tip: Target this content based on behavior or authenticated data where possible for improved RPV/MPV

CONSIDERATION/CONVERSION – DEVELOP MEANINGFUL AND HIGH QUALITY CONTENT• Think beyond the sale – remember that most

customer are here to learn not purchase

• Content can be your own or from your partners or customers

• Simplify language and choice

• Be consistent in all messaging and drive reassurance

Unclear Better

TIP: Robust content like this is a great search traffic driver

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SITE STICKINESS – ENGAGE YOUR CUSTOMERS ONLINE SMB customers and businesses are taking more

advantage of Social Computing

– Forums, Wikis, Blogs, RSS, file sharing and user-generated content

Great opportunities for customers to collaborate and learn

Great way to get low cost traffic and attention Don’t advertise – engage. Customers are in control Dell examples:

– www.dellideastorm.com

– www.dell.com/community

– Community within primary navigation

DELL CONFIDENTIAL 10

TIP: Customers want to share their ideas with you and with their peers.

Give them a place to do so.

BACKUP

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Actions:• Optimize ease of use, relevance and persuasiveness of primary purchase path

• Make forward-moving navigation clear

• Side paths can provide additional information, but should always lead back to the main path so customers do not get lost

• Give each page a clear purpose• Each click answers a question – the page behind the click must serve that purpose

• If the purpose of a page is to sell, have consistent and visible ‘action’ to allow customers to buy

SITE NAVIGATION

TIP: Identify upsell opportunities in the configurator: highlighted recommendations, featured add-ons,

default selections

Promo link opens new window - delivers info and keeps customer

on purchase path

Focus on the purchase path

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Home Page Line Page Configurator CartSeries Page CS1

HOW SEO WORKS• Search engines use automatic programs to crawl the Web. • Search Engines retrieve content based on a query

– Can your content be retrieved? Can the crawler read the content on your page?– Does it match what the user is searching for? If a user search “laptop”, is that word in your content?

• Those crawlers or spiders look for information about the intent of the website:

• Web pages are read like we read a page in a book: top to bottom, left to right.– Search engines take the crawled-through information and index them. – Hundreds of parameters are processed through their unique proprietary “black box” algorithms

• They then use this index to match search engine results to searcher queries. Ranking is largely based on

– How well your content matches what the user is looking for– How popular your content is on the web – internal & external links

•Subject •Age of Information •Audience •Popularity

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• The Key to having a strong natural search result presence is: – Clear page subject matter AND Descriptive title & URL of the page.– Distinct focused content unique to each page – Keywords/phrases customers would search on relevant to the page– Easily readable content and accessible navigation not reliant upon

images, multimedia or special scripts– Linking Strategy –Link is a “Word of Mouth” on internet .

• A link is a “vote”: So incoming links help establish the importance of a site or page with a search engine

• Links can be External (CNET, blogs, industry partners, etc) or Internal (ex: from a blog entry to the main blog page)

• Link to the page using descriptive text, preferably a keyword

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Social Media Channels

Micro BloggingBloggingSocial Networks /

ApplicationsOnline Video

Widgets

(Web based Widgets)Podcasting

Tagging/

Photo SharingOthers*

• Blogspot.com

• News Blogs

• Corporate Blogs

• Twitter

• Tumblr

• Facebook, Digg

• Groups, Forums

• Communities

• Youtube

• Vlogs

• iTunes

• Zune

• Juice

• Winamp

• Widsets

• Akami

• WebWag

• Plusmo

• Brand Monitoring

• Mashups

• Wikis

• Outreach

• Flickr Photostream

• Picassa

SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS

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Nike Plus Case Study

Nike plus ready shoe is built to have a

tracking device that syncs with the iPod or

band (device measures time, distance, pace,

calories etc.)

Nike has created a community of runners (Nike 6.0 Action Sports

Community)– all centered around the Nike brand.

– They offer a community forum to connect with other runners around the world,

– Social networks: Jordan Brand Breakfast Club

– Widgets: Nike + Challenges and Goals

It allows Nike to market directly and indirectly to product users through

the community website portal; new product launches are also

communicated through these channels

J&J’s Social Media Initiatives

J&J Health Channel on YouTube:

Online video channel which

focuses on addressing several

health issues

Consumer Product information: J&J posted a video on an acne treatment

product developed by Neutrogena Corp ; launch of medical device training

videos (OCD & Ethicon Endo related products) on YouTube increased the

number of views and response

Using twitter as a channel to promote health related initiatives undertaken by

J&J ; directs traffic to J&J Sponsored web properties such as Safe Kids USA

and baby.com

•Blogs work well for B2B brands because they require a certain level of prior knowledge and interest

Blogs

•Brands can integrate the real-time functionality of micro-blogging platforms into their marketing efforts

Micro – Blogging

•Niche Social Networks are specifically designed for B2B Brands. Others like Facebook allows to create a dialog with audience through images, video, text, and interactive applications

Social Networks

•This channel is primarily engages through image sharing, many viral videos and video channel which is quick and easy to facilitate

Video/Image Sharing

SOCIAL MEDIA TYPES AND APPLICABILITY

LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS Create baseline site and user experience metrics and measure often – NPS Document your user needs (what they want to do on your site) Quantify and categorize the key visitor demographics and attitudes Identify possible barriers to visitor success Categorize and prioritize areas of improvement suggested by users Gain a clear picture of:

– Who is coming to our site?

– Why are they coming here?

– What drove them here?

– How successful are they in accomplishing what they came to do?

– How we can improve the site to help fulfill its mission

– Whether the site is having a positive or negative impact on our brand

44% 46% 45%51% 50% 51%

33% 36% 33%41% 40% 41%

34% 34% 33% 26% 32% 29%

42% 38% 40%38% 38% 36%

22% 20% 22% 23% 17% 20% 25% 26% 27% 21% 22% 23%

22%26% 23%

28%33% 31%

8% 10%5%

20% 18% 18%

WW SMB AMER SMB APJ SMB EMEA SMB

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Tip: Develop short and long term projects to fix the larger CE issues tracked on site to improve NPS and conversion.