Rich Media for Your Website

Now that most of your customers have broadband, your site should offer rich media features such as zoom, virtual e-catalogs and dynamic color-swatching. “It’s basically a must-have for many retailers, especially those where touch and feel are critical to product conversion,” says Sucharita Mulpuru, a senior analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Anyone in this space who doesn’t have features such as zoom and alternative views is seen as being really behind.”

A host of companies offer low-cost tools that make it easy to add rich media to your site. Virtual Iris, for one, sells software for enhancing pictures, e-mails and websites with next-generation rich media elements. Prices range from free (for basic use of the company’s website) to monthly licensing fees of several thousand dollars for downloadable enterprise desktop products.

Another company, ActivePoint, offers contextual e-catalogs and reporting tools for e-commerce. The company’s Easy-Flip E-Catalogue starts at $65 per page with links; hosting is charged based on traffic. Meanwhile, ActivePoint’s TX5 system creates interactive online presentations that incorporate rich media elements and guide customers through a website, helping them find the product they want even if they don’t know its exact name. The base price for TX5 is $5,000 per system or about $900 per month, depending on usage.

The TX5 system helped entrepreneur Sebastian Harrison solve a problem: Customers had trouble navigating the hundreds of pages of his website. His Playa del Ray, California, business, Cellular Abroad, sells myriad international phone plans so customers can avoid expensive roaming rates. “Before TX5, consumers would call and ask where to begin on our 800-page site, or they would get frustrated and leave the site,” says Harrison, 41, who expects more than $2.5 million in sales this year.

Sheila Dahlgren, senior vice president of marketing and communication at Scene7, a Novato, California, provider of rich media software and solutions, offers the following advice on using rich media.

1. High-resolution imagery produces high-quality results. Delivering the best online shopping experience possible means making sure all your content is consistent and of the best quality.

2. Invest in rich media technology that can grow with your business. Make sure your rich media vendor can scale to allow you to leverage your rich media across all products and pages, including the home page, thumbnail pages, product pages, shopping cart and so on.

3. Hook buyers with visuals. Visual merchandising is a proven method for increasing conversion rates. Maximize your rich media investment by using dynamically served imagery to not only upsell and cross-sell additional products, but also showcase items in your customers’ shopping carts, on compare pages, in search results and more.

MelissaCampanelli is a marketing and technology writer in New York City.

By Melissa Campanelli

Get Your Site Ready for the Holidays

For many e-tailers, holiday sales account for more than half of their year’s total sales. That’s great news when you consider that this year is expected to be a big one for online shopping. Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of ComScore Networks, a Reston, Virginia-based global information provider and consulting firm that tracks online sales, predicts a 24 per-cent to 25 percent increase in spending this holiday season over last year, with nontravel online spending reaching about $24 billion.

“It’s been clear for a while,” Fulgoni says. “The longer somebody is online, the more comfortable they become, and [as] more people switch to broadband, they spend more. And those trends continue to drive growth.” He points to other growth factors as well: the fact that online merchants are designing better websites that are easier to navigate, and that multichannel retailers are focusing more on their online channels today than in the past.

Online marketing efforts during the pre-holiday months and weeks are especially critical for e-tailers who seek healthy profits this holiday season. Just ask Randall Scott, the 27-year-old president and founder of Randall Scott Cycle Company LLC, an online retailer of high-end bicycles and bike accessories. Here’s how Scott, who expects sales of more than $2 million this year, plans to get his Boulder, Colorado, business in gear for the holidays.

1.Beef up inventory. Due to the seasonality of the bicycle industry, Scott says his top-selling holiday items are indoor bicycle trainers. “At the end of September, we increase our inventory of these items by more than 1,000 percent—[we] buy in bulk during this time,” he says.

2.Do an e-mail blitz. In October, one month before the company’s big holi-day push, “We e-mail our top 100 customers a newsletter with a number of items that we think will be bestsellers for the holiday season,” Scott says. “We then track all metrics of their click streams to see what they have the most interest in and what they have purchased.” Randall Scott Cycle uses those results to determine inventory levels and shape holiday sales.

3.Run pay-per-click promotions. In November, Scott’s company runs aggressive, specific promotions on indoor trainers that remind customers of health and fitness benefits. The weekly promotions are strategically placed in all major search engines. As Scott explains, “The promotions will be clearly represented in the text of the pay-per-click campaign ad—showing, for example, a percentage off a particular product—and bring the customer directly to a holiday season landing page that is directly associated with the PPC text campaign.”

4.Show some spirit. Also starting in November, Randall Scott Cycle’s website and e-mail marketing messages reflect the season with holiday icons and other visuals. “It’s a way to differentiate ourselves by [connecting] with our customers and building a community,” says Scott. “It gets our customers into the shopping spirit.”

Melissa Campanelliis a marketing and technology writer in New York City.

By Melissa Campanelli

Should You Use a Vanity Domain Name?

You’re promoting your business URL on your marketing materials, right? That’s a start. However, you might be ready to expand your brand. Vanity URLs can help.

A vanity URL (or vanity domain name) is an easy-to-remember URL often used to promote a particular product or service. For example, your company URL may be www.company.com, and your vanity URL for a product called ABC could be www.abc.com. Often, a vanity URL redirects to a page on your site. For example, www.abc.com could redirect to www.company.com/abc.html.

What does this accomplish? First, you’ll send prospects to the most appropriate landing page. Dumping them off on your home page and making them search for what they want could cost you the sale.

Second, you’ll likely avoid additional site hosting fees because a redirect is not a separate site. It just allows people to type in one URL and then be sent to another. Your ISP can set this up for you. Although you could pay a small hosting fee for the redirect, it shouldn’t be much.

You don’t need to use vanity URLs, but they make great low-cost web marketing tools.

Personalized Service Online

Avatars let your customers spread the word about you.
By Karen E. Spaeder

 

Imagine someone wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with your company name–all day, every day–then sharing the shirt with thousands of friends. It might sound like a marketer’s pipe dream, but with avatars–the little talking, animated characters representing users that are popping up all over the web–such dreams can come true.

Sean Ryan, founder of San Francisco based Meez.com, is witnessing the trend firsthand with his online avatar service. “We’re seeing interest from companies looking for cost-effective ways to reach out to consumers online,” says Ryan, 38, who launched Meez in March 2006 and has raised more than $5.3 million in venture funding. “It’s harder and harder to reach people under 30,” he says, and avatars are one way to do just that.

Scott Flora, owner of Venice, California-based Blik, found a friend in Ryan when they partnered up to create virtual wallpaper that mimics Blik’s line of adhesive wall decals. Meez users can choose Blik wallpaper for their free avatars’ virtual environments, then share the avatar–and the Blik name–in blogs, on social networking sites, as IM icons and anywhere they want to give themselves a little personality in an otherwise impersonal web world. “People see the design is branded by our company,” explains Flora, 39, who says Blik has doubled in size every year since starting in 2002. “We have gotten a number of responses from people who have seen us on the Meez site.”

While avatars are just beginning to catch on in the U.S.–compared to, say, Korea, where avatars are a billion-dollar market–Ryan says they’ll become much more mainstream in 2007 and beyond.

It’s a trend you can’t ignore, especially from a viral marketing standpoint. “Entrepreneurs are always looking for cost-effective ways to fit marketing into a new context,” says Robb Hecht, marketing consultant and adjunct marketing professor at Baruch College in New York City. “Avatars are the next big thing. They put a humanizing touch [on] the whole web-based experience.”

Originally published in the January 2007 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine