Here is an interesting graph using Google’s financial tools and search query results. The blue line shows searches for phrases like “financial planning advisers”, “fidelity” “smith barney”. The red line shows the trend line of the S&P 500. Note how clearly they correspond to each other! As the S&P500 does well fewer people look for a financial planner.  This seems to be the most closely corresponding vertical.* But negatively.Why?

Imagine a middle class person has a little extra cash and wants to invest it. If the S&P500 is doing well, they can just buy a couple companies they recognize and watch their worth increase. In more difficult financial times people start to look for financial help. I would guess the correlation coefficient is -.8: Strong negative correlation.

You can do this for any vertical you are in or thinking about getting in. So we saw that financial advisers has a strong positive correlation. What vertical do you think has a positive correlation? My guess was luxury but I was wrong. Here’s luxury:

If I had to guess a correlation coefficient for luxury it would probably be .35. Small correlation but nothing I’d bet the house on. So what has the best correlation? It’s Automotive! I would guess the correlation coefficient as .55: Medium positive correlation.

Durable goods and house buying are about the same. So people perform fewer searches in these verticals as the stock market fluctuates. How can you use this to your advantage? Well, if you are a financial adviser I suppose you should be rooting for the S&P500 to go down. Or if you are a financial adviser and you suspect the stock market to go down you can start increasing hiring advisers.  Or for my readers who are search marketing consultants- if/when the stock market goes down expect belt-tightening from your car and housing clients but seek out financial advisers!**

Notes

*Google doesn’t mention which search terms it uses to define a vertical. It just gives examples. I’ll assume they put a little thought into this. It also does not mention every vertical. For example, I don’t see aerospace.

Also, google does not provide exact numbers so we can’t find true correlation we can only use “eye-ball analysis”. I think that is fine.

** One other thing to note that while I implied a cause and effect relationship—or a causal relationship of some sort—I think it is stock prices that are doing the causing not vice versa. I have made this assumption in all commentary.

Shopper marketing is a relatively new idea in the CPG world. The idea is that a manufacturer representative will use her knowledge of the product to help a retailer optimize their site towards increasing sales of that product. In other words, if I am a shopping marketer at Welch’s assigned to walmart.com I would try to increase Welch’s sales on Walmart.com.

That’s the extent of it.

You may be asking “Isn’t that the retailer’s job?” Well yes and no. A retailer wants to sell more jelly, but he doesn’t care if it is Welch’s or Smucker’s jelly unless Welch’s is the highest margin product in that category or Welch’s inventory is getting out of hand. So a retailer wants to sell more jelly, but not necessarily your jelly.

A shopping marketer works with (or without) a retailer to increase sales at that retailer. The question is-How do we do this? There is a lot written stating that is beneficial for manufacturers to do this, but not a lot of practical advice. So I will provide some advice on this here blog.

Shopper Marketing Tactics
The best techniques are methods that we can use without the retailers knowledge. (Again-this is web only). It is not that we are trying to be devious; the reason is that I don’t want to have to go plead with Wal-Mart to make the changes that I want and/or negotiate terms for every change. I want what I want now. If I can get this, that is best! Let’s take a look at what that my look like:

It turns out Smucker’s is killing it. We have a lot of work to do.

When I say Smucker’s is killing it, I am not looking at sales numbers, so how do I know Smucker’s is winning? Because I know the way that online merchandisers think and how merchandising algorithms work. The “best” products get put at the top UNLESS retailers are trying to get rid of excess stock. Smucker’s has the top 10 spots…it is winning. I don’t need to request sales numbers. (Though maybe walmart provides them. I am not sure).

Our Welch’s Strawberry is in about spot 10. In spot 9 is Smucker’s strawberry. Let’s see what we would have to do to get the Welch’s above the Smucker’s. That is, what can I do on my end without even talking to Wal-Mart to increase sales.

Analysis
Why is the Smucker’s strawberry above the Welch’s strawberry? It is a culmination of things. Let’s take a look at them:

1) The total price for Smucker’s is lower but the price per/unit for Welch’s is better. I don’t think it is the price. Next.
2) Smucker’s has double the reviews. That is an issue. Whether we can do anything about this is another issue
3) The Smucker’s product has the word “jelly” in the product title. Welch’s says “spread”. This is a search for jelly! Advantage Smucker’s. We could change this in our feed.
4) There may be another issue-I’d just have to ask my team. If Smucker’s is stocked by Wal-Mart but Welch’s is third party, I am in trouble. Most companies will try to get rid of what they stock first. If I had to increase sales of Welch jelly on Wal-Mart I’d tell someone to sign a contract with Wal-Mart getting inventory in their warehouse or we might have just hit a wall. This is not the case here, but for Amazon or Newegg it might be.

Let’s Compare the Two Product Pages: *all pics click-able*

and…

1) Note the URLs-The come from the product titles. So again, the word “jelly” gets left off another field in our product. We need to be more careful on product titles.
2) Not shown- Smucker’s seems to import reviews of their product from their own site…that is bound to increase reviews. We could do this.
3) The Smucker’s packaging is nicer. This isn’t really immediately fixable, but the packaging makes it look better. One of the ranking metrics is probably click through rate. So we should make cuter packaging.
4) Inventory levels- Ours could be low in stock..if we are using a feed I would know if this the case. Also, Wal-Mart may favor brands that offer more variety..we could try to offer more variety.
5) I could also link-build to my product. I haven’t heard much about this, but it would increase sales.
So let’s review the “free” tactics we have at our disposal: Product title optimization, changing price-(mostly if we are a third party provider), change picture/packaging, increase reviews, use seo e.g. use jelly in product copy, play with assortment. That is a pretty good about of tactics to use without interacting with the retailer. Imagine the results if I hoped on the phone!
The paid tactics don’t involve interacting with anyone at Wal-Mart. I can buy ads on Wal-Mart that advertise my jelly, not Smucker’s:

Those circles are ads I can buy. I can write ads on the Smucker’s products that says “did you hear Smucker’s is being recalled for Salmonella, try Welch’s instead.”

Or maybe something like “Welch’s tastes better”. This would increase sales of Welch’s on Walmart.com which is the goal of the shopping marketer.

Conclusion
In conclusion, manufacturers should think about the tactics an internet retailer uses every day to increase sales. Then use those on your product. The less you involve a retailer, the faster you can move. If you have the highest margin product in your category look for the retailer to be more likely to work with you that if you are a discount product.

Exhaust all free methods before trying the paid methods so as to achieve the best ROI. If you have a huge budget use the paid methods first so you can see results faster. It is possible that your product just doesn’t belong in that retailer and nothing you do will increase sales. If this is the case why waste a ton of time on it? Fail faster.

The Fundamentals of Email Newsletters
The primary function of email newsletters is to get customers to buy. Simple, right? Well, there are so many places where things can go wrong, it is a miracle anyone converts. Here is the flow of an email:
1) Send email out (hopefully to the right address).
2) Mail goes through filters and arrives in their Inbox.
3) The customer likes our brand and the subject enough to open the email and check it out.
4) The customer is interested in the product and offer enough to click-through to the website.
5) Once on the website, then they can start shopping.
6) About 1-2% of people who made it to step 5 will buy.
7) Hopefully they will like the product enough not to return it.

Every step of the way, customers will stop shopping. Our goal is to carry as many people from step 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3, etc. Every time a customer advances to the next step, we think of this as a micro-conversion. We can’t make a sale if the customer doesn’t make it to the website.

Email marketing involves optimizing each of these steps. Improvements in any of these areas will lead to improvement in performance. Often we’ll spend a lot of time on step 4, the design of the email. I think this is because it is the most fun. Creating promos, looking at pictures, merchandising, & selecting models is much more interesting than staring at spreadsheets. But somebody has to do it!

A Real-life Example of Optimizing Step One: List Scrubbing
I just went through an email list with about two hundred thousand entries. Seven and a half percent of the addresses were formatted wrong. These are people who want to hear from you, but they typed their email wrong. 7.5% actually doesn’t sound like a lot of loss, right? Wrong. That is 15,000 people per email. Let’s examine how much money we are losing by doing some quick math.

We send a newsletter 2x a month. Open rate is 30%. CTR is 30%. Conversion rate is 1%. Avg Order $100.
{[(15,000) (2) (.3)] (.3) (.01) (100)}= $2700/month lost.

Ugh! That is money we threw away due to people typing their addresses wrong. But there is good news. This is a relatively easy thing to fix. You can buy software to do this, or get a programmer to help you, or fix this yourself in Excel.

Scrub Yourself
First, export all your addresses to Excel. The “trick” is to replace common bad addresses with good addresses. We know that every email address has the same format: name@domain.com. Here are some of the most common errors.
@yahoo.comm
Yahoo.com
@Yaho.com
@Yahoo.con
@yahoo,con

Find and replace (Ctrl-F) each of these variations with “@yahoo.com”. Do the same procedure for gmail, aol, msn, hotmail. Congrats. You just fixed half of the errors. I just made you $1300/month in a half hour.

Kind of.

To recoup the rest of the address, you will have to send the list to an intern and tell them to fix all the unique domain addresses. You’ll probably have people using their school or work addresses, and the replace function will not save you time on these. Also, remember to import your new email addresses to your email provider.

Conclusion
The good news is that there is an easy way to fix this problem going forward. Make your customer type their address twice when they subscribe. This way there will not be any formatting errors in your email list. Making these changes will have a large impact on any email campaign. This is just one step of the email optimization process.

Remarketing is hot in the internet marketing world. It is becoming easier and cheaper to implement, thus lowering the barrier to entry. In the online world, the term “remarketing” is used to discuss efforts to acquire customers who have already visited your site or opened an email. If someone has never visited your site, you cannot “RE-market to them”.

As of today, remarketing is only used on the display network. However, it seems that Google or MSN could use that data to customize your search network ads sometime in the future. With the focus on “personalized search” I would think this is on its way.

Facts about Remarketing
The segment of traffic that comes to our site and leaves without converting will be the target of most remarketing campaigns. Since these visitors have already shown a previous interest in our site we can make three assumptions about them:

1. Remarketing segments will always be a subset of the general population. Thus, the impressions and traffic you receive are likely to be small.

2. Remarketing campaigns will cost less to convert since this segment has already demonstrated interest in your brand. We might think of their prior exposure to our brand as a kind of micro-conversion. If your brand is worth anything, remarketing should cost less than the general segment.

3. Remarketing segments are worth more to us than the general population. Feel free to spend more to insure these visitors see your ads.

Tips and More Details on Remarketing
Two other quick things that you need to know about remarketing. One, this remarketing “magic” is created done by using tagging in your analytics/ ppc/ display tool. Your analytics /ppc /display guy should be able to help you.

Keep it simple. There are many more advanced ways to use remarketing which are beyond the scope of this article. If you are not using remarketing, feel free to use it as I described. Even this is way beyond most companies’ capabilities (because they don’t get enough traffic, or lack the resources to analyze the data).

* There are some exceptions to this case. In ecommerce, often time customers need to be reacquired each time they search for a new product. However, let’s ignore this situation for the sake of simplicity.

For marketers and businesses, Google Maps is an extension of SEO. For businesses whose customer base is primarily local, Google Maps may be a more important source of traffic than traditional organic SEO or pay per click marketing.
Lawyers, doctors, hotels and restaurants are all examples of businesses that need a presence on Google Maps to stay competitive.
E-commerce companies, wholesalers, and warehouses usually do not need Google Maps to stay competitive

local search results

Google Maps and Universal Search
Google maps is an aspect of what is called “universal search”. Google maps attempts to identify businesses close in location to the searcher. If I need a lawyer and search for “lawyer” or I want a pizza and I search for “pizza”, it is likely that a business down the street will be much more relevant than a lawyer in New York or Ukraine.
For certain searches, local results are better.

How does Google know I want a Local Business?
There seems to be at least two conditions that need to be satisfied for Google Maps to be triggered:
1) The search phrase must contain a city name: e.g, San Diego Lawyer, Surgeon in Minneapolis, etc.
2) The search is for a business-related item. You can’t just search for “San Diego X” or “X San Diego”. X has to match a database of words. Lawyer, surgeon, pizza, hotels are all business-related, so Google-Maps triggers if you enter one of these phrases. “San Diego Rattlesnake” does not trigger Google Maps.

What Does This Have to do With My Business?
Submitting your business to Google Maps can help you gain visibility when people perform these “local searches”.

If people see you on Google Maps, they could clickthrough to your website and end up as customers. This has to be the easiest search optimization technique to use to help market your business. Obviously, the “trick” is to do it right.

You only get seen if you are in positions A-J (the top 10).

The Problem
Google has not resigned to the fact that Google maps is the domain of marketers.
As such, they have enforced very strict rules against attempts to optimize Google Maps. More than any other area of search marketing, it is better for you to be conservative- no keyword stuffing.

Conclusion
Submit a map, or hire someone to submit a Google Map for you. If you still desire more visibility, and wish to be aggressive in your marketing, look into altering your SEO and PPC efforts.