What Should The Highest Level Metrics Of Success Within A SmartCircular Site Be For ShopLocal?

Posted on 21 July 2009 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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Success for ShopLocal’s SmartCircular sites is really this simple:

1. Acquire traffic (the retailer is responsible for this step)
2. Get the user’s geo-located
3. Get the user’s to open the circular
4. Get the user’s to browse all pages in the circular

This could be condensed into the following equation:

SmartCircular Success = Traffic to Circular X Conversion To Viewing Content X Amount Of Content Viewed and/or Interacted With

To succeed one must clearly understand the component metrics that added up to overall success. For SmartCircular sites there are only four (4) simple metrics that really move the needle of in-store sales.

The goal of this funnel should be to minimize the drop off or abandonments that occur from the point the traffic shows up.  To this end, the tactics of success should be:

1. Traffic acquisition (retailer owns this step):
   • Highly visible and relevant linkage
   • Recommendation: Get the following permanent links deployed on your retailer.com site
     • Header AND footer navigation links
     • Integration within store finder results, so that for each store location returned the correct corresponding SmartCircular deep link is displayed
     • Inclusion of a link and/or graphic within the retailer.com homepage
     • Inclusion of a link and/or graphic within the weekly email newsletter
2. Geo-locating the user:
   • Removing decisions – Don’t make any user think.  This includes steps such as:
     • ZIP code or City, ST entry
     • Selecting a store from a list of nearby stores
     • Picking what bandwidth version of a site to view (dial-up vs. broadband)
   • Current SmartCircular Benchmarks
     • Low: 56%
     • High: 99%
     • Average: 86%
       
   • Recommendation: Use GeoIP Targeting to automatically locate a user. By doing this, a user is able to enter the SmartCircular site without having to type anything in or click on anything. This is how the high data point of 99% is being achieved.
3. Opening the circular:
   • Taking away choices
   • Current SmartCircular Benchmarks
     • Low: 34%
     • High: 99%
     • Average: 79%
       
   • Recommendation: If the retailer typically only has one (1) promotion live at any given time, then auto-default all incoming traffic directly into the browse by page mode so that the user just start’s their browsing experience on page one of the latest circular. This is how the high data point of 99% is being achieved.
4. Browsing (ideally) all pages contained within the circular:
   • Making navigation really easy and obvious
   • Current SmartCircular Benchmarks
     • Low: 21%
     • High: 204% (yes, this is accurate but not that common. It can be achieved by a retailer having really short circulars, like 2 pages, and by users visiting both pages twice)
     • Average: 77%
       
   • Recommendation: Make it clear to the user that what you (the retailer) want them to do is to flip and view all the pages of your circular.  Do this by having many different ways of turning the page such as the corners, back/next buttons, slider bars, etc.  By combining multiple methods of page-by-page navigation, this is how the leaders on average achieve around ~90% plus circular page read rate.

If you are a current SmartCircular client, call your sales or client service rep to find out how your actual site ranks against these performance benchmarks.  The ShopLocal team has loads of client specific data and insights to share so as to help guide your SmartCircular site to higher performance.

Coupons + Local Inventory + Store Events + Local Promotions = The New Shopper Planning Center Concept

Posted on 22 June 2009 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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What in the world does:

1. Store Coupons
2. Local Inventory
3. Store Events & Announcements
4. Local Promotions

have in common?  They are all all local store focused and represent the complete set of resources that would help any in-market shopper.  Collectively over the last few months, the team here at ShopLocal has been doing a lot of thinking and discussing where the future of our business is headed.  One of the most immediate conclusions is that we need diversify our business well beyond the current focus area of circulars and catalogs. There will be a day were no print circular is created and inserted into newspapers. This is not an immediate threat or doomsday scenario, but just prudent long-term preparedness.

So once the focus is off the circular, our team immediately turned to bring other great store focused sources of content to a more visible nature.  Areas like store-level closeouts, coupons and  in-store events are just a few examples.  The point being, ShopLocal quickly is evolving to become a store focused, promotion based marketing tool, of which the weekly ad / circular content is just one source.  This concept is what the team is calling a Shopper Planning Center (working name – still on the hunt for something better – maybe SmartDeals? Suggestions welcome…)

The goals of what a Shopper Planning Center can do for a retailer are:

• Deepen the amount of location specific content by bringing in promotional data from sources that have no current outlet of home on the internet (including retailer.com)
• Become more multi-channel in terms of offering items available for sale online
• Manage all of this increased volume of content by the use of data driven features such as site personalization, product recommendation and related products
• Do all of this so as to increase local, in-store conversions that are fueled by online research and activities

This is a list of some of the potential content / data sources that a retailer could easily load into the Shopper Planning Center.

So the team here at ShopLocal took this vision of a retailer store-centric deal center (or Shopper Planning Center) and came up with two initial visual manifestations.

Here is a Borders Books "Magic Shelf" inspired visualization that the team did for Kohl's of how many unique content sources can be well integrated into an engaging user experience / interface (Ux /Ui). This entire site would be built as a rich internet application (RIA) so that user could pan up, down, left and right to view the various result sets.

Here is a low fidelity wire frame that was done for Best Buy that does a great job of showing how store event content and eCommerce content and weekly ad content can be pulled together with personalization and localization.