This past month we discussed topics like email marketing subject lines, the impact of international fraud on your online store, and go-to-market strategies for Asian ecommerce. The June Ecommerce Digest will continue talking about email marketing and other important ecommerce subjects like the state of the PC market, split testing pricing models for subscription products, and other trends.
Email Marketing: Your Questions About Personalization and Length | MarketingSherpa Blog – Imagine you are reading your favorite tech blog and you see an ad for some shoes you were just looking at on Zappos. Does that ad encourage you to revisit the store? Rich Fleck, the VP of Strategy for Responsys, an email marketing service, says it may, “We often see targeted messaging out-performing status quo messaging by a factor of two to three times – on both engagement and conversion metrics.” As usual, the important thing here is balance. Beware the temptation to get hyper-personal with all the data at your disposal.
How PC Makers are Fighting the Mobile Revolution | CNNMoney – With PC sales plateauing, software makers are wisely asking what the future holds for their industry. As this article from CNNMoney notes, people are buying apps on phones and tablets mostly for entertainment purposes while PCs and desktop software are still the primary tools for getting work done. The key for software manufacturers is to leverage the opportunity for supporting and maintaining older machines and outdated programs. Furthermore, due to the emergence of the Internet of Things, where a plethora of household and business devices communicate through central hubs, software vendors have an opportunity to sell to device manufacturers who requiring pre-installed software on the connected televisions, thermostats, etc., that they build.
A/B Testing Subscriptions – More Challenging Than It Looks | Charge Thru – The concept of split testing is fairly simple: offer visitors two different experiences and see which one converts better. In this post, Martin Westhead helps us understand the complexity of split testing for subscription products. He explains the tension that exists between the elements that lead to initial conversions and those that help subsequent ones. His analysis also provides insight into metrics like monthly recurring revenue, customer lifetime value and churn rate.
How is Ecommerce Likely to Evolve? Five Key Trends | Econsultancy – This blog post is an extract from Econsultancy’s guide to building an ecommerce team. Today, the key challenges faced by ecommerce teams center on data and metrics, flexible customer service, and responsive design for mobile devices. One ecommerce manager in the report notes that when it comes to measuring improvements, “Start simple and do small-ish focused trials to see what happens when you lift a lever here a bit and then pull a trigger there a bit etc.”
Adobe CEO: We’re Off to a Good Start with Subscriptions (Q&A) | CNET News – After Adobe announced that they were making the shift to SaaS, we noted that both Adobe and its customers stood to gain a lot from the focus on subscriptions. This interview with Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, indicates that new subscribers are flocking to the subscription model. As we learned in the Charge Thru post, the real test, of course, will be on the churn rate and the customer lifetime value.
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