August 28, 2013
The eTail Blog: From ‘Electronic Commerce’ to ‘Engaged Community’
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of an article from The eTail Blog, a source of exclusive content generated by and for the e-commerce community.
Rose Hamilton, EVP and CMO of Pet360, believes there is a lot more to etailing than simply selling a product. At Pet360, an e-commerce website for pet owners, the focus of marketing and digital efforts is to become an effective resource for pet parents. Before her time at Pet360, the website was transaction-driven. But it has since become community-driven, with an emphasis on the user experience.
It is now a one-stop-shop for not only buying pet related products, but also learning about pet wellness issues, enhanced by pet parenting related blogs and connecting with other German Shepherd, Scottish Fold or fuzzy hamster owners in the Pet360 community.
At eTail East 2013, during the Social Commerce and Social Engagement Summit, Ms. Hamilton shared six tips she believes will allow any company to transform transaction-focused online platforms into online communities:
1. Identify an executive sponsor for your upcoming efforts. Decide what higher-up member of your company is going to sponsor your efforts. If the CEO is worried about ROI and the budget needed to hire an editorial staff, then attempt to bring in the CFO of your company in order to better justify costs.
2. Define the value of customer engagement. Make sure that you understand how your marketing efforts will justify your financial goals. In other words, come to an understanding with your executive sponsor on how you will monetize your future online efforts.
3. Shape the culture of your community. Begin to understand your consumer’s emotional motivations and engage accordingly. This begins in-house with the engagement of your own staff members. If they aren’t engaged in the online community, how can you expect people outside of your company to engage?
4. Leverage consumer feedback to guide decisions. Feedback is not failure, thus in order for you to test certain community themed changes to your online platforms, you must create a risk-tolerant culture within your organization.
5. Integrate consumer engagement. Consumer engagement efforts must be spread over the whole of your organization. Everyone must be empowered to further along your company’s engagement methods.
6. Measure quality over quantity. Focus on planned content as well as segment tailored content, rather than just customer acquisition and traffic measurement.
BrainTrust
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Discussion Questions
What steps should e-commerce sites be taking to position themselves as online communities? Do you agree that websites should be much less transaction-driven? Which would you rank as the most and least important tips offered in the article?
Poll
This is an excellent and insightful article. It really taps into the most basic human need since the beginning of time…the need for “common-unity.”
What has devastated our society is this “every man/woman/child for themselves” mentality of isolation. Using technology to disconnect, home schooling because so many schools are pathetic, finding technological ways where we don’t have to actually interact with customers and so on.
We all need to belong, to have a place. It’s the Cheers principle.
So what should e-tailers do? Follow steps 1 through 6. Will they? Probably not and even if they try it will most often fail. Reason is we are so locked into seeing everything as mechanistic, “just do these things” and all will be well.
Unfortunately we go through the motions without the emotion. If the spirit and belief isn’t present, mimicking certain ‘steps’ won’t get you there. What truly ‘unifies’ people into engaged communities is LOVE—the love for someone or something. As Ms. Hamilton knows, if you have a lab—especially a yellow lab—you are my friend forever. As anyone who goes to a dog park will admit, you know the names of the other dogs, but not their owners. It’s the love of the dog that unites you into instant community.
The idea of beginning with and working against your consumer’s emotional motivations is huge, particularly for marketers looking to engage millennial shoppers. This generation is always wired and on the lookout for good value and great experiences. And research consistently shows that the influence of new media on Millennial shoppers is two and three times higher versus the average shopper.
Millennials can and will get information from a broad range of electronic media, and retailers absolutely must be part of that solution set to win share of this new, large and increasingly wealthy consumer segment.
There is a role for e-commerce sites that are great at transactions, but that is now a crowded space, with an entrenched 800 lb gorilla in Amazon, and a few extremely well motivated contenders trying to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of brick and mortar revenue (Walmart).
The opportunity for new entrants to create engaging, curated, experience driven sites is much greater.
My namesake (Jason Goldberg of Fab.com) talks about the three eras of e-commerce:
E-Com 1.0: Assortment and Efficient Transactions (Amazon)
E-Com 2.0: Distribution of digital goods (iTunes)
E-Com 3.0: Experiential Commerce
Pet360 is clearly focusing on trying to carve out a niche in E-Com 3.0.
The challenge at the moment is that most of the e-commerce industry is geared to create E-Com 1.0 experiences. All the platforms are focused on SKU-driven experiences vs. rich marketing content and user generated content. Most of the advice about structuring your team and your business is focused on efficient buying and selling of goods. So you are unlikely to a get 3.0 experience by buying the off-the-self tools, and following the current industry advice.
Becoming a content destination and creating a community is an entirely different skill-set. I’d encourage businesses that aspire to do so, to spend a lot more time refining their inbound marketing muscles and focus on earning an audience, rather than the typical paid, performance-driven marketing tactics to rent an audience.
Whether one agrees with all the tips, this is clearly superior salesmanship: treating customers as more than transactions. It is getting out of the mind of the retailer into the mind of the customer, who may not exactly be “shopping” on this visit. How can we be helpful to them?
This is part of what I was getting at with my comments on salesmanship here recently: “The principle is, that when calling on a prospect, even if the prospect doesn’t buy, you owe it to them, to yourself, and to the sales profession to make it a positive experience. This is essential if you ever expect to be welcome there on another occasion, and it is essential to prepare the soil for the next competent sales person who may call on them.”
In the present instance, Pet 360 is extending their service to their community by being helpful far beyond the purchase transactions that will make their business successful.
I do think most retailers do have this attitude to an extent, but the drive for transactions can easily sweep aside all but token efforts to serve the shopper, and razor thin margins forestall any serious effort that’s not directly, immediately, driving transactions.
One critical questions to ask: “is there a need for a community nexus or hub within this space, and how do I know that?” Ecommerce sites are essentially that in the consumer’s mind: places to buy things. Transforming a site from a transactional ecommerce site to a community hub which facilitates need fulfillment for its constituents (of which buying things easily is one)…that takes time and all the things noted in the article.
There is no one thing over another on that list: you have to hit them all. I would add one more: design a UX built around the concept of “community hubs” rather than tweak the transactional UX currently in place. Adding community-like elements to a transactional site helps. But it will not, I believe, affect the transformation needed. Point 3 speaks to the need to shape the culture of the community within the company—it’s a paradigm shift to see the website this way, rather than focus on driving traffic, converting traffic, and increasing AOV. All of those metrics will improve with a community hub approach—but not immediately and not without an experience designed for that cultural shift.
This is indeed a great article and I am looking forward to hearing Ms Hamilton speak at the upcoming RetailConnections Forum in San Francisco, Sept 10th. There are still seats available. (Shameless plug, but appropriate.)
The common themes in the comments found here are love and emotion. I would encourage every retailer to gather around the brainstorm table and search for the love and/or emotion they can associate with their brand. Then look for ways to incorporate it into their brand experience — both online and in-store.
Websites that go beyond the transaction are bound to be more enticing and garner more loyalty as well as interaction from customers.
And, of course, since I ranked leveraging consumer feedback as the most important, don’t forget to include the consumer input in your efforts!
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This is an excellent and insightful article. It really taps into the most basic human need since the beginning of time…the need for “common-unity.”
What has devastated our society is this “every man/woman/child for themselves” mentality of isolation. Using technology to disconnect, home schooling because so many schools are pathetic, finding technological ways where we don’t have to actually interact with customers and so on.
We all need to belong, to have a place. It’s the Cheers principle.
So what should e-tailers do? Follow steps 1 through 6. Will they? Probably not and even if they try it will most often fail. Reason is we are so locked into seeing everything as mechanistic, “just do these things” and all will be well.
Unfortunately we go through the motions without the emotion. If the spirit and belief isn’t present, mimicking certain ‘steps’ won’t get you there. What truly ‘unifies’ people into engaged communities is LOVE—the love for someone or something. As Ms. Hamilton knows, if you have a lab—especially a yellow lab—you are my friend forever. As anyone who goes to a dog park will admit, you know the names of the other dogs, but not their owners. It’s the love of the dog that unites you into instant community.
The idea of beginning with and working against your consumer’s emotional motivations is huge, particularly for marketers looking to engage millennial shoppers. This generation is always wired and on the lookout for good value and great experiences. And research consistently shows that the influence of new media on Millennial shoppers is two and three times higher versus the average shopper.
Millennials can and will get information from a broad range of electronic media, and retailers absolutely must be part of that solution set to win share of this new, large and increasingly wealthy consumer segment.
There is a role for e-commerce sites that are great at transactions, but that is now a crowded space, with an entrenched 800 lb gorilla in Amazon, and a few extremely well motivated contenders trying to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of brick and mortar revenue (Walmart).
The opportunity for new entrants to create engaging, curated, experience driven sites is much greater.
My namesake (Jason Goldberg of Fab.com) talks about the three eras of e-commerce:
E-Com 1.0: Assortment and Efficient Transactions (Amazon)
E-Com 2.0: Distribution of digital goods (iTunes)
E-Com 3.0: Experiential Commerce
Pet360 is clearly focusing on trying to carve out a niche in E-Com 3.0.
The challenge at the moment is that most of the e-commerce industry is geared to create E-Com 1.0 experiences. All the platforms are focused on SKU-driven experiences vs. rich marketing content and user generated content. Most of the advice about structuring your team and your business is focused on efficient buying and selling of goods. So you are unlikely to a get 3.0 experience by buying the off-the-self tools, and following the current industry advice.
Becoming a content destination and creating a community is an entirely different skill-set. I’d encourage businesses that aspire to do so, to spend a lot more time refining their inbound marketing muscles and focus on earning an audience, rather than the typical paid, performance-driven marketing tactics to rent an audience.
Whether one agrees with all the tips, this is clearly superior salesmanship: treating customers as more than transactions. It is getting out of the mind of the retailer into the mind of the customer, who may not exactly be “shopping” on this visit. How can we be helpful to them?
This is part of what I was getting at with my comments on salesmanship here recently: “The principle is, that when calling on a prospect, even if the prospect doesn’t buy, you owe it to them, to yourself, and to the sales profession to make it a positive experience. This is essential if you ever expect to be welcome there on another occasion, and it is essential to prepare the soil for the next competent sales person who may call on them.”
In the present instance, Pet 360 is extending their service to their community by being helpful far beyond the purchase transactions that will make their business successful.
I do think most retailers do have this attitude to an extent, but the drive for transactions can easily sweep aside all but token efforts to serve the shopper, and razor thin margins forestall any serious effort that’s not directly, immediately, driving transactions.
One critical questions to ask: “is there a need for a community nexus or hub within this space, and how do I know that?” Ecommerce sites are essentially that in the consumer’s mind: places to buy things. Transforming a site from a transactional ecommerce site to a community hub which facilitates need fulfillment for its constituents (of which buying things easily is one)…that takes time and all the things noted in the article.
There is no one thing over another on that list: you have to hit them all. I would add one more: design a UX built around the concept of “community hubs” rather than tweak the transactional UX currently in place. Adding community-like elements to a transactional site helps. But it will not, I believe, affect the transformation needed. Point 3 speaks to the need to shape the culture of the community within the company—it’s a paradigm shift to see the website this way, rather than focus on driving traffic, converting traffic, and increasing AOV. All of those metrics will improve with a community hub approach—but not immediately and not without an experience designed for that cultural shift.
This is indeed a great article and I am looking forward to hearing Ms Hamilton speak at the upcoming RetailConnections Forum in San Francisco, Sept 10th. There are still seats available. (Shameless plug, but appropriate.)
The common themes in the comments found here are love and emotion. I would encourage every retailer to gather around the brainstorm table and search for the love and/or emotion they can associate with their brand. Then look for ways to incorporate it into their brand experience — both online and in-store.
Websites that go beyond the transaction are bound to be more enticing and garner more loyalty as well as interaction from customers.
And, of course, since I ranked leveraging consumer feedback as the most important, don’t forget to include the consumer input in your efforts!