Pimpin’ Your Products: Rob Snell’s PubCon ‘07 Presentation

Long-time Yahoo! merchant and marketing guru Rob Snell recently presented on a panel at PubCon 2007, the WebMasterWorld convention. He graciously provided a copy of his presentation in PDF format for other merchants to read. And while there is no audio, and therefore you’re missing out on all the great “Rob-isms” (and a huge helping of his Southern “gravy”), merchants can still glean the most important points from just viewing the slides.

Rob emphasizes the following:

• how to stand out from the crowd by providing original content for products in the form of videos, additional product images, and product guides.
• how to capitalize on new products entering the market by using any and all manufacturer content and your own to grab search share and press coverage.
• how to increase conversion and win loyal customers by providing product opinions to help shoppers differentiate between products.

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I highly recommend reading through the slide deck and seeing what lessons you may be able to apply to your own site.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Would You Like Cross-sell With That? Yahoo! Improves Cross-sell Feature

Most of us have had the experience of being asked whether we want to add fries to a fast food order, add batteries to the purchase of any product that requires them, or to upgrade to a higher end model when selecting frankly anything at an electronics store. These scenarios are common because cross-selling is a great way to encourage the purchase of additional products and increase order size. Today we’re introducing two features to help you improve your cross-sell efforts: auto-suggestions and product page cross-sell.

Cross-sell items displayed on a product page

If you have 10 products, it’s pretty easy to come up with cross-sell rules based on what you know about how those products sell. For example, your birdhouses are often sold along with a bag of bird seed, your first aid kits tend to sell well with lawn darts, etc. However, once your product offering grows, so do the possible product combinations, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep an accurate finger on the pulse of every product’s sales behavior. Let’s say you have a store with an inventory of 20 products. If you decided to cross-sell just 3 items next to each product, you would have over 5000 cross-sell combinations to choose from. Imagine what a store with 200 or even 2000 products would have to do to keep up! This is where our new cross-sell auto-suggestions feature comes in. Using a combination of Yahoo! behavioral targeting technology, past purchase combinations, and past navigation history for your store, you can opt to have products auto-suggested to your shoppers, which reduces the need to set up cross-sell rules for each product.

In this same release, we’re also introducing the ability to cross-sell on product pages. For an online shopper, adding a product to their cart is making a certain level of commitment. Cross-selling in the cart is a good opportunity to suggest additional items that complement the product the shopper has selected. However, as a merchant you shouldn’t have to wait for a shopper to add something to their cart in order to cross-sell them additional or related items. Shoppers who in the past did not add products to their cart may just not have seen the product they were looking for, even if it existed in your store. With cross-sell on product pages, you can capture their interest and show them relevant products that will turn them from browsers to buyers.

Please refer to the Cross-Sell Help documents for more information on this new feature.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

Note: These new features are available to Standard, Professional and Store merchants who have Checkout Manager enabled.

[Edit–11/01/07: Comments are fixed now. If you don’t see your comment or did not receive a reply, please submit them again.–Paul]

[Edit–10/31/07: An issue with our build of WordPress is submitting comments but without any content. We received numerous comments today but without any of the content. Please email store-blog-feedback at yahoo-inc.com to submit any comments or questions.–Paul]

[Edit–10/30/07: It appears that WordPress may be having an issue at the moment with comments. Comments are coming through without any content. Please email store-blog-feedback at yahoo-inc.com to submit any comments or questions. We’ll post the comments when the issue is resolved.–Paul]

That’s What Friends Are For

Your online store is built, and the virtual shelves are stocked. You have a payment processor, and your tax and shipping rules are set up. You’re now officially open for business. Great… now what? While the obvious next step might be to market your store, what’s not clear is who to market to, and how to do it.

The Simple Promotional Email tool

Pay-per-performance marketing tactics like Yahoo! Search Marketing are extremely effective at delivering visitors to your store immediately, but they also require financial investment that you might not be ready to make without knowing which of your products converts to sales the best.

What to do? Try out Simple Promotional Email, our latest marketing tool designed to help you attract visitors to your store and become more successful, even if you’re working within a shoestring budget.

The Simple Promotional Email tool allows you to easily create professional looking, visually rich emails to help promote your store. Included in the email are your branding elements (store name, URL, colors), product images, a personal message to customize, and a very strong incentive to shop at your store: a coupon! Coupon is one of the most effective promotional tools to help induce sales, and now this feature is available to all of our merchants.

For those of you who are thinking of using this tool for spamming…. DON’T! The Simple Promotional Email actually uses the Yahoo! mailing engine to send emails. In short, it will be as if you are sending the emails directly from your Yahoo! Mail account, or your Business Mail accounts. So don’t get yourself labeled as a spammer.

Remember that the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions license agreement explicitly forbids spamming. So please review Yahoo!’s Universal Anti-Spam Policy for anti-spamming guidelines.

The Simple Promotional Email tool is available for all Yahoo! merchants and is accessible from the Promote section of the Store Manager. For more information about the tool and how to use it, please visit our help section for Simple Promotional Email.

The grand opening of your store is an exciting occasion and it should be shared with friends, family and colleagues. Whether you are celebrating being open for business, or just want to advertise your summer sale, try out the Simple Promotional Email today . Don’t feel like the guy at the office who’s trying to push his kid’s candy bars by the water cooler. Think of yourself as the guy at the office who’s trying to push his kid’s candy bars online…. with a 15% off coupon.

Duncan Shen
Yahoo! Small Business

Using Video to Drive Traffic and Conversions: a Merchant Interview

The following post comes out of an email interview I did with Lars Hundley, owner of cleanairgardening.com and several other successful Yahoo! stores. I met Lars at the Internet Retailer conference and he showed me how he has incorporated video into his sites and we talked about how it has helped.

Lars demonstrates the Big Round Compost bin. Highlights: 0:02–The Clean Air Gardening jingle, 0:12–Lars demonstrates how much the bin can hold, 2:08–Video cross-sell merchandising–very smart.

Tell me a bit about your store(s) and how long you have been with Yahoo!?

We’ve been with Yahoo! since 1999. I started out in 1998 by building the web site myself with an HTML editor. But I wasn’t a programmer, so I couldn’t figure out how to get a secure shopping cart to work. I could only take orders over the phone. I switched to Yahoo! and my sales have grown either exponentially or by double digits every year since.

We were one of the early online stores to sell manual reel mowers and compost bins online, and we couldn’t have done it without an easy to use platform like Yahoo! We’re coming up on our 10th year in business, and our 9th year with Yahoo! That’s a pretty long time in Internet years, isn’t it?

At the show we discussed using video on your site. How did you go about producing the videos and incorporating them into your site?

I started out by simply shooting them with my little $200 Canon digital camera that also had a video feature. I would just have someone push the button and hold the camera while I demonstrated a product, and then we would upload the video file to the “Files” part of the store, so that people could click on a link and download the video to watch it.

But then I realized that I could upload them to Yahoo! Video for free and embed the video right on the product page, so that people could click on the video and play it while they were still on the site.

Since then, I have gotten slightly more advanced with my setup, although it’s still pretty straightforward. I bought a real video camera for around $300, and I shoot with that now instead of the digital camera. Then I import the video into my Mac and edit it after I shoot. I add an introduction title screen with our company name on it, using Apple iMovie. Then I take the finished video and upload it to Yahoo! Video. (You can see my Yahoo! Studio space here: http://video.yahoo.com/video/profile?sid=86695)

Are there specific products you think are demonstrated better with video?

Yes and no. In an ideal world, I’d love to shoot a video for every single product that we sell! I think it’s helpful to customers to see almost any product in action, or watch a real live person tell them about the product.

But in the real world, it takes time to shoot the video and edit it and upload it. So I concentrate on products that are more expensive, and products that are complicated or uncommon and that might otherwise result in someone calling on the phone to ask a lot of questions. By creating an informative video, I can answer all of those questions upfront, which saves time for us, and for people who want to learn about the product and get a better idea of how it works.

I’m sure most other Yahoo! merchants out there have some kind of a product that ends up being a constant source of email and phone questions. That’s the kind of product that is perfect for shooting a video, because customers obviously want to know more about it.

What has been the impact in terms of traffic? Did you post the videos to other sites as well or just on your own site?

It’s hard to measure exactly how much new site traffic we’re getting directly as a result of the videos, but traffic is up in general by 35 percent compared to last year.

And yes, we also uploaded our product videos to YouTube and Google Video, and people are watching them there too, even when we don’t embed them on our site. They are actually finding them directly on those sites and watching them on their own. Who would have thought?

We’ve gotten tens of thousands of video views if you add them all up at all the places we have them uploaded, so people are obviously interested watching them. And I see comments all the time with the incoming orders where customers mention that they bought from us because of the informative product videos. So it has definitely paid off with better conversion rates and happier, better informed customers.

By the way, one quick tip to other Yahoo! merchants who want to do this. I always mention our company name in the videos, and I start out with an introduction screen that says Clean Air Gardening. That way I don’t have to worry about competitors embedding my videos on their sites. I’m thrilled if people start embedding it other places.

Are you reaching a whole new audience, more deeply engaging with your current audience, or both?

I’d say that we are primarily engaging our current site visitors better. We’re getting better informed customers too, which has resulted in lower returns. We do get a decent number of people who watch the videos on the other video sites without visiting our site first, but that isn’t a major part of our overall video views.

After seeing the success we’ve had with simple product videos, we plan to make more strictly educational videos so that we can bring in a wider audience of people interested in environmentally friendly lawn and garden issues. I think that these educational videos will certainly bring in a new audience of people who are just looking for good information. Hopefully, some of those viewers will buy something, but even if they don’t, we’re getting our name out there for free, and using our expertise to teach others.

Have you seen any impact on conversion or are you just driving more traffic to your site which converts at the same rate?

We have been working on a lot of things to increase our conversion rates in the past year in addition to adding video, so it’s hard to know exactly what is responsible for the increase. But in general, our conversion rate is up 12 ½ percent over last year’s conversion rate. Judging by the number of people who email about our videos or mention them during checkout, I would say that the videos have played a substantial role in that increase.

It has helped show our customers that we aren’t just another faceless web site selling the same stuff as every other site.

We’re real people who actually care about and understand the products that we sell, and the videos help demonstrate that.

What was the biggest obstacle to using video on your site?

The biggest obstacle is simply taking the time to make and upload the videos! Even though I know first hand how valuable they are, I still have a list of 50 more products right now that I still need to shoot. Just like other Yahoo! Store owners, I get caught up in running orders and answering emails, and then another day has gone by with no new videos. Everything else is pretty easy, but you still have to take the time to do it.

Thanks Lars for sharing your experiences with video. No doubt other merchants may be inspired to tackle video on their sites after reading this post.

One final thought: Ideas such as this, and video is certainly not the only one, will help your site stand out from and gain an advantage on your competition. Certainly you have to get the basics down before tackling a project like this, but the most successful merchants I have spoken with have one trait in common: they are creative risk-takers. They are willing to try new ideas such as this and while many “viral marketing” ideas will not yield big results, it only takes one that does to push your business to the next level. Try to carve out some time each week to step back from the basic operations of your business and answer the question “what if we did…”

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business