Watch and Learn

Online marketers have a lot to gain from observing their competitors – and non-competitors, too

Since the early days of one-to-one marketing, when enterprising individuals wearing “sandwich boards” pounded the pavement in front of luncheonettes and haberdasheries, businesses have kept an eye on what their closest competitors were doing to reach potential customers – and tried to do it better.

The heart of this appears key to being successful online. Perhaps that’s because the Web represents uncharted waters; or perhaps it’s because the “copycat” method has always worked.

Consumer-goods marketers would be well-advised to take a look at what’s working online for their industry leader, Amazon.com (www.amazon.com), as well as for non-competitors in other industries. Findings from the latest edition of “State of One to One Online,” a research report published three times annually by Peppers and Rogers Group (PRG), indicate that, overall, consumer-goods and books/ music/video sites lag behind those in other categories in customer relationship management (CRM).

“The travel/hospitality, portals/ media and community/content categories, for instance, all do a better job of allowing the user to customize the Web experience,” says Jonathan Brookner, director of one-to-one research for PRG. “They’re better at actually allowing the user to personalize the look and feel, as well as the information, on their sites. They also are much better at providing differentiated levels of customer service.”

Sixty-five sites were grouped into eight industries and reviewed in the report. They were rated based on their one-to-one marketing focus and features. Some general progress and improvements in the consumer-goods and books/ music/videos categories certainly can be noted since September 1999, when the first reportwas published, according to Brookner.

“The consumer-goods industry appears to be very good at protecting customer privacy,” he notes. “They tend to make their privacy protection policies very prominent, and they’re more likely to use third-party privacy protection `auditors.'”

But the performance bar is consistently being raised by innovative sites. “Amazon.com is certainly one of those,” Brookner says. He also cites American Express (www.americanexpress.com) and Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com) as being particularly effective.

One can’t fault Web marketers for putting primary attention on the basics: getting the product line represented on-screen and speeding up the browser. A recent eMarketer survey of 3,200 online households found the most important reason people shop on the Web is convenience. Results also indicated that shoppers want to shop the entire store online, not just a selection. They won’t wait for a slow-loading site, and don’t want to enter information more than once. Customers may be drawn to a site by gift certificates and other promotions, but they won’t return, the study concludes, if the experience isn’t convenient.

E-CONVENIENCE

Pre-filling of data and offline-online data integration are just two marketing tools that make the e-shopping experience far more convenient and personal. Once those are accomplished, imagine the convenience of shopping an apparel site that remembers your size or whether you prefer your khakis with pleats and cuffs. That information is in the company’s database as soon as you place one order; you don’t even need to fill out a preference sheet. The question is simply whether the company chooses to use its data to reward frequent shoppers. The customer’s incentive to shop at a given site – in terms of value-added convenience and personalization – starts with the second purchase.

FAIR GAME

Sites that appeared very basic last summer have adopted some of the successful CRM features initiated by leaders in their own industries. For example, Fidelity Investments partnered with Lycos Inc. to offer users a personalized My Fidelity page on its www.fidelity.com site – an imitation of competitor CharlesSchwab’s earlier deal with Excite Inc. When Lands’ End (www.landsend.com) premiered its Your Personal Model feature for women shoppers, says Brookner, it didn’t take long for JC Penney (www.jcpenney.com) to offer a similar service, Just 4 Me. And Virgin Megastores (www.virginmega.com), CDNow (www.cdnow.com) and Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com) all followed the Amazon.com model by offering reviews, discussion groups and so forth.

“Every industry stands to profit from the one-to-one lessons that also can be learned from non-competitors,” adds Brookner. Consumer-goods marketers, for instance, could learn some techniques from travel and hospitality. Travel sites, following their offline practice of building traveler profiles, remember much more (than consumer-goods sites, overall) about their customers, such as airplane seat and meal preferences and rental car size.

“But even the travel industry has yet to show they look much beyond their direct competitors for ideas to imitate” he says.