After attending the event for four years, I’ve had the opportunity to see first-hand how the market has shifted over time. The discussions at eTail West in the earlier years were primarily about how to manage, measure, and increase transactions. But most retailers have this figured out by now, so their focus has shifted to maximizing their revenues in new ways.

Naturally as the market has matured, retailers have grown to be more concerned with customer experience and service, so it’s no wonder that the three consistent themes at this year’s event were multi-channel customer experience, personalization, and recommendations. Online retailers are looking for new ways to increase their revenues and to achieve better personalization and customer targeting. They are also looking for new ways to maximize revenues by deploying the recommendations they already have in place in a much broader sense. Now that retailers have reaped the benefits of traditional product recommendations, they understand the capabilities these technologies have to tackle the newer issues, such as navigating social elements of their sites and the ongoing quest to improve search.

Just as the market has matured, so has Baynote. Each year at eTail, we’ve seen interest in our approach grow. Listening to the conversations of the attendees and the other speakers this past week, it was clear to me that Baynote’s time has come as retailers hone in on providing a superior customer experience and ultimately how to create happier, more loyal customers.

Perhaps the best evidence of this was a survey I conducted during my presentation. I asked the crowd: “Raise your hand if you think your best salesperson can outsell your best customer?” The result? Not a single person in the room raised their hands. When I asked another question: if the happiest customers are the most important to increasing their revenues; almost every single person in the room agreed. This demonstrates just how powerful peer-to-peer brand advocacy has become to retailers and the bottom line.

I left Palm Desert thinking about what an exciting time it is to be involved in the e-commerce industry, and how proud I am that Baynote’s customers are setting the standard with more sophisticated personalization approaches that are transforming the customer experience as well as their online businesses.

Coined by the National Retail Federation a few years ago, Cyber Monday offers retailers a way to organize sales and promotions in an online version of Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving Day. The promising news for retailers is that Cyber Monday hasn’t typically been the largest online shopping day of the year, meaning this season’s peak is likely still yet to come.

I thought readers of this blog may also be interested in my guest article for BusinessWeek, where I share five rules that savvy online retailers already had in place heading into Cyber Monday. For those of you not yet incorporating these practices, fear not. They’re easy to implement and each can help your business year-round.

The report, Americans Reject Tailored Advertising shows that 66 percent of adults said no to tailored ads. Not only that, when informed of specific behavioral targeting techniques that marketers employ to create the ads, even higher percentages — between 73 percent and 86 percent — oppose tailored advertising. Those techniques include tracking behavior on websites and in retail stores.

For a more detailed analysis of the findings, you should check out Stefanie Clifford’s coverage of the report in the New York Times.

We’ve been talking about the pitfalls of behavioral targeting for years, so it’s nice to finally see some national research that tells marketers what consumers actually think about this shady technique. In this age of identity theft and mounting concerns over privacy in general, a practice that proactively profiles a user — perhaps over the scope of many Web sites and over a period of several months — will sound alarms even among the least conservative of us.

Beyond privacy concerns, there are bigger issues with behavioral targeting related to accuracy and quality, that many marketers still don’t understand. Traditional behavioral targeting struggles precisely because it tries to discern what I want now based on my past behaviors. Consider the impact of focusing on historical interests instead of current intent: If I bought a gift for my niece on Amazon.com last week, I certainly don’t want to be bombarded by ads for similar products that probably aren’t relevant during my next visit.

Another way to think of this problem is to consider the idea of roles or what personalization systems might call “profiles”. Humans have far too many roles in life for a profile to possibly predict what a user wants on any given day. A woman shopping for baby clothes, a tie for her husband, and a gift for her sister may appear schizophrenic because she is acting in three different roles — mother, wife and sister. What do you show her next? Tossing strollers ads at her isn’t going to be effective now that she’s shopping for a new cocktail dress for herself.

This is the pitfall of profiles. In a given month, an individual will have thousands of roles. Knowing my past is not necessarily a better way to predict my future. In fact, this phenomenon has been known by psychologists and other scientists for years — humans are animals of context and situations, much less than of historical profiles or roles.

Enter Intent-driven Targeting

An alternative that solves the issues with both privacy and effectiveness is one centered on understanding the users’ intentions, instead of their clickpaths or profiles, and pairing that knowledge with specific content, product and advertising recommendations. This approach relies exclusively on the collective wisdom of like-minded peers who have demonstrated interests or engagement with similar content and contexts.

The concept of profiles is completely removed in this case. Instead, through understanding expressed or implied intent, content appropriate to the user’s current mindset can be delivered.

Most importantly, it kills two birds with one stone: Users get useful, accurate recommendations and ads, while still avoiding the whole privacy mess.

Watch the full webinar now.

This webcast features Forrester Analyst Julie Katz, author of “Your Email Marketing Road Map For 2009″ and Jay DeFoore, Director of Consumer Marketing at The Knot Inc. Julie and Jay will discuss how marketers can make the most of available tools and services to open doors for radical innovation in the channel.

Ms. Katz will reveal some of Forrester’s latest findings in her “How To Improve Email In 2009″ series, including 10 ways email marketers can get more from their programs today.

In this joint Baynote/Responsys webinar you will also find out how to:

• Target your emails based on observed website visitor behavior and interests
• Deliver emails at optimal times when customers are most receptive
• Measure the impact of your email marketing initiatives from email open rates to conversion and sales
• Test and Optimize to continually improve conversion results and ROI

Watch the full webinar now.

When I was pregnant,  Amazon kept recommending me books on exotic locations my husband and I had planned to travel like Cambodia or Patagonia.  Oh cruel Amazon and you won’t even fetch me ice cream!

I haven’t done a lot of shopping this year on Amazon.  If I had it would start showing me crazy recommendations based on some esoteric book I bought my physicist stepfather.  That was his wierd niche, not mine, not mine!  Let it go!

So this morning, I log on and what do I see but an Amazon recommendation for a book on losing weight while breastfeeding.  Not only is my youngest now a year and a half and I am waaaay past that phase but it seems, again, eerily cruel that Amazon finds a way to remind me that during the holidays I am eating more than I burn.  Now that’s just cruel.

Today I had an enlightening conversation with one such vendor. He spoke highly of his merchandisers and explained their extensive knowledge of the business. He questioned the need of a recommendation engine when he had access to such experienced merchandisers. Point well taken. This continues to be a hurdle for many recommendation companies trying to break into the ecommerce industry. Lets move the conversation away from an “either or” scenario. Combining your experienced merchandisers with automated intent driven recommendations incorporates the knowledge of your business experts with the collective intelligence of your website visitors.

We’ve spent many resources on our merchandising console within our reporting interface Baynote Insights to facilitate this goal of “merchandising harmony.” For the last few months our clients have been combining our recommendations technology with their merchandising expertise to deliver an enhanced user experience while increasing conversion rates and average order values. Why substitute when you can combine?

Turned Off Users

The JupiterResearch document claims that email users’ likelihood to make an on-line or off-line purchase as a result of promotional emails has declined 7% over the last year. While an increase in popularity of other communication mediums such as text messaging and social networking certainly have an impact on these numbers, email marketing success is still within arms reach. The top reason for email users to unsubscribe continues to be a lack of relevance, followed closely by excessive emailing.

Here are a few tips to increase the success of your email marketing:

1. Test Different Layouts – A/B and Multivariate testing have been important methods used to determine the layout that will most likely lead to a conversion.
2. Tune into your users – The content of your email must relate to your users, quickly. Promote content that users will find most relevant, but not too frequently.
3. Foster Product and Content Discovery – Whether you are sending event-triggered emails like invoices or promotional emails like new product lines, provide popular or complimentary products that allow your users to discover new products and content that could lead a conversion.

For Information about how Baynote enhances email marketing, click here.

I’ve just returned from the Shop.org Annual Summit in

Many continue to ask whether eCommerce growth has peaked. With countless consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, one has to ask these kinds of questions. Well, the data suggests it has not peaked. According to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, ecommerce will continue to grow at a rate of 25% annually for the next many years. The reason? Online retailers not tackling the basics.

As the holiday season approaches, and since it’s football season (thankfully), it’s only appropriate that we talk a bit about blocking and tackling fundamentals. Forrester and other pay mention to the following:

1) Completing the Transaction

Amazingly, some leading eCommerce websites are seeing transaction failures as high as 12-14%. For comparison purposes, the airline industry which is hardly the gold-standard in service sees has delayed/cancelled flight rates of about 6%. There are $ millions left on the virtual table as consumers are driven to alternative channels to make their purchase.

2) User Experience

Snazzy front ends that are engaging and interesting may draw some attention, but don’t forget the basics of making it easy to browse, search, add to cart, and purchase. ‘Pretty’ is good, but usable is better.

… and finally…

3) Product Recommendations

The only technology that Forrester recommended were recommendation engines.  Recommendation engines help retailers dynamically up-sell / cross-sell / merchandize their products.   With thousands of products and millions of visitors to an online retailer’s website and automated solution to this is a necessity, but measure the impact so you can truly understand the hard-dollar impact it’s making.

So make sure to do your homework and invest in the basics of selling, merchandizing, and completing transactions.Also, I wanted to give some credit to Jason Billingsly over at Elastic Path. He presented an eye-opening and incredibly engaging session on leveraging social media for eCommerce. If you have a chance, check out his session at Online Market World in

- Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…

- Premature Redirection

- Zero Results Found

- If Only Search Engines Could Understand What We Want

We highly recommend viewing the other three parodies at http://www.getelastic.com/crazy-ecommerce to anyone who has ever been at the mercy of the eCommerce gods.