It's never been easy for online businesses to obtain, and retain, customers. But that never really worried e-tailers in the early days of e-commerce, as business-to-consumer sites were flush with venture capital or IPO cash to spend on marketing efforts.
But that feeling of financial security is changing, especially since several dot-com companies have hit hard times.
"B2C is not the most attractive right now," said Ron Walters, CEO of GreatCoffee.com, an e-tail site in San Francisco. "And a lot [of businesses] are in trouble, overspending on marketing. Customers come in but either don't place an order or don't come back. Marketing won't make sense if you can't convert them and bring them back."
That's why more B2C companies are getting personal, creating Web sites that can respond to the interests or actions of their shoppers. GreatCoffee, for example, has been using a service that launches this week from Angara E-Commerce Services.
Priced at US$15,000 per month for 1 million visitors, the Angara service uses marketing data to route incoming visitors to a page tailored to their geographic, age, income and gender profiles ÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬"- information that can be obtained through marketing services such as those from Naviant or simply by noting an IP address.
"We want to target what people see immediately," Walters said, "so they're more likely to be intrigued by what they see and more likely to spend more time on the site."
But once shoppers are inside a site, there's still a lot of work to be done to persuade them to buy. A survey released in February by New York-based Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu reports that 66 percent of shopping carts are abandoned before checkout.
That's where another startup, Manna, comes in. The company this week is delivering FrontMind 2.0, which enables real-time dynamic personalization of a site.
FrontMind 2.0 adds a new Learning and Inference Engine and tools to simulate and analyze the effectiveness of marketing efforts. Get-Outdoors.com, a recreation site launching this week, is one FrontMind customer that wants the advantages of tailoring content to a visitor's interests.
"We built the company to make money," said Adam Meron, CEO of the site. "We need Manna to be recommending the right gear, appropriate for climbers, sailors, and we need that flexibility because that can double or triple conversion [buy] rate." FrontMind is available for a US$250,000 software license or on an annuity model.
Still other vendors include HotData Inc., of Austin, Texas, which last week launched Web e-Luminate and Marketing e-Luminate. Those products link Web applications or customer relationship management software with a database of business and consumer data provided by The Polk Co., the US Postal Service, Experian Information Solutions Inc. and Dun & Bradstreet. Web e-Luminate and Marketing e-Luminate each carry a setup fee of US$10,000, plus a monthly fee based on transactions.
Macromedia last week previewed UltraDev, its Web development software designed to make it easier for dot-coms and click-and-mortar operations to build e-commerce Web sites and analyze their traffic.
Another new product, Macromedia's LikeMinds eMail, enables marketers to create an HTML template that captures customer e-mail addresses, sends them targeted e-mail promotions and follows up with more promotional announcements depending on customers' responses to the initial mailings. LikeMinds eMail will be available this month starting at US$110,000 for 100,000 users.
This week, E.piphany will announce the availability of an integrated solution combining E.piphany E.4 with RightPoint's Real-time Personalization technology, which culminates E.piphany's acquisition of RightPoint in January.
Additional reporting by John S. McCright
