Terry Jukes - President of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence, LLC

How to Keep Your Job … and Your Business

1. Are you using RFM analysis to refine your circulation plan on a monthly basis?

2. Are you enhancing your RFM analysis with product purchased and order channel data?

3. Does your Web site work? (This question may sound silly, but more than 70 percent of site abandonments happen because the shopper perceives the site doesn't work!) Here are some examples of areas where you site's performance may not be optimized:

Does your site return zero or error search results more than 2 percent of the time?

Do your pages take more than one second to load?

Do you ask customers to view more than six pages before completing an order for any one item?

Do you ask for payment before showing shipping and handling charges?

Does your site rank and show up on the first page of keyword search results?

Are your online sales growing by more than 10 percent?

Are you acquiring 30 percent-plus of all new customers online, for free?

4. Are your telephone customer service reps empowered to solve 90 percent-plus of all problems they're presented with on the first call?

5. Are you tracking when and in what shape your catalogs are received in-home?

6. Is your catalog's copy and photography selling or merely informing?

7. Do customers rave about you? (If not, you have work to do!)

8. Is your employee turnover, including your call center, less than 20 percent per year?

9. Do you have multiple sets of numbers around your business that can't be reconciled easily?

10. Are you driving your plans and programs — and your business — or simply reacting to daily problems?

I suggest in these troubled times that we simply turn off or tune out all the depressing news and focus on doing the right things the right way. If we simply do that, we'll survive to see a better economy and healthier businesses.

Terence Jukes is president of Ability Commerce, a 140-person firm that designs, builds and runs e-commerce and related marketing programs for catalog companies. He can be reached at TerryJ@AbilityCommerce.com.

Ask Your Vendor Partners for Help

Last week I provided several tactics your company can use to improve the performance of your inbound call-center reps. This week, I examine another key performance area in your inbound call center: how your call-center management team reacts to shifting inbound call volumes. In today’s recessionary environment and online ordering world, historical call volumes based on the number of catalogs mailed may not materialize like they used to.   

A call-center manager schedules staff based on projected call volumes, which are usually derived from mail volumes. This forecast never will be 100 percent accurate — there will be too few or too many reps at some point in time.

If there are too few reps, most companies I know have other employees who can be pressed into service at a moment's notice until additional call-center staff can be called in. When there are too many, the manager quickly must adjust by sending reps home, assigning them to other tasks, among other possibilities.   

The bottom line is that call-center managers must measure staffing volumes by their ability to adjust staffing (i.e., costs) to “flow like water” with inbound call volumes. This is all while maintaining acceptable service levels.

It's not about how they did in comparison to budget, but how they did in comparison to reality; what really happened hour by hour. Many companies’ budgets don't account for the flexibility that allows managers to make hour-by-hour adjustments in staffing.

Here are some tips to consider when planning your company's call-center needs:

• use split shifts, part-timers and seasonal reps;
• use a backup call center or virtual reps to help handle peaks in call volumes;
• review staffing and service levels against call volumes every hour;
• have training planned that can be done immediately when call volumes slow;
• use nontime-sensitive work (e.g., collection calls, mail orders, etc.) to occupy reps when call volumes drop;
• organize backup agents, possibly marketing staff, to take calls when call volumes spike unexpectedly;
• instill a spirit of flexibility so everyone “gets it" that responsiveness is key; and
• provide incentives to support that spirit of flexibility.

Terence Jukes is president of Ability Commerce, a 140-person firm that designs, builds and runs e-commerce and related marketing programs for catalog companies. He can be reached at TerryJ@AbilityCommerce.com.

Is Your E-Commerce Site Up to Snuff?

In my column last week, I discussed how catalog/multichannel merchants can reduce their dependency on the USPS in the face of ever rising postal rates and the threat of a five-day delivery week. One of my suggestions was to improve your e-commerce site.

I'm currently the president of a company that builds new e-commerce selling systems for catalog companies. One of the things we do with new or prospective clients is review their current sites and assess where there are opportunities to increase sales.

I'm always amazed at how lacking many of the sites are, and wanted to share some statistics to consider as you ponder the effectiveness of your own site.

Over a period of six months, we reviewed 56 e-commerce sites for catalog companies. Sites were scored in eight best practice areas: “indexability,” homepage best practices, organic ranking, title and meta description tags, internal site search, linking, site stickiness, and cart functionality. Here's what we learned:

• Overall, site search is poor. Only two of the 56 sites reviewed provided suggested search terms as users typed keywords into the search box. Sixty-eight percent did a poor or very poor job of addressing common synonyms, misspellings and plural/singular variations. Only 28 percent had strong zero-results pages (the page returned when no results are found). 
  

• The online shopping cart was another area that lagged behind best practices. Forty-one percent of the sites didn't have a perpetual shopping cart and emptied their shoppers’ carts as soon as they left the site. Just 36 percent offered a guest checkout option, while 64 percent required shoppers to create an account before checking out. Checkout options were limited to credit card-only on 70 percent of the reviewed sites.

• Strong search engine optimization (SEO) was lacking on many sites. Twenty-seven percent had poor or nonexistent title tags, 70 percent had poor or nonexistent meta description tags, and 39 percent either didn't use or poorly used alt attributes. Less than 45 percent of the sites had strongly optimized keywords in their top or left navigation.

• Seventy-three percent of the sites didn't offer customer product reviews or ratings. With all the recent studies emphasizing the importance of customer reviews to increasing conversions, we were surprised at how few sites offered them.

• Nearly all of the sites reviewed placed an illogical emphasis on what the site looked like and not on how it functioned. The reality is that sites today must drive SEO (acquisition), excel on user experience (conversion) and be the reason shoppers return (retention). Site mediocrity these days can be deadly.

Based on our knowledge and experience moving similar companies to more productive e-commerce systems, of the 56 sites we reviewed over the six-month period, we estimated that the average site could increase its online sales by at least 45 percent and online customer acquisition by at least 30 percent. No small prize.

Terence Jukes is president of Ability Commerce, a 140-person firm that designs, builds and runs e-commerce and related marketing programs for catalog companies. He can be reached at TerryJ@AbilityCommerce.com.

    

What Would Reduced Mail Delivery Mean to You?

Postmaster General John Potter recently asked Congress to lift the requirement that the agency deliver mail six days a week. Dropping Saturday or Tuesday delivery seems to be the option. The obvious question then becomes: How will this affect my business? The obvious answer (at least in my opinion): It’s going to happen, so prepare for it.

More importantly, everyone needs to realize the problems and challenges facing the U.S. Postal Service aren't going to get better any time soon, and it's going to continue to have a negative impact on your businesses. It's not just this one event, but rather the future course and direction of one of our largest “partners” that concerns me. Consider the following:

• The USPS lost $2.8 billion last year.
• For 2009, the projected loss is estimated to be “$6 billion or more,” according to the postmaster general.
• The postmaster general also predicts that 2009 will be the first year since 1946 that the amount of money collected by the USPS declines.
• Total mail volume in 2008 was 202 billion pieces, 9 billion less than the year before and the single largest annual drop in USPS history.
• There's a huge pension fund contribution liability outstanding … the amount and state of which seem to change with the political winds of the day. (In all likelihood, the guy or gal who delivers your mail will have a better pension than you do.)
• Postal rates are expected to increase again, this year by 4 percent to 5 percent. That's after the punitive rate increase of 2007.

I'm not an expert reader of tea leaves, but as a businessman, this isn't a “partner” I'd want. Problem is, you can’t live without the USPS. The only prudent course of action is to try and manage the negative impact on your business. Here's 11 tips to help you make the most of your relationship with the USPS:

1. Believe that your postage will continue to increase at rates well above inflation; make sure you budget for it. Also, operate under the assumption that one day a week of service will be cut — and it may be Tuesday (the worst choice for B-to-B catalogers).
2. Continue testing new mail formats that are cheaper than mailing a full-line catalog.
3. Carefully test reducing frequency to your repeat online buyers.
4. Invest in search engine optimization and pay per click to acquire new customers online. This will allow you to reduce your prospect mailings.
5. Test alternative media — whatever makes sense for your product category or market segment. Find new ways of acquiring customers.
6. Rethink industry trade shows as sources of new customers.
7. Beef up your personalized e-mail capability. E-mail needs to relieve some of your dependency on customer mailings.
8. Improve your Web site. The better it is, the more your buyers will use it, like it and come back to it, reducing their dependency on mailings.
9. Convert your smaller customers to credit card payments and your larger ones to electronic payment systems. Mailed checks are no longer an efficient form of payment.
10. Examine similar businesses around the world, particularly Europe, to see what they're doing. Postal rates in Europe are much higher than the U.S., so they've been dealing with this problem for some time. You may find some innovative ideas that might work for you.
11. Join the American Catalog Mailers Association. In numbers we have a voice and can slow the progression of postal rate increases, and lobby for relief (a bailout maybe?) from the pension fund liabilities.

Terence Jukes is president of Ability Commerce, a 140-person firm that designs, builds and runs e-commerce and related marketing programs for catalog companies. He can be reached at TerryJ@AbilityCommerce.com.