WhyCommunicate?

Let’s face it, how many people do you know under the age of 40 who don’t use Facebook. Personally I know one and that’s because he’s concerned about online privacy. With the recent changes in privacy settings users are now able to lock their accounts down, so this issue is addressed. Will he be using Facebook now? Yes, because if he doesn’t he will have no idea what anybody is doing with their lives, when they are going out, what happened and the pictures to prove it!

UPDATE: Thanks Jaamit http://bit.ly/basSaJ The Times has now been re-indexed in Google, now who said Newspapers were old skool.

As the index loss is only half a day the revised figures suggest a reduced cost of £17, 500.

While Times Online begin their move to an online charge model following a very public spat with Google, it’s been revealed that Google has removed the paper from its all important news index.

Effectively this means Times Online will no longer receive any organic traffic from Google representing around 90% of their overall organic traffic, bearing in mind the respective market shares of Bing, Yahoo! Et al.

The monetary value of this loss of organic traffic could be significant if you consider the effect on Times Online’s online advertising revenue.

Times Online received 7.1 million browsers in March 2010*. If we assume that of this percentage only 20% comes from organic search traffic then this could amount to over 1.4 million browsers. Let’s assume that an average browser views 10 pages and visits the site 4 times a month this equates to nearly 57 million page impressions a month.

If the primary income from these page impressions is advertising and this is sold at £15 per 1000 page impressions then the revenue lost would be in the region of £850,000 per month.

These calculations obviously make several assumptions. Times Online tends to run two ads per page so this figure could easily be increased to £1.7 million a month.

Interestingly this equates to a just over a pound per browser, which just so happens to be the daily charge to online subscribers.

One thing is for sure, Rupert Murdoch has probably done his sums.

*Source ABCe

So if I’ve got this right, Royal Mail workers, in the teeth of a recession, in an industry with increasing competition and in the run up to a critical trading period for its fast disappearing customers, is going on strike, again.

The last time, all of two years ago, Royal Mail lost an £8 million contract to deliver second class parcels for Amazon, it’s second biggest customer and this time round, it’s been reported that it’s moved the £25 million main contract to arch rivals Home Delivery Network.

Even in a recession, e-commerce sales are estimated to top £5bn this year and it can’t be too hard a leap for the CWU to understand that retailers will move to protect themselves and their customers from the Royal Mail’s action.

According to industry body, IMRG, prior to the strike, 86% used Royal Mail for at least some of their deliveries but 60% have now made alternative arrangements. IMRG’s Director of Operations, David Smith says of the situation “For Royal Mail the impact of this industrial action is going to be disastrous”.

Anecdotally, I know someone who had one item they’d ordered online disappear twice in the Royal Mail. On the third attempt it was finally delivered. Without a strike, the Royal Mail would have to face an uphill struggle holding on to their existing customers, but now, any remaining faith or loyalty must surely have been lost, like many of our parcels.

It’s the season for cultural stereotyping. As legions of Brits head over the channel, we’ll once again hear stories of how rude foreigners can be – especially if you ask them a simple question slowly and loudly in English.

It’s not really our fault, because English is the world’s favourite language we’ve been tricked into thinking that speaking English abroad is OK. But of course just because people in other countries can speak English, doesn’t mean they want to and of course it’s presumptuous of us to think that they would, which is most of the problem.

Online retailers can fall into the same trap. For example, figures from Forrester show that while 60% of UK shoppers prefer to pay by credit card, only 35% of French and 26% of Germans do. In the Netherlands it’s only 19%. So presenting primarily credit card options at checkout will end in a high drop out in those countries. And this is just one of many differences you need to adjust for when trading internationally.

How online customers regard brands also varies massively from country to country. French & German customers are far more venerable in their attitude to brand than their UK counterparts. They are thirsty for information, especially about forthcoming new products and will avidly read newsletters and blogs about their favourite brands. UK consumers on the other hand are much more motivated by discounts.

And in a reversal of this seasonal stereotyping, if you were to speak to the call centre of one online retailer we know who deals with French, German and UK customers, they’ll tell you that it’s actually the Brits who are the rudest – by far.

With summer holidays upon us, the global phenomenon that was croc shoes will be in luminous evidence in beaches and resorts across the world though its star is in decline if you read the business press – one analyst described the company as ‘zombie like’ – dead but doesn’t know it yet.

As Helen Rumbelow pointed out in The Times recently, it’s a seeming miracle that these garish, ugly, plastic shoes caught on in the first place, but caught on they did, and how. At their height, croc shoes were generating $168 million in yearly sales.

The croc shoes phenomenon is something most manufacturers and retailers dream of and understanding why such a product catches fire has long been debated, perhaps most famously by Malcolm Gladwell in Tipping Point.

While the answers to each case are different and complex, in the day to day world of online retailing many of the secrets of ‘shifting product’ are readily available. Differentiation is an important one. In a market where a product is freely available, at a similar cost how do you mark your site out as the one to buy from?

There are many elements to this but one of the most basic and often overlooked is customer service. You may have the best technical site in the world but does it work for your target audience? If you make life easier for the customer simply by adding a telephone number (see previous blog) or responding to an email enquiry promptly, you’re already likely to be ahead of your competitors.

In Tipping Point Gladwell talks about how it’s often these small and seemingly trivial elements of an idea or message that give birth to an epidemic.  While etailers can’t necessarily expect to have a croc shoes on their hands every year, paying attention to the many small details of customer engagement online deliver consistent results over the longer term.