As we celebrate this milestone, we are also close to celebrating our 5-year anniversary (Brant and I founded Bazaarvoice on May 2, 2005). With 80% of consumers now looking for customer reviews, it is hard to appreciate now just how few U.S. retailers offered customer reviews on their websites in May of 2005. Would you believe only four? Today we serve more than 50 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, more than 25 of the top 50 U.K. retailers, and similar numbers in Australia, France, and Germany. And we serve many clients outside of retail, from health care to manufacturing to financial services. We have rapidly grown into a company of 750 clients and 515 employees globally, operating across 25 international languages. I do not take our success for granted one bit and I'm very proud of and thankful for our partnerships with our clients. I'm also proud of the culture we have created here. We spend the majority of our waking time at work, and we strive to make that time as fun and meaningful as possible. Our passionate culture impacts the way we serve our clients and also give back to the community.

As I look back to my first Bazaarblog post, I think back to my analytical roots, spending seven years building Coremetrics, and reflect on how much we have achieved on the analytical front at Bazaarvoice. The "hidden" impact of 100 billion impressions is how we are writing the new marketing and merchandising textbook together with our clients. In a world of increasingly fragmented media, a dramatic shift to time spent in the online channel vs. other channels, and a rise in the prominence of the voice of the customer, the "hidden" impact is felt in how marketers and merchandisers adopt new practices based on user-generated content. And, to be totally frank, I underestimated the impact in how Bazaarvoice would change the world in this way. The Bazaarvoice School of C2C Marketing Seal to the left is from our first Social Commerce Summit in 2008, which quickly sold-out and was a magical event, full of clients speaking about writing the new textbook together (our fifth Summit is coming up in Austin April 19-21 and is almost sold-out already).

So this blog is dedicated to some of the most dramatic changes I have seen on the path to 100 billion. Here is a look back on just a few of them:

• Oriental Trading's CEO, Sam Taylor, leads a radical organizational change to reform merchandising based on user-generated content and wins the prestigious Gartner Group Customer Experience award (read the Bazaarblog post on the award, and another on specifics).
• The customer reviewer becomes the spotlight for campaigns (Free People example, and Urban Outfitters too). At that time, I believe this was an industry first. With 80% of reviews usually coming from the top 20% of your customers by lifetime value, this campaign technique will be adopted rapidly.
• Sephora uses in-store signs to get customers to read reviews via their mobile devices, and trains in-store associates to promote it. [Note: the sold-out Shop.org (NRF) and RAMA Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference in San Francisco this week will feature Julie Bornstein of Sephora - read her interview by NRF on the ROI of social media, a special Mobile Boot Camp, and me moderating a panel of rockstar venture capitalists.] Related to Sephora, Intuit's TurboTax did the same with their in-store displays, and made an impact at every Best Buy, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, and Walmart store in the U.S.
• The broad multichannel marketing implications of user-generated content, from print, to TV, to online. I'll never forget the first time this reviews were promoted on in-store receipts and by whom.
• The transformation of channel advertising with BrandVoice and BrandAnswers. With 80% of consumers searching for reviews, the implications for channel advertising are huge and user-generated content in the channel is quickly becoming a business imperative for a supplier. And it isn't just UGC. BrandAnswers and Ask & Answer now bring in supplier-generated content as well as retailer-generated content to answer user-generated content in the form of product pre-sell questions.
• TurboTax partners with us to launch the "Friendalyzer", where you can see TurboTax reviews written by your friends on social networks, including Facebook (which now has 400 million users). Seth Greenberg of Intuit will be presenting the great results on this live at our Social Commerce Summit this April 19-21 in Austin. The implication for technologies like Facebook Connect are profound for user-generated content at large and we are in Inning One for these innovations.

It has been an amazing 4 years, 10 months, and I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all of our clients, employees, partners, investors, and advisors. We promise not to take our success for granted, and we are ramping up R&D and Client Services like never before. This quarter alone, we are attempting to hire at least 80 people, but our very high bar makes this difficult indeed (we have 14 full-time recruiters working in our office at Bazaarvoice today and there is nothing more important for our culture than its foundation: our people). If you know of someone that may be interested in joining us, see the many jobs available here and note our referral incentives.

The next 100 billion impression milestone will no doubt be achieved much faster than the first, but I expect our impact to be no less profound than with the first (see our many case studies, webinars, or whitepapers for more). Thank you, thank you, and thank you again for your support. And stay tuned to this blog as we continue this exciting journey. As I said in my first-ever blog post on Feb. 3rd, 2006 (and remains just as true today):

Welcome to the age of customer empowerment in our hyper-connected global village! We look forward to being your tour guide in this wild, wild ride.

Second, just one week later, our very own Brett Hurt was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Austin – one of four regional winners. The E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year awards recognize entrepreneurs who demonstrate extraordinary success in the areas of innovation, financial performance, and personal commitment to their businesses and communities.

I can’t think of anyone who deserves this honor more than Brett. In the description above, the word that I would emphasize most in describing Brett's motivation as an entrepreneur is community. An Austin native, Brett is very mindful of the positive, profound, and multi-generational impact that a single entrepreneur and business can have on the prosperity of a community. He sees Bazaarvoice's success and his own as a win for all of Austin, and he sincerely hopes that Bazaarvoice's success will bring prosperity to our community not just in terms of job and wealth creation but in the form of many future companies that our team members will one day start.

When I worked for Brett at Coremetrics, the company he founded prior to Bazaarvoice, he was expecting his first child and was in the process of shopping for a new stroller. Like many first-time parents (I recently went through this process myself), he did a ton of online research, finally landing at Amazon.com and finding an extremely long and detailed review contributed by an aerospace engineer who had methodically deconstructed and reconstructed the stroller in question, documenting the process and his observations on the stroller's design, materials quality, and workmanship at every step. This experience had a profound effect on Brett, as he imagined the power of this content for every shopper and purchase decision if it were available for every product and website. The idea for Bazaarvoice was born a few months later. Fast forward four short years and here we are – we have served 50+ billion reviews for 525+ global brands in 36 countries and we continue to grow (and hire!) like wildfire.

Please join me in congratulating Brett for his many accomplishments as an entrepreneur (Bazaarvoice is his fifth start-up company!), for the positive impact he has had within the Austin business community, and for being a genuinely sincere and humble person. He never fails to show his appreciation for the team at Bazaarvoice, our customers and partners, and the many supporters that have helped the company and Brett personally along the way.

So far, 2009 has been a big year for us – and there's still six months left to go!

It takes a very talented and experienced person to manage a global team of such complexity to the level that our clients, our executive team, and I expect.  But we found her.  I am incredibly proud to announce that Heather Brunner has joined us as our Senior Vice President of Worldwide Client Services.  Her first day was Monday, and we put out the press release on Wednesday.  Her ability to rapidly ramp has impressed our entire team, and I have already had several important client-facing meetings with her during week one.

I have known Heather for many years, first working with her when she was a Regional Vice President for Concero while I was the CEO of Coremetrics.  I was impressed with her back then, and Concero did a great job for Coremetrics during a very important, foundational period.  But Heather has grown her career so much since then.  Most recently, she served as the CEO of Nuvo, a wholly owned subsidary of Trilogy.  Prior to Nuvo, Heather was the COO of B-Side.  In past jobs, she has served as a the VP of Client Services at Coremetrics, the VP of Client Delivery and Operations at Trilogy, a Practice Director at Oracle, and a Senior Manager at Accenture (where I also began my career).

I am confident that Heather will be an incredible leader for our Worldwide Client Services team.  With nearly 20 years of experience in client services and operations, she really gets it.  Just as importantly, Heather fits our unique cuture perfectly.  We were recently named one of the best places to work in Austin again, and the executive team (now including Heather) sets the cultural tone for the rest of the company.  It is also impressive to note that she understands the importance of nurturing the soul with her decade-long community service to the United Way.  Bazaarvoice has been very focused on community since inception, as we strongly believe that companies also have a soul to nourish.

Client Services has been a major strength for Bazaarvoice, and I know that Heather will help us make it even better.  The teams reporting into her are already successful, with exceptional ratings from our clients (we survey them quarterly and take their input very seriously).  Heather will make sure we keep that high-bar as we rapidly scale globally.

Heather will be attending the Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas as well as our upcoming Social Commerce Summit in London (the first was a sold-out success) with me.  I sincerely look forward to introducing you to her.

Keith's partnership posted information on his passing on their home page today.

As a friend and mentor, Keith was a truly amazing person.

First, as third-generation Wall Street, he was always right on with his market predictions.  He was "the guy" I went to for all market advice.  I remember him telling me that Amazon.com was an incredible buy during a period where all of my Wharton MBA alums were telling me that it was a sell.  Analysts were reporting that Amazon.com would never become profitable, no matter the scale.  I think this was 2001 when everyone in dot-coms were panicking.   Keith told me "I'm putting a huge part of my mother's retirement into Amazon.com".  He wasn't telling me to do the same – that wouldn't have been his way.  He was just sharing the information with a good friend, who was younger and confused by the dot-com carnage.  Truthfully, I thought that was a crazy move.  But he was right.  And I started to really listen to his advice after that.  And he was always right.  He was a contrarian, which made him a good VC too.

Second, Keith was an incredible mentor to a young CEO (me).  He joined my Board of Directors at Coremetrics in February of 2000, one year after I founded the company.  Keith was my go-to resource for heavy issues.  I could always count on him to give me his best advice.  He was a true sounding board.  And he really knew how to encourage me.  He was the type of person that you wanted to shine in front of, and he brought out the best in me.

Third, Keith reinforced the importance of family to me.  He was a very caring husband and father.  Debra and I were younger, without children yet, when I started to work with Keith.  He and his wife were role models to aspire to.  Keith was a Total Leader (see what that means), with extraordinarily strong performance in career, family, and self.

I am incredibly humbled to have known and worked with Keith.  He was an amazing man and incredible mentor and friend.  I am a better man for having known him.  And I will miss him very much.

You may want to take some time to read his bio and his blog posts.  He was exceptionally smart.  From my perspective, he was one of the founders of the Internet movement that we all financially benefit from now.

Our prayers and thoughts are with his wife and children now.  We will be attending the memorial service.

1. It’s 2008.  By now, every online business understands that without a web analytics solution, they are flying blind.  That said, not all businesses are sophisticated users of web analytics.  On average, how would you grade the industry overall?

I think it’s fair to say that most online business owners recognize that flying blind is far from ideal.  Understanding an issue and actually working to overcome it are two entirely different activities.  I would give the entire industry a C- overall.  That said, there’s certainly a class of businesses that are far and away excelling at their use of web analytics.

2. What are companies doing extremely well?

Looking at the leaders in the field of using web analytics to manage their business, a casual observer would likely conclude the secret to their success is that they are actively and constantly monitoring the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of their web business.  That’s a common trait among each of these, but what we’ve seen that separates the high performing companies from the distant followers is that their organizations truly embrace the notion of data driven decisions.  I realize that is easy to say, but these companies look at both the macro trends of their business and constantly break down each KPI to understand the causal factors that drive those trends.  From that, they build business models that describe how a % increase or decrease in those causal factors will impact the value created servicing their online visitors and customers.  It isn’t easy!  Businesses that lead in this area work hard to map their online and offline investments to their topline objectives: Sales, Leads Generated, Advertising Revenue Generated, Bookings, Applications, and the many metrics for Customer Satisfaction, Engagement, and Service.

3. What big opportunities are routinely being overlooked and why?

The odd thing about the online business is that there are so many articles, case studies, and books available on the best practices online businesses are deploying, that it can be daunting to know where to start.  What I see is that many companies don’t start or don’t value the importance of constantly evaluating their business for improvement.  I think there are two areas where a majority of business owners have huge opportunities:

First, many don’t do the math to understand the impact they could have on their business top and bottom line.  Many businesses only look at their KPIs, but have little time, expertise, and patience to look further upstream to explore the complexity of inputs that can impact each and every KPI.

Second, only the very best companies routinely ask their customers if each point of their website is easy to use, meets their needs, and could be improved.  My second point doesn’t stop there, the best companies actually take and embrace that feedback to improve the overall customer experience.

4. Coremetrics has invested heavily in product development that helps online marketers attribute conversions to the right marketing sources.  The online advertising landscape is already complicated enough, so how does the rise of social media and user-generated content further complicate the process of attributing your marketing results accurately?

Since our founding in 1999, Coremetrics has been focused on delivering analytic solutions that provide marketers the most accurate measure of conversions to each and every marketing source, whether it’s a first click, last click and/or any click in between.  To do this, Coremetrics doesn’t rely on just measuring a visit or session, but is focused on measuring each and every interaction a Visitor and Customer has over time with all Marketing and content.  Measuring the impact, influence, and value of social media and user-generated content on Customers and the business is something Coremetrics does right out of the box without need for additional site tagging or customization.   Measuring and attributing value to these is not hard for a web analytics solution that is inherently Visitor based.  What’s hard is determining how to influence customers in both the social networks and those users generating content.   If you dialed back to year 2000 to the first marketing message of Coremetrics, you would find our tagline was short and to the point: Optimizing eMarketing.  And to that point, that is exactly what we are focused on today as we continue to enhance our applications that optimize eMarketing: Coremetrics Search, LIVEmail, and Intelligent Offer.

5. Product recommendation solutions are becoming a must-have technology for many of our customers.  Coremetrics’ Intelligent Offer solution competes with offerings from Aggregate Knowledge, Baynote, Certona, and several other vendors.  What are the key advantages of using Intelligent Offer vs. going with a “best of breed” vendor that is exclusively focused on this space?

The VC investments in companies that offer product recommendations has really heated up over the past 18 months and we’ve seen a lot of new players enter this market in that time.  What many people don’t recognize is that Coremetrics started developing Intelligent Offer in 2002.  The very first client we delivered this solution to 5 years ago achieved more than $5 million in incremental revenue in the first year.  Since 2002, we’ve invested years into the R&D on the algorithms to deliver highly relevant recommendations that dramatically improve upsell, cross-sell, and merchandising depth.  In 2008 we are on track to deliver over 150,000,000 product recommendations.  Intelligent Offer stands apart from the “pure plays” on three distinct fronts:   

• Business User Interface – Most of the pure plays have early stage technologies lacking in flexible and accessible user interfaces.  This means professional services are required to tune the algorithm and set up business rules.  Intelligent Offer provides an application interface distinctly designed for the needs of online retailers.  The algorithm is easily tailored for a site’s behavior patterns, product mix and recommendation use case.  The impact of these changes can be previewed instantaneously right in the application interface.  Intelligent Offer is integrated across the Coremetrics application suite.  For Example, Clients using Coremetrics LIVEmail to target customers via personalized e-mail marketing can automatically insert Intelligent Offer recommendations into their e-mail program.  

• Easy Implementation – Intelligent Offer is designed specifically to be implemented quickly.  It requires no new tagging and utilizes the largest and most detailed Customer Behavior dataset.  All the new pure plays require site tagging and considerable time to build up the data from which highly relevant recommendations can be generated.  There is a substantial opportunity cost when you consider lost revenues during the “cold start” and “tune” period.  

• Greater ROI – Intelligent Offer allows clients to quickly leverage product recommendation data across more customer touch points to achieve greater ROI.  Distinct recommendation styles can be enabled for various site touch points such as product page, cart and order status.  Recommendations can be scoped to match items in print catalogs so call center representatives can up-sell callers within the context of the print catalog the caller has in hand.  

6. Congratulations on the recent launch of Coremetrics Connect.  How is Connect different from other partner programs and integration platforms?

We designed Coremetrics Connect from the ground up as an integration platform that facilitates the ability for our clients to achieve closed loop marketing.  Unlike other programs in the market that are primarily promoted as partner programs, Coremetrics Connect is distinctly providing certified technical integrations that are focused on achieving one click integrations with leading solution providers servicing the online marketing industry.

7. How will you gauge the success of Connect after 1 year?  After 5?

We expect the primary measure of success will be based on how rapidly our client base adopts the Connect Certified solutions.  Already we are hearing directly from our client base concerning the vendors that they want certified in Connect.  We certainly recognize that our partners have a limited amount of resources to devote to partnering activities.  Therefore, we’ve identified a set of technologies and more importantly a Product and Service team that will work directly to enable our partners across more than 1100 client sites.  Whether the time horizon is 6 months or 60 months, the success of Coremetrics Connect will be measured by the value our client base recognizes as they continue to adopt these solutions.  

8. Bazaarvoice and Coremetrics offer an integrated reporting solution through the Connect program.  How do you see our integration evolving as our joint customers become more sophisticated in their use of web analytics and social commerce?

I think the first reporting solution we jointly developed really helped the early pioneers in this market explore the value created by customers using the social commerce solutions.  Those early case studies certainly helped the market accelerate the adoption of the wide variety of social commerce solutions available from Bazaarvoice.   As social commerce continues to grow and evolve the analytic needs have expanded.  To meet that rising analytic need, Coremetrics introduced an exciting new application named Explore.  This new set of analytics enables our joint clients to deeply and flexibly analyze the business impact of social commerce.

9. Understanding the conversion impact of user-generated content is very important, but what are the deeper analytics questions you would be looking to answer if you were VP eCommerce of a company that uses Coremetrics and Bazaarvoice?  

We are hearing from our clients that it is imperative to measure the value of engaging the customer community over time.  The VP of eCommerce is being measured on consistently delivering value to the business utilizing a wide range of technologies and services that are ultimately focused on creating a compelling multi-channel experience for their client base.  The questions we help our customers answer include “What is the long term impact of engaging customers via the Bazaarvoice solutions? What is the lifetime value of customers that engage? What are the multi-channel impacts?  What are the surprising unintended positive impacts to my business?"  The surprising part about user-generated content is both how rapid its influence on online business has grown and how willing unique customers are to share their time and energy interacting with a brand.

We’re approaching our 3-year anniversary (May 2) at Bazaarvoice, and I’ve been restless thinking about this incredibly transformational time in history.  I’m on my way back from an exhilarating week in Philly and NYC, and I’ve literally had 12 hours of sleep over the past three days.  My journey has included a $320 taxi ride from NYC to Philly at 1:30am and many other moments of craziness that I may share with you one day over beers.  Here are some of the forces of transformation I have been churning on:

1.    Civic duty: Bill Gates leaving Microsoft to focus, with his wife, on spending his mindboggling billions on the most important causes in the world.  The places where their money can affect the most impact.  Like Andy Grove recommended in High-Output Management (one of my favorite beginning management books), you should spend your time on the highest leverage activities – those that impact and empower that greatest number of people in your organization.  With Warren Buffett being one of the smartest people in history and realizing his own strengths and weaknesses, knowing that Bill and Melinda Gates would do a better job than him on impacting change through charity, entrusting them with 85% of his equally mindboggling billions – this was the most incredible personal initiative that I can think of in my lifetime.

        Civic duty is very powerful, and I believe we are in a transformational period where more people are getting involved.  From the beginning of Bazaarvoice, we have focused on charity, and this has nourished the soul of our company.  I’m convinced that our usual involvement in this area has led to faster and more profitable growth than our peers (fellow rapid-growth companies our age).  In Judaism, we call this tzedakah.  Perhaps the Web connects us and creates more accountability in this area, where a virtuous cycle of giving kicks in.

2.    Free-market regulation: I have always been a Republican.  I am also Jewish and most of my fellow Jews are not Republicans.  I am also an Austin native, where most people are Democrats.  And I am a Wharton MBA alum, where I presented all day Tuesday, on my own dime, on the subject of leadership and teamwork (teaching is giving and learning).  If there was ever a free-market focused school, it's Wharton.  This whole mortgage mess has great people, such as the Board of Directors at Shop.org, talking about free-market regulation in a way that I never heard in my professional career.  The exotic instruments created, the ignorant (or knowingly false) assumption that housing prices would climb forever, the forced sale of Bear Stearns, the sleepless nights for Paulson and Bernarke, and the near collapse of our economy.  It’s hard to sleep when I feel an obligation to study and learn from this period in history.  I grok business.  And it really has me thinking about the wisdom of unregulated capitalism.  As a result, for the first time in my life I will be voting for a Democrat in this presidential election (not my only reason for the switch).  The dot-com bubble bursting, which was personally so painful for me as an early pioneer as the founder of Coremetrics with 100 of our dot-com clients going out of business, pales in comparison to the trillions that will be lost globally as a result of our mortgage bubble.  I know from my conversations in the industry that many of us are rethinking unregulated capitalism.  I think this will mess will lead to greater consumer involvement in government, and the Web will be an extremely powerful force in that.  Just wait until everyone can vote online.

3.    The health of our planet: To be transparent with you up-front, I drive a 2008 Audi S8, which has a 10-cylinder, 450-horsepower motor.  It is an incredible machine, a real dream car for me and a reward for my entrepreneurial success, but it’s also a gas-guzzling monster.  So you can either skip this paragraph, or read on. 

        An Inconvenient Truth was just that – too inconvenient.  Hybrids haven’t really made a dent (well less than 5% of all cars sold are hybrids), and the truth is they are mostly gas-powered anyways – more of a symbolic gesture really.  The Tesla (see my previous post on them) and the Chevrolet Volt – that’s real change (but generating electricity also consumes resources).  I keep reading about the two-stroke cheap motors in China spewing massive emissions.  These small motors are even worse than huge ones. 

        Companies are moving toward green, both for attracting a new age of green-aware consumers as well as to ensure their longevity.  I have blogged about this many times over the past three years (see Aug-06, Dec-06, Jan-07 for three insightful examples).  It is a huge trend.  But I’m restless because we’re not making progress as fast as I thought we would.  I sometimes feel like we have a freight train speeding towards us, with rapid worldwide population growth not helping.  As I’ve blogged about previously, I’m ultimately hopeful that entrepreneurs will successfully affect real change by capitalizing on the multi-trillion dollar opportunities.  The venture capitalists are all over it, and that's because the entrepreneurs are all over it.  One only needs to look at the rapidly rising price of oil and commodities to realize that there are ridiculous amounts of money to be made if you can find real alternative sources of energy.  But I’m pretty sure it is going to take government regulation to get there, as my faith in unregulated capitalism has been somewhat shattered (see #2 above).        

        The implications for companies is obvious – attract green-aware consumers through their actions and affect real change to ensure their longevity (e.g., are they dependent on gasoline or other diminishing resources to survive?).

4.    The war on terrorism: This is too thorny to really dig into publicly, and I’m not educated enough about all of the issues to feel confident in my proposed solutions.  I pray that our government is.  In any case, this is a huge problem for the human race, not just the U.S., and I have no idea what happens if we stop being vigilant.  It is pretty obvious that the actions of our current President are easy to criticize in hindsight, and there has never been a costlier war.  As I travel throughout Europe, it is clear to me we need a President that will be able to repair our relationships with other countries.  I look forward to seeing solutions vigorously debated in the upcoming Presidential campaign (and I’m sure it will continue for long afterwards) and being open-minded to solutions proposed then.  I’m hopeful that the Web will bring us together, as the human race, to debate these issues and find reconciliation through understanding each other.  Given the increasingly global nature of business, this is incredibly important to businesses as well as the disruption could be exponential.

I would love to hear your perspectives on my rants above.  After almost three years in business, having much pride for what we have accomplished as a business and team, I can tell you that the best part of my job is working with our incredibly smart clients.  Thank you!

I'll post Part 2 (update: Part 2 is live now) of this trend piece soon, and I promise to make it more focused on word-of-mouth and our business.  And I'll end on a better note, too.

And now I’m going to catch up on some sleep! 

We are exhibiting at the Omniture Summit in Utah this week, and I'm amazed at how significant this event has become for the online industry.  There are over 2,000 people here making this event almost as large as Shop.org's Annual Summit in Las Vegas (disclosure: I serve on the Board of Directors at Shop.org), and Seth Godin just spoke.  Lance Armstrong spoke last night, and I had tears in my eyes after hearing his story (and not just because I am an Austinite).  I also heard that the Coremetrics Summit last week was strong (we were an exhibitor) but, unfortunately, could not attend.  Being a founder of the Web analytics space (as the founder of Coremetrics), I'm really impressed to see how much that industry has grown.  I hope to grow Bazaarvoice into just as large of a company, and we are well on our way to meeting that (current) goal.

1. Email remains one of the highest ROI online marketing activities – it generates almost $60 of revenue per $1 spent (Direct Marketing Association).  With better analytics, content, and targeting, can email marketers expect even higher rates of return?  

Absolutely. The more that marketers use this channel responsibly the more effective it will become. No other channel provides this type of quantitative and qualitative data — leading marketers understand the inherent value of email marketing and recognize that its metrics provide the keys to delivering relevant communications. In addition to being a great channel by itself, email marketing combined with web analytics and advanced tools like Bazaarvoice enables marketers to identify customer purchase triggers and channel preferences.  Specifically, we’ve seen many clients attribute in-store traffic and revenue to an email campaign.  The direct effect that email has on the other channels is far greater than anyone ever anticipated.

Another valid point here, aside from the relevance factor, is that because email is so cost efficient, marketers aren’t as motivated to invest the same amount of analytical strategy into it as they do with catalogs or direct mail as they tend to carry higher costs for the marketers.  However, I do see more and more leading marketers becoming increasingly responsible with email and utilizing the tools available to develop highly relevant and response-driven marketing programs. These are the marketers who ultimately deepen customer loyalty and build positive brand equity.

2. As a best practice, Bazaarvoice recommends that our clients use email to capture customer word-of-mouth, often in the form of post-purchase review solicitation emails.  This essentially kickstarts a two-way conversation between our clients and their customers.  How do you see the brand-customer dialogue evolving over email and other messaging systems (SMS, etc.)?

We see post purchase reviews as yet another great way to engage your customer.  This type of campaign strategy not only benefits the organization but allows the marketer to show they value them by providing  an opportunity to evaluate the product or service.

This type of dialogue is evolving quickly, and we’ve seen very positive results with many of our large retailers that send post-review confirmation emails to all customers who have submitted a review.  We also have a number of clients planning to deploy post-purchase emails to recent buyers to solicit a product review. We promote this concept to many of the mutual clients we share with Bazaarvoice because it seems clear that there is a much higher long-term value to customers who are very engaged with their brands.  This, in turn, should result in better response to future emails and marketing campaigns.

3. Relevance is a constant focus for advertisers trying to reach consumers in an ad-saturated environment.  As part of Experian and through investments in tools like SiteClarity, what unique advantages does CheetahMail offer to drive increased relevance for your customers?  

Relevance is definitely the key, and one of the many advantages of being a part of Experian is the availability of rich data mining tools like Mosaic and TrueTouch for advanced consumer segmentation. Having access to the world’s largest data center and highly innovative data management tools coupled with the deep reporting capabilities of CheetahMail, ensures that our clients have the opportunity to send emails as individualized as their customers.

Additionally, web tools like SiteClarity give CheetahMail clients an advantage by allowing them to deploy web-based triggers (such as shopping cart abandonment messages) regardless of whether or not they’ve undergone a complete integration with a 3rd party web analytics provider.  The tags are very small and easy to set up so clients can choose to use them alone or with their existing analytics provider like Coremetrics or Omniture.

4. Our clients have seen remarkably higher email clickthroughs and conversions by marketing top-rated products and including compelling customer reviews in their email programs.  Any personal theories on why this works?

This works for the same reasons that running such reviews on-site should increase responsiveness – the credibility of the offer is enhanced by seeing actual ratings by other users.  The authenticity of reviews by consumers vs. marketing spin is incredibly powerful because these reviews put the power directly into the consumers’ hands. User reviews are one aspect of the overall social networking phenomenon we see everywhere now, and its power and uses are still being discovered.

5. As trust continues to rise in “someone like me”, consumers expect even more personalized and authentic content and offers.  UGC may play a leading role in this next wave of personalization.  What is CheetahMail’s strategy to support this trend?  

Our creative services team is examining different ways to include user ratings and reviews in email creative to test response levels. Several of our clients have taken the lead on this initiative and have already begun incorporating this level of authentic content. We are reviewing these programs very closely to identify commonalities in what works (and what doesn’t) in an effort to create strategy guides for our clients in this area. For example, does simply putting the number of stars a product or service receives fare better than including actual snippets of customer quotes? Is there a point at which too many reviewed items in one email dilutes overall effectiveness? We are still framing these questions and need more response data before we can accurately provide answers. 2008 will be a big year for these types of programs — testing standard “Marketing-speak” against versions of the same offers featuring more customer voices.

6. Can you share an example or two of well executed email campaigns that feature customer word of mouth or other “viral” content or offers?

A great example of this would be our client Bath & Body Works. For example, in mid-November we deployed one of their emails that featured “the sweetest, softest nap blanket on earth” – an actual description pulled from a Bazaarvoice review (see the first review listed). The email included the handle of the customer (“GRITS”, from Charleston, SC!) and an additional quote that highlighted some very compelling features of the product, followed by 5 red stars. In an analysis of one Bath & Body Works email campaign featuring ratings and review content, average order value increased more than 10%, session length jumped by 13%, and sales per visitor also saw an 11% increase. Since then, Bath & Body Works has continued to innovate with a variety of approaches featuring user-generated content.