1. ATG is well known for its personalization capabilities. How would you grade US online retailers, overall, on the quality and efficacy of their personalization strategies? What are the key obstacles these companies must overcome to implement more sophisticated personalization approaches?

I think we need to start with a quick definition of personalization, as it is a term that has been used in many different ways. At the highest level I define personalization as presenting the most relevant information to each customer during each interaction through each channel. In my view it doesn’t mean an individual plan for each individual visitor but rather a refinement of the content presented – images, messages, assortments, promotions, etc. – where appropriate, based on your knowledge of the customer and the reason she’s in your store. I believe the “1 to 1” view of personalization in itself overwhelmed many retailers and stalled adoption.

Based on this definition, I would give online retailers as a group a “C” for their personalization strategies to date. There are a few notable exceptions – and of course ATG clients would rate higher – but in general, industry personalization strategies haven’t moved much beyond a segmented email and a welcome back on the corresponding landing page. However, we’re seeing lots of momentum in the market and many of the obstacles holding retailers back have been removed. Retailers have traditionally been held back by either a lack of actionable knowledge of their customer base or a limitation in available resources or tools to act on the knowledge once gathered.

With the maturing of the e-commerce market, shoppers have mainstreamed and customer segments and shopping patterns have become more evident and defined. And the technology has advanced as well. Business data, merchandising applications, and automation have evolved to the point that merchants can identify trends as they’re happening and respond effectively to deliver more relevant interactions. As e-commerce and online shoppers continue to mature, growth will increasingly depend upon customer loyalty and lifetime value. Personalization is the ultimate loyalty platform and I look forward to the continuing evolution.

2. As personalization continues to mature, what steps has ATG taken to give the merchandiser more (and easier) control to deliver tailored shopping experiences? How do you see user-generated content playing a role there?

We have done a variety of things to continue to enhance the merchants control and capabilities around personalization. First and foremost we have insured that merchants have a consistent and complete view of the customer – all the products they view and purchase, and all the interactions they have with the site. Secondly, we have developed business applications that help merchandisers use this knowledge to easily implement personalized promotions, merchandising strategies, marketing campaigns, and search rules without having to go to IT. Most recently we have added algorithms and automation to our offering that help merchandisers even better negotiate the delicate balance of rules-based vs. automated personalization.

The growth of UGC and consumer participation in general only increases the need for personalization. UGC, while incredibly valuable, can also quickly become overwhelming. As the sheer quantity of content grows, it becomes more important to help each consumer filter through it and find the perspectives, people, and advice most relevant to him in particular. In many industry surveys, consumers have said they value opinions from others “like them.” Personalization provides the ability for sites to connect the right customers with each other.

3. Acquiring eStara in 2006 was a great move for ATG, both for the business and as a value add for your clients. How does this technology extend a brand’s ability to converse with its customers, and what are some of the more innovative things you’ve seen clients do with this solution?

The eStara products have been a great addition to our offering. Today, e-commerce is multi-channel. Shoppers see stores and brands; they don’t think in terms of channels. They expect seamless transitions and consistency across every interaction with a brand, no matter what channel they use. Some customers still prefer to complete a purchase directly with a real person, regardless of how good your site may be. The eStara products enable merchants to proactively reach out to customers on a Web site who may be highly valuable, may be researching a high consideration product, may be stalled online, or may simply have a history of researching online but buying by phone or in a store. These customers can be connected directly from the site to a customer service representative (CSR) who is immediately aware of who they are, their history with the company, and their current activity on the site. The CSR can immediately help the customer accomplish her goal. This ability has an immediate impact on conversions and customer satisfaction and goes a long way to build loyalty.

The eStara team has been incredibly nimble and has worked closely with customers to evolve the product set to meet a very interesting mix of needs. I could spend hours talking about customer examples but I’ll narrow it done to just a couple. Jenny Craig uses eStara to connect browsers on their corporately run Web site directly to their local franchisee. Franchisees love this as it provides a direct business channel for their local outlet. Customers love this as it provides an easy way to get engaged with a local person who can immediately get them started on their weight loss goals. And Jenny Craig loves it as it enforces their brand difference which as they state is “a personalized approach.”

There’s also a viral marketing use of the eStara services that’s taking hold and getting huge media attention, especially in Europe right now. Just one example is of Sporting Portugal, a major Portuguese soccer club, which created an interactive viral marketing campaign using eStara Click to Call. The campaign aimed to increase membership and attendance at games by phoning soccer fans as they’re watching a video online. As a result of the campaign, the all time record for season ticket sales was broken the first day of the season, and the creativeness of the drive resulted in massive interest from the local and national media.

4. Our readers like actionable ideas that are feasible to execute. What are your top 3 ideas for merchants integrating ATG and Bazaarvoice to drive value for consumers and growth?

There are an endless number of actions that a merchant can take once they’ve integrated Bazaarvoice with ATG. The first three things I’d consider are:

A. Combine ratings & reviews with personalization to show top-rated product recommendations by customer segment on your home, search and category pages. Drive more sales with relevant and highly rated products for all visitors.

B. Include top-rated products in campaigns triggered by customer actions such as order confirmation and shipping emails, abandoned cart follow-ups and messages to shoppers using gift lists.

C. Use Click to Call or Click to Chat to reach out to highly engaged customers by targeting personalized invitations to active reviewers. Keep these customers engaged, informed and they’ll happily sing your praises!

5. Tell us about how a customer who really gets it would use ATG's capabilities far more extensively and intelligently than the average.

The customers who truly “get it” realize that one size does not fit all. Different shoppers reach their stores with different goals, needs and tastes. The better merchants are able to understand what the varying desires are and the faster and more completely they are able to respond to them, the more successful they will be.

It’s a simple thought – shoppers return to stores where they have had success. The complexity lies in recognizing that success for one shopper may in fact be failure for another. Some shoppers want to browse, connect with merchants and fellow shoppers and extend and enjoy the process. Others want to get in the store and get out. Some shoppers know exactly what they want and simply want to purchase it in the most convenient manner while others want detailed information, recommendations and advice from others and want to consider their purchase across visits and channels. Further complicating the story, success for a single shopper will vary across shopping trips. History provides a good view of the customer but not necessarily an understanding of how they want to shop today.

I believe the merchants who “get it” are those who think about their Web store as a living entity that is constantly learning, reacting and enhancing customer visits – across channels. They are merchants who plan at a segment level but react to each visitor when they’re in the store. Merchants who balance direct control and automation to deliver effectively and efficiently. Merchants who have moved beyond guided navigation and strive to deliver guided serendipity – where shoppers not only accomplish their initial task but are also delighted by the products that they trip across along their path through your store.

6. The eCommerce space is still quite fragmented, and much of it is beginning to tie into the enterprise marketing space. What are your projections for consolidation in this industry, in light of your recent acquisitions?

I don’t believe any of these “spaces” are distinct – obviously you can’t do commerce without marketing, just as you can’t do commerce without servicing your commerce customers. The smart merchant looks at the end-to-end customer experience holistically, plans an architecture that enables a single view of the customer, then selects a platform that implements the architecture and add-on products and services that fill out all the functionality the consumer expects – without regard to what “buckets” or “spaces” someone thinks they fit into.

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.