For Direct Marketing Professionals

Includes Forrester research panel data

July 1, 2009
Sharpening Web Site Relevance
Tactics For Delivering Meaningful Online Experiences
by John Lovett
with Carlton A. Doty and Emily Murphy

Executiv e S ummary
Relevance is the gold that marketers seek and the means by which customer intelligence professionals
secure their tenure. Marketers require relevance to reach customers in our increasingly cluttered and
information-overloaded environment. The recipe for relevance includes three key ingredients: data,
insight, and technology. More sophisticated marketers will sprinkle in some automation for good
measure, but ultimately some ratio of these ingredients along with calculated timing results in satisfying
returns.

Why Must Marketers Get Relevant?

If delivering relevant content to Web site visitors isn’t a top priority for you, Forrester delivers the
following wake-up calls:

· Marketers don’t own the Web. Contrary to popular belief among marketers, the Web belongs
to consumers. On average, consumers visit 2.5 Web sites prior to making online purchases, and
42% visit three or more sites during their research process.1 For 47% of consumers, the research
begins with a Web site visit, search engine query, or promotional email. Relevance tactics improve
marketers’ chances of capturing consumers’ attention and driving them toward conversions.

· Irrational exuberance is dead. Effective marketers focus on high-value opportunities rather than
high-volume activity. Targeted offers and promotions for customers whose behavior demonstrates a
high propensity for action is one method to achieve profitable relevance. Marketers can accomplish
this by mining their customer intelligence data to calculate product life-cycle cues and identify Web
site browsing behavior that indicates a visitor’s readiness to act.

· Targeted content drives activity. Marketers currently deliver targeted content to 24% of Web
site visitors on average.2 Fifty-eight percent of these marketers reported an incremental lift in
conversions over the control by 5% or more as a result of using relevance tactics. Content and
messaging delivered with contextual meaning for Web site visitors (derived from current session
activity or historic profiles) consistently outperforms generic one-size-fits-all content.

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Relevance Tactics Are Within Reach

Most marketers surveyed (68%) utilize Web analytics tools to derive the insight and data necessary
to gain relevance with their customers.3 Relevance tactics range from basic to highly complex, yet
the following principles serve as fundamentals of Web site relevance:

· Relevance doesn’t need to be rocket science. Basic segmentation can help marketers discern
differences between visitor types by using self-selection methods (i.e., allowing visitors
to navigate freely) or explicit information collection (i.e., visitor ZIP codes). From here,
segmentation can become increasingly complex using data analysis and interpretation methods
to identify profitable pockets of visitors — but it doesn’t have to. Simply identifying with
customers through segmentation, by using personas, or by listening to user-generated feedback
provides fuel for increasing relevance (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Predominant Tactics For Web Site Targeting

“Which of the following online tactics does your company currently use or plan to start using in the next
12 months to address the needs of your target audiences on your primary public-facing Web sites?”
Currently use Plan to use in next 12 months No plans to use in next 12 months

Segmentation 72% 23% 5%

Behavioral targeting 46% 37% 17%

Recommendations 44% 26% 30%

Personas 43% 29% 29%

Multivariate testing 34% 40% 26%

User-generated content 29% 39% 32%

Base: 76 marketers who use on-site targeting

(Don’t know responses not shown)
Source: Q1 2009 Global Email Marketing And On-Site Targeting Online Survey
53631 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

July 1, 2009 © 2009, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

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· Meaningful experiences begin with relevant landing pages. Deep-linking visitors to relevant
or customized pages within a Web site is not only good practice — it’s a key benefit of social
channels using URL shorteners. As information sources multiply and simultaneously disperse
across the Web, relevant experiences should start immediately upon arrival. Too often marketers
waste their acquisition dollars and social marketing efforts by driving traffic to generic pages.
Customer intelligence professionals accomplish relevance at the inception of the visit by
aligning acquisition messaging and landing page content.

· Customer profiling builds relationships. Forty-two percent of marketers surveyed rely on

unique user profiles to increase relevance, and 36% allow customers to identify their unique
preferences (see Figure 2). This minimizes the risk of alienating customers with misaligned
targeting and opens access to more meaningful interactions. Advancing relevance beyond
collaborative filtering requires marketers to maintain distinct data profiles — or personas —
about their known users and marry these identifiers to real-time session activity.4 This requires
help from an analytics database or CRM solution that can integrate with a presentation layer —
a recommendation engine or WCM solution — to inject content at critical decisioning
junctures.

Figure 2 Deep Relevance Requires Triangulation Of Multiple Attributes

“Which of the following attributes do you utilize for targeting content to specific site visitors?”
Geography 45%
Unique user profiles 42%
Referral keyword 37%
Explicit preferences (user-defined) 36%
Referral site 29%
Previous session activity 25%
Affinity groups 25%
Real-time clickstream activity 18%
IP address 17% Did you know?
Day-parting (content changes Marketers use an average of
based on time of day) 13% 2.9 attributes for targeting
Other 3% Web site content to specific
visitors.
None 18%
Base: 76 marketers who use on-site targeting
(multiple responses accepted)
Source: Q1 2009 Global Email Marketing And On-Site Targeting Online Survey
53631 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

July 1, 2009 © 2009, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

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Relevance Tactics Span Industries And Marketing Disciplines

There are numerous ways to become more relevant to your customers and Web site visitors, yet
nearly all companies interviewed for this report described their relevance tactics as an ongoing
process. While you’re chasing relevance, Forrester provides these examples of companies that apply
relevance for results:

· Geo-targeting scores big. Online ticket seller StubHub is in the business of buying and selling
event tickets and uses relevance tactics to achieve unique click-through rates as high as 5.4%
on targeted emails. StubHub mines its propriety customer database it calls the “preference
center” and works with email service provider Responsys to target customers on multiple
levels including: geography, transaction history, and timing. For events like the NBA playoffs,
StubHub will email fans of teams in contention and drive them deep into the purchase process
so they can easily take action in just a few clicks. Overall, the targeted email program has netted
profitable returns, and customers are showing their ongoing appreciation of relevant emails with
very little attrition and resounding click-through rates.

· Showing the love with personalized URLs (pURLs). One B2B company decided to leverage
its database of 1 million customers with a direct marketing campaign using pURLs to elicit a
response.5 Customers who accessed the pURLs arrived at a microsite constructed for maximum
relevance to their unique profiles using data about their business, purchase history, and
geographic location. Using technology from magnify360, customers could also refine microsite
targeting and future interactions by answering a set of 10 out of 60 possible of questions that
adapted content to meet their business needs. Not only did initial response rates increase by
22% for customers who received pURLs, but the company was able to segment customers into
distinct profiles used for lead nurturing and future relevance-driven campaigns.

· Working out pays off. Smooth Fitness, ranked on Internet Retailer’s Top 500 E-Retailer Guide,
earns its revenue by selling large-ticket exercise equipment like treadmills and ellipticals,
which typically last for a long time. As a result, its Web site traffic tends to be first-time visitors.
The company uses behavioral targeting offered by Amadesa that targets products and offers
to site visitors even before they arrive on the home page. The technology uses a real-time
combination of keyword analysis, referral information, and hundreds of other source attributes
to automatically deliver the most effective offers to visitors. Since launching the technology
in March, Smooth Fitness has improved the four “holy grail” metrics for this initiative, which
include: click-through rates (month one, 12%; month two, 48%; month three, 123%; in
aggregate, 78%), conversions (up 8%), revenues per visit (up nearly 12%), and average order
values (up nearly 20%). Since Smooth Fitness’ business is seasonal, the targeted efforts are
helping increase sales through the lean summer months and enabling the company to optimize
its planning for the winter months when sales are stronger.

July 1, 2009 © 2009, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

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· Recommendations to the rescue. Office Depot employed a hybrid solution including

Coremetrics Intelligent Offer (for upsell) and CNET’s Intelligent Cross-Sell to develop a closed-
loop process for determining highly relevant recommendations based on a buyer’s history and
current session behavior.6 Faced with a vast product assortment of more than 33,000 SKUs,
Office Depot merchandisers were challenged to guide online shoppers quickly to relevant
products. Previously, they labored through a manual process of matching cross-sell and upsell
recommendations to products, which quickly became a daunting task as inventory revolved and
buying patterns changed. The automated process minimized the manual product association
burden while still enabling merchandisers to intervene with business rules to maintain
profitability. Overall, this program doubled cross-sell revenue and resulted in significant time
savings and profits for Office Depot.

R ecomme n datio n s

Relevance is best Served warm

Marketers looking to optimize their efforts by becoming more relevant to customers must
follow a recipe that includes data, analysis, and technology. While simmering, Forrester strongly
recommends the following activities for best results:

· Listen to your customers. Effective use of customer intelligence gathered in the form of
behavioral actions and expressed sentiment will make or break marketers. Marketers who
establish “listening posts” will ensure that they’re capturing the conversation and arming
themselves with the knowledge to become relevant.
· Automate tactics for engaging experiences. Online relevance does not rely on serendipity.
It requires data-driven technologies embedded with foresight and automation to trigger
actions at precise moments in the customer life cycle. Trying to accomplish this without the
aid of automation technology is futile.
· Be relevant in more ways than one. Profiles change, intentions fluctuate, and customers
are fickle. Relevance tactics must span both historic behavior and real-time activity. To
accomplish this, marketers must apply multiple relevance tactics to rise above the din of a
cluttered marketing environment.

Endnotes
1
Source: JupiterResearch/NPD Retail Consumer Survey (4/08), n=2,231 (online consumers, US).
2
Source: Q1 2009 Global Email Marketing And On-Site Targeting Online Survey.
3
Source: Q1 2009 Global Email Marketing And On-Site Targeting Online Survey.
4
“Collaborative filtering (in electronic commerce) is commonly recognized as ‘others who viewed this

July 1, 2009 © 2009, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

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product also viewed . . .’ and relies on product data. This tactic associates products in a cross-sell or up-sell
manner, based on collective clickstream data. Product presentation can be automated through rules-based
processes to update as new data accrue, or manipulated by merchandisers based on inventory, availability,
and other factors. These capabilities also enable retailers to capitalize on hot trends and rapid market
changes.” See the September 15, 2008, “Recommendation Technologies” report.
5
Source: magnify360 and subsequent interviews with a client company (http://magnify360.com/resources/
email-dmailMarketingOpt-B2B-products.pdf).
6
Source: Coremetrics and CNET as well as subsequent interviews with Office Depot (http://www.
coremetrics.com/clients/thankyou.php?id=cs_office_depot and http://cnetcontentsolutions.com/files/
ccs_casestudy_ics_officedepot_en.pdf).

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