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Review: MarketingSherpa's Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2006
This is a monster of a report, aimed at e-retailers and anyone else selling products or services online. It covers everything from landing pages, shopping carts, customer service, email marketing and more.
The core purpose of all 300-plus pages is to help you optimize your online marketing efforts and increase conversion rates and revenues.
As always with MarketingSherpa, this report is not a collection of expert opinions, but a compendium of results -- including 311 charts, 23 heatmaps (eyetracking) and data from 1,101 companies which have been tracking their own performance online.
In addition, MarketingSherpa surveyed 1,120 online shoppers as they attempted to navigate their way through online stores.
Some of my favorite parts...
As I worked my way through the report, I realized there was just too much material to try to “review” every part.
Instead, here are just a few of the areas and findings that jumped out at me. But keep in mind, this list is not exhaustive and represents just a fraction of what you’ll find in the report.
- There are dozens of charts showing what companies are spending online and how they are spending it. This section gives you a wonderful bird’s eye view of ecommerce, and provides insights into which areas of activity are growing, and which are shrinking.
- There’s a great chart showing the reasons why people abandon shopping carts. The number one reason? No, it’s not because the shipping costs were too high, it’s because, “I was comparison shopping.” Something to think about.
- Here’s a quote from the section on eyetracking. “People pay attention to the left side of the page, and it takes a lot for them to focus to the right. This seems obvious, but the truth of the left-hand bias can’t be stressed enough.” I agree. The right side column is often the dead zone, although there are exceptions when a page design is radically different from the “norm”.
- I love the heatmaps. These show you where people look and click on pages. Red shows the greatest concentration of attention, orange shows slightly less and so on. They show heatmaps of Amazon, Wal-Mart, Apple, Circuit City and other sites too. The most common hot zone? Imagine a spot just below your header graphics and about one third in from the left.
- There’s a ton on data on the details of selling online... credit cards and other payment methods, privacy pages, creation of user accounts and plenty more.
- Here’s an important area. There are pages and pages of data on the use of email by online retailers, whether it’s welcome emails, confirmation emails or autoresponder sequences.
- There’s a lot on customer service. How companies handle communications from customers, how long they take to response and more.
- There’s a big section on how e-retailers drive traffic to their sites, with online marketing tactics and offline too.
- And chart after chart with figures on email marketing. The number one way to collect new email addresses for your list? Add a check box to your registration page. The second best way is to offer free trials or downloads.
- There is a whole section on the use of search engine marketing.
- There is also a huge section on the demographics and behavior of shoppers online.
And that’s just scratching the surface...
This is a big report. Almost every page has a chart, table or heatmap.
If you sell online, this is the kind of information you need in order to provide yourself with an industry benchmark.
Read through these pages for the first time and you’ll see how you compare...where you are doing well, and where you need to make improvements.
Then put it on the shelf by your desk and refer to it when you want detailed information on just about every factor relating to e-commerce.
In other words, if you sell online, this report is an essential reference guide.
Read the MarketingSherpa information page for more details and ordering information...
Also, read my reviews of other marketing reports by MarketingSherpa...