A couple of multichannel merchants reporting financial results today also had brand-related news.

Liz Claiborne Inc. said it made the decision during the fourth quarter to close its Elisabeth plus-size apparel concept. A message on the Elisabeth Web site, www.elisabeth.com, says all of the stores will be closed over the next month but that e-commerce site will continue to operate.

PetSmart Inc., www.petsmart.com, announced plans to exit the State Line Tack horse business, which includes 180 departments inside PetSmart stores. It is also exploring strategic opportunities for its State Line Tack horse catalog and e-commerce operation. The company said it reached this decision based on its findings that the horse business operates differently than its core pet business, attracts a different customer and doesn’t perform as well.

–Posted by Chantal Tode

Wal-Mart is planning on purchasing a 35 percent stake in the Bounteous Company, a Taiwan-owned group that operates more than 100 retail outlets in China.

This news is interesting as the retail giant lately has seen problems here in the US with low holiday sales. Perhaps they see more potential in emerging markets. More and more marketers are noticing the growing consumer audience in places like China, India and Brazil.

Not onlyis there a growing market place for consumers in China, but as many of the products that Wal-Mart sells are made in China, it seems appropriate that the chain would tap into that market and save money on the logistics of shipping those products all the way to the US.
-Dianna Dilworth

In 2006, DM News was pleased to sponsor Fast Forward, a one-day conference put together by leaders in the list community and scheduled the day before the DMA’s List Vision conference. The day was created to provide a forum for high level executives in list and related companies to focus on the changing nature of direct marketing and how list companies can continue to meet their clients’ needs in the Internet age.

“You gotta move forward quickly” is how American List Counsel’s Fran Green, a key organizer of the event, put it.

In 2007, the second Fast Forward will take place on July 31 at the Marriott Marquis in New York. Once again, a task force of top list executives has come together to start lining up speakers. The first point that has been agreed makes a lot of sense to me. It is that the whole event will be framed around the marketer’s perspective. Accordingly, a list of progressive companies has been formed as possible sources of speakers. These include Meredith, Williams-Sonoma, Vonage, Second Life, Time Inc, Career Builders and others.

One speaking candidate who was enthusiastically endorsed by the task force members was Amy Africa, publisher of EightbyEight.com, which provides tips on building effective web sites and optimizing online channels such as search marketing and email marketing. When it came to politically oriented candidates, however, such as Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, or Joe Scarborough on the other side of the spectrum, it was a little more difficult for the group to reach a consensus.

Whichever way it goes, DM News will once again be a sponsor of Fast Forward.

–Posted by Adrian Courtenay

In the mid 20th century, modernist architects to the desert to apply new ideas and techniques to building in a natural environment. It seems the perfect setting to hear new ideas about the Internet discussed, at this year’s eTail show.

One big trend that I have heard a lot about, which also came up at FirstLook Shop.org, is the user generated shopping experience. Web 2.0 is not a new idea, but the fact that consumers are actually able to participate in the retail experience is a new step in the direction of e-commerce.

At this show, a number of things to this effect have happened, like Petco using Bazaarvoice to host its user generated media, this coming at the same time as Bazaarvoice partnering with Aggregate Knowledge. This partnership will leverage a user generated review platform and turn it into an aggregate total of all of these reviews.

This theme rang true in a session yesterday afternoon in which Jodi Watson, vice president of direct marketing services at Williams-Sonoma spoke about the importance of building a strong Web site that promoted the brand, much like a store.

The multichannel shopping experience is definately key for retailers who are looking to grow business in the coming years. But it is not only important to have all of this sophistication in channels for the customer side of things. It is also important to study that data and know what to do with it, as Steve August, vice president of customer marketing at Brookstone highlighted.

Because understanding your customer and providing them what they need is a constant challenge and should be the goal of all retailers.

The sun is shining here in Palm Desert, as marketers from around the wrold have gathered to talk about online retailing for eTail 2007.  Today’s preview day events were split between search and e-mail, and just down the hall was day two of a nonrelated mobile marketing conference.

I sat in on the e-mail day and met marketers from L’Occitane, Saks, See’s Candies, LL Bean, Circuit City and Warner Home Video.
I met one man from Canada, another from France, and yet another from Brazil.  eTail is not just for the big name American brands.

A big theme throughout the day was personalization and segmentation.  Words I’ve heard a thousand times before, and so have most of the marketers in the room, but today was for those who are applying these best practices and trying to do it even better.  Web 2.0 technologies like RSS and mobile marketing were discussed, which I heard a lot about in the mobile conference yesterday. Both mobile and RSS have to be highly segmented and it is good to see marketers recognizing the value of this kind of targeting in e-mail.

Today’s discussions were less theory driven, like “we should offer relevant content to consumers” and more about the actual application, such as “how do we make e-mail better for content on a mobile device.

I wonder if anyone from the e-mail marketing conference will run into anybody from the mobile conference at the pool.  They’d certainly have something to talk about.
-Dianna Dilworth

Arroweye’s motto is “Solutions for the Custom Era.

I noticed that Scot Wingo, computer scientist and CEO of ChannelAdvisor, was sitting alone at the Ask the Expert table at the shop.org conference, so I sat down to ask him about his company. ChannelAdvisor is coming off a huge fourth quarter and is growing at the rate of 60% per year. As its name suggests, the company advises clients in multiple online channels, including comparison shopping, search marketing and marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.

The company was spun out of Overture, formerly the paid search part of Yahoo, and is now backed by a venture capital firm. Customers include a hundred large retailers, including Sharper Image, J & R Music World, Mens’ Wearhouse and others, but half of the clients are small and medium size businesses, many of whom got their start on eBay and now want to branch out into other channels as well.

Later on, at the event’s dinner under the palms, I found myself chatting with an employee (anonymous) at ChannelAdvisor, who advised me that Mr. Wingo is the kind of guy who makes you want to join his team the first time you talk to him. Nice to hear about a company with this kind of esprit de corps.

–posted by Adrian Courtenay

Acquire. Convert. Grow. Retain. Reactivate. These are the objectives of your email at different stages of the customer lifecycle. You start out with a welcoming campaign with a new customer. You nurture them with loyalty campaigns and grow them with cross-sell and upsell campaigns. You improve the lifecycle and avoid quick drop-offs.

Lindsey Ganahl, a sales development representative at the Responsys booth at the shop.org show, was just getting started.

“It’s a more strategic approach,” she said about the Responsys Lifecycle Campaign Management Solution, “using strategically designed programs as opposed to ad hoc campaigns.” She added that Responsys partners and integrates with Coremetrics, WebSideStory, Webtrends, Google Analytics and other web analytics firms in providing a pre-built data gateway that allows marketers to leverage their web behavioral data, in order to send highly targeted email campaigns that reach customers at perfectly timed moments in their own unique lifecycles.

Responsys takes existing profile data and integrates that with real-time web behavioral data to gain a more comprehensive picture of the customer.

“It’s all about executing the right message at the right time through the right channel. It’s individualized lifecycle marketing.”

Amen.

–Posted by Adrian Courtenay

Agendize, a company based in Troyes, France with an office in Grapevine, Texas, used today’s shop.org FirstLook show as the venue for announcing its new “Click to Save and Share Suite for E-Commerce.”

The online sales conversion toolset was designed to improve customers’ online buying experience by allowing them to move and share advertising and product content with just a single click, according to company founder and CEO Alex Rambaud. There are more than twelve different formats available, he said, to enable customers to save information in the shopping cart or share it with friends without any cut-and-paste.

The customer can also save information to a mobile phone — a feature that Mr. Rambaud demonstrated while we were talking by sending some scintillating information to my cellphone on ladies’ handbags from the web site of My Kate’s Bag in Grapevine.

By enabling customers to save and share product information before purchase, shopping carts are abandoned less often while referrals and revenues are increased. Among the suites’ features are Contact Now, Share with Others and Save for Later.

Agendize was founded in 2002 and is privately held. “It started with user frustration,” says Mr. Rambaud. “The tools can be placed anywhere on your site, as well as banner ads or in your email communications, and they can be configured to transfer your branding and shopping cart information.

– Posted by Adrian Courtenay

Who better to talk to about the new features of an eCommerce suite than the chief architect who designed them? At the opening exhibit hall session of shop.org’s FirstLook in Florida, I had the pleasure of speaking with, and getting a product demonstration from, Joe Berkowitz, chief architect of the Cambridge, Massachusetts company Allurent’s Rich Commerce Suite.

As Mr. Berkowitz described it, the suite is a set of modular products that deliver an improved shopping experience. Customers can see different styles and colors of the products they’re interested in, for instance, and enjoy a number of other consumer interaction features. They can also look at what they’ve got in their shopping cart and/or complete their transaction without page abandonment. For their part, merchants can set up their own uses with the Allurent tool set.

Allurent Detail, Inline Cart, Checkout Display, Navigation and Video modules are all immediately available. Mr. Berkowitz promises that additional modules will be released throughout 2007.

– Posted by Adrian Courtenay