Which Golden Globe Star Represents Your Ecommerce Marketing Style?

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Christelle

The world of marketing can be an extremely diverse setting. Like Hollywood, you have everything from the quirky comedian to the polished professional. But regardless of how a marketing strategy is tackled it is important to define your approach.

Honing in on your distinct ecommerce marketing style is just as important as an actor signing on for the perfect role that will earn a Golden Globe.

For some, finding this perfect fit means going for what you know you’re good at and capitalizing on those strengths. For others it can mean stepping outside of the box to stir up curiosity. Either way, locking down a specific angle of attack will help you maintain consistency and leverage the most results from your efforts.
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What’s your Facebook Engagement Factor?

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Alvinl

One of the great ways to reach out to your audience and position your brand is through Facebook, and our last post on the Top 10 “Most Liked” Online Retailers on Facebook got a great response.

While researching for that piece though, we stumbled upon a far more interesting phenomenon. As you may know, in addition to “likes”, there is a “people talking about this” metric on Facebook, which is basically the number of unique users commenting, liking or sharing your wall posts over the last 7 days. The metric also includes “viral shares” – whenever fans share a page’s post, any subsequent likes, comments, or re-shares will be counted towards a page’s “talking about this” number as well. (To find out more about the “talking about this” metric, check out this great explanation here.)

Introducing: Facebook Engagement Factor (F.E.F.)

After too many rounds of caffeine-fueled discussion, we decided that the ratio of the “talking about this” number to the number of “likes” was a pretty good measure of the overall level of engagement on your Facebook page. Think of it this way: the number of likes is a baseline measure of how many people have come across your Facebook page and found it useful or liked it, whereas the “talking about this” page gives you an idea of how many people are actively commenting on and liking your posts.

Hence the number of “talking about” divided by the number of “likes” is a good indicator of what proportion of your users are actively engaged on your page. After some research online, we found that variants of this metric had actually been talked about (hey great minds think alike!). For instance, it had been used to calculate the Facebook engagement levels of casinos in Las Vegas.

We called this metric the Facebook Engagement Factor, and here’s how we calculate it (Note – because this ratio of “talking about” to “likes” is usually small, we multiply it by 100 for more intuitive comparisons):

Facebook Engagement Factor (F.E.F.)

= (Number Talking About This / Number of Likes) x 100

Let’s take the example of everybody’s favourite teen singer, Justin Bieber. Justin had about 2 million screaming teenage girls and their mums talking about him over the last 7 days. Divide this by his 46.9m likes on Facebook, multiply it by 100, and you get a Facebook Engagement Factor of 4. Now this number doesn’t seem like much, but it’s still way better than his girlfriend Selena Gomez (0.9) and another teen pop sensation Miley Cyrus (0.6). (Note that this works only for pages of celebrities, companies and the like, and not your personal profile, which doesn’t have the “talking about this” metric.)


Justin Bieber’s Facebook page: high popularity, middling engagement

What the Facebook Engagement Factor Means for Your Brand

If you’re a company selling a product, the first thing you want to look at on Facebook is probably the number of likes on your Facebook page, which is a decent proxy for how popular you are overall on Facebook. However, the F.E.F. is a proxy of how (for want of a better word) fanatical your online followers are, and how much of a viral reach you have with your posts. This could translate into a stronger brand for you and more loyal paying customers, although the jury is still out on this one.

So who does well on this metric? Amongst the giant brands with more than 10m views on Facebook such as Converse (33.3m likes), Walmart (23m likes) and Victoria’s Secret (19,9m), none of them do particularly well. Converse, despite it’s massive popularity on Facebook, has a surprisingly low F.E.F. of 0.6, Walmart does slightly better than Justin at 6, and Victoria’s Secret does okay at 1.6. Bear in mind of course that the F.E.F. changes with time depending on how many users are talking about your brand in the past 7 days.

We got curious as to how our Top 10 Online Retailers on Facebook did on the Facebook Engagement Factor. Here are the results:

Facebook Engagement Factor of Top 10 Most Liked Online Retailers

10. Infibeam (942k likes, F.E.F. = 0.6)

9. Flipkart.com (1.1m likes, F.E.F. = 0.9)

8. NewEgg.com (1.1m likes, F.E.F. = 1.2)

7. Fashionandyou.com (1.1m likes, F.E.F. = 1.3)

6. Worldsoccershop.com (1.4m likes, F.E.F. = 0.8)

5. Yepme.com (1.4m likes, F.E.F. = 6)

4. Eastbay.com (1.5m likes, F.E.F. = 2)

3. Peixe Urbano (1.7m likes F.E.F. = 6)

2.Shoedazzle (2m likes, F.E.F. = 4)

1. Amazon.com (13.5m likes F.E.F. = 1)

As you can see, there is no clear correlation between what number of Facebook likes and your Facebook Engagement Factor. You might have the most number of Facebook likes, but if your engagement factor is low, it’s time to rethink whether those are truly engaged fans posting on your Facebook page.

So how do you increase the Facebook Engagement Factor?

So what affects the F.E.F. you ask? The geeks here at ReferralCandy crawled the web for the online stores with the highest F.E.F. (as well as more than 100k likes) and found out what makes them tick.

The winner? An Indian Online T-Shirt Retailer Bewakoof, which specialises in what looks like funky t-shirts with cool slogans for the Indian hipster market. Their Facebook page uses a tried and tested formula of posting once every few hours or even minutes, which leads to an incredibly high engagement factor, probably from viral shares by their loyal clientele. Their F.E.F. hovers at around 180(!), which is tremendous, given that Justin Bieber averages about a 4. This is possibly also because the nature of the posts (jokes and lolcats) lends itself easily to reposts and viral shares.

Let’s look at another online retailer, SuperheroStuff.com, with an F.E.F. of 29 (137k likes, 40k talking about). Their secret sauce? Again, lots of posts, as well as funny and cool stuff like the picture of Darth Vader below.


Funny stuff gets liked a lot!

Of course, some may ask whether an increase in the number of likes on your page will decrease your F.E.F. Theoretically, this wouldn’t happen as the number of people “talking about this” should increase proportionately. However, there is a possibility that websites with a large number of likes (think Justin Bieber with 46 million) may lower your Engagement Factor, possibly because the followers tend to be more casual, rather than deeply interested in a community (for instance thinkgeek, an online store selling geeky toys for overgrown boys).

What’s Your F.E.F.?

Whether you’re a small business or a huge celebrity with a page on Facebook, we think it’s useful to check out your F.E.F. to get a sense of your engagement levels and whether you should be posting more on your page. Of course, you should take this and any other metric with a pinch of salt and measure it along with other considerations such as how much social media actually helps your brand and your sales.

Here at ReferralCandy, we have a Justin Bieber Rule of Facebook Engagement. That is, our F.E.F. has to be higher than Justin Bieber. Thankfully, our Facebook Engagement Factor of 5 is just above that of JB at 4. Take that, Baby!

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Alvinl is the marketing guy at www.ReferralCandy.com, the refer-a-friend app that increases your sales through word of mouth. In his spare time he loves geeking out on technology, psychology and economics news.

Image Credit: Birgerking

Writing Persuasive Messages: Tips from a Nobel Laureate

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Alvinl

It’s not everyday that you get tips on messaging and marketing from a Nobel Laureate. But that is exactly what Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman does in his recent bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow. Much of his book centres on the two Systems in our brain – The first system, simply called System 1, intuitively processes information and is quick to make decisions (think driving a car), while the second system, System 2, makes deliberate and considered choices (think taking a math test).

Kahneman tells us that if you have a well thought out message that you want others to believe, it’s not just what the message is that matters, but how you say it. In general, if you engage the intuitive and automatic part of our brain (System 1), the message is more likely to be believed quickly. And the psychology lab experiments bear this out.

We’ve distilled the three best tips that Kahneman dishes out on writing persuasive messages based on the science, and summarized them into a mnemonic. So here it is, The ReferralCandy S.M.L. Rule for Persuasive Messaging.

Tip No 1: Make it Simple

Many students believe that writing in complex language and with bombastic words will lead to better marks from Professors. Kahneman details how Princeton Professor Danny Oppenheimer refutes this myth with his brilliant paper Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.

Oppenheimer gave undergraduates at Stanford sample essays to read. But some of these essays had deliberately been made more complex with longer words. The result? increasing the complexity of a text made the students judge the authors to be less, not more intelligent.

So if you have something important to say during that business presentation or marketing blurb, keep it simple and concise. It’s the smart thing to do.

Tip No. 2: Make It Memorable

Besides keeping it simple, Kahneman recommends that you make your message memorable with rhymes. He cites an experiment where participants read unfamiliar but rhyming sayings such as:

Woes unite foes.

A fault confessed is half redressed.

Other students read some of the sayings, but with non-rhyming versions:

Woes unite enemies

A fault admitted is half redressed.

You guessed it. Readers judged that the sayings which rhymed were more insightful than those which did not, though they were equally unfamiliar. No wonder Celine Dion songs always rhyme!

Tip No. 3: Make It Legible

Which of these statements is true:

Adolf Hitler was born in 1887.

Adolf Hitler was born in 1892.

If you are anything like most people, you would have chosen the second answer. But the right answer is neither (the evil dictator was born in 1889). The idea is that the more your message stands out from the background, the more believable it is, other things being equal.

So the next time you’re designing a website or writing advertising copy, use bold fonts, and maximize the contrast between characters and their background to make the message more legible and clear. Kahneman also advises that if you use colour, use bright blue or red as they are more believable than lighter shades of say green, yellow and pale blue.

It’s All About Cognitive Ease

It’s all about what Kahneman calls cognitive ease. The human brain likes to believe what is familiar and easy to process. So the next time you need to get your point across, use our very own S.M.L Rule of Thumb. Keep it Simple, Memorable, and Legible. Hey, that rhymes!

Photo Credit: Osborneb

How Many Online Stores are there in the U.S.?

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Dinesh

Here at ReferralCandy we got to wondering how many e-commerce retailers there are in the USA and how much they make. Asking Google brought us some possible answers, but nothing about how they were derived, or why they might be the right ones. So we decided to look for numbers we could crunch ourselves to get a good guesstimate.

So where do we begin? We found this June 2012 article about the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide which had this nugget:

Overall, the Top 500 retailers have a 77% share of the $198 billion U.S. e-retailing market.

The Top 500 Guide also lists each retailer’s annual sales revenue. We plotted a graph of those 500 retailers and their revenues to see if there was anything useful we could find.

This is what we got:

That graph sure looked like it followed a power law. Could we figure out what the precise function was? After removing the top 10 retailers (since they were “noisy”) and asking Excel for a little help, we found a function with a pretty good fit:

That’s better. Now we’re getting close! Assuming that the power law held for retailers past the top 500, we now had a way of reasonably ascertaining the rank of any online store. Say we wanted the rank of someone running a side business making $12,000 a year. With a bit of math, we would be able to get the magic number of… 90,501. Plugging in a few more numbers would give us the following table:

Yearly sales of at least	Number of retailers
$12,000	90,501
$25,000	54,686
$50,000	33,983
$100,000	21,118

Our power law formula also gives us a way of estimating the combined revenue of all the retailers making less than $1,000 a month (spoiler: around US$1 billion!).

So if we only considered online stores making more than $12,000 in sales a year, that comes up to about 90,500 retailers with a combined revenue of $197 billion in the U.S. That’s more than the population of the Seychelles!

So there we have it. Stay tuned for more number-crunching adventures! And feel free to ask any questions.

Image Credit: bfishadow

How to Stop Paying for your Customers – 5 Lessons from Rand Fishkin

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Alvinl

Here at ReferralCandy, we’re always looking for cool and innovative ways to market great products. One of the leading experts in this field is Rand Fishkin, CEO of software company SEOmoz and a master of inbound marketing. His advice on how to earn customers without paying for them is relevant for all e-commerce businesses.

Rand started his SEOmoz blog in 2004, and as he tells it, slowly built it from struggling no-readership material to a behemoth in generating publicity and genuine interest from readers interested in SEO.

We recently stumbled upon a video of an exceptional impromptu talk that he gave at a Hacker News Meetup in London. It’s worth watching in its entirety, but if you don’t have 60 minutes to spare, here are the top 5 things that resonated with us from his video.

1. INBOUND MARKETING IS A HACK FOR MARKETING

Inbound marketing is essentially putting interesting original content onto innovative channels, so that your target audience gets to know your brand and product, and that leads actually come to you. It could come in the form of a viral video, a blog post (like this one), an infographic, or anything really that draws readers and viewers in.

The good news is that inbound favours the nimble and clever startup rather than the giant corporation. This is opposed to outbound marketing, which is paying for advertising, cold-calling and playing the numbers game to generate leads.

Rand’s main point is that inbound marketing shouldn’t be seen as distasteful “black magic” marketing, but rather as a hack for marketing that accomplishes more outreach and generates more sales with usually no money down. In fact, according to him, Inbound marketing can generate up to 80% of traffic as compared to 20% from paid marketing (10:50 in the video). It’s a no brainer that we should use inbound!

As Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist of Apple once said, “If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains
than money, you should focus on inbound marketing!”

2. CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT

So you’re sold on inbound marketing. But what’s the secret sauce you ask? The truth is that “you don’t buy those visitors, you earn them”. Creating good content and doing work that you’re proud of is the basic building block of inbound marketing.

It’s simple, if you can recreate relevant and even exciting content that people will tweet, blog about and link to, they’re going to want to know your name and what you do. In inbound marketing the content draws interest in, rather than you pushing your product out.

The content that you create needs to engage readers. Good content requires research and hard work to put a fresh spin on things or even say something totally new. It could be an infographic that makes sense of the latest trends and figures in a compelling and intuitive way, or even a product that is so compelling it gets your target audience buzzing (Rand cites the ingenious example of a “USB Doomsday Device” at 16:17). For an in-depth view on how to create good content, check out this blog post on content creation.

3. THE RISE OF SOCIAL IS NOT THE END OF SEARCH

Social Media channels are a natural fit for great content. We all have a favourite advertisement video or blog post that went viral on social media channels and brought great publicity for a particular brand. Rand cites the brilliant example of the Dollar Shave Club commercial. Although the business model is simple (selling cheap razors online for a dollar a month), the commercial has garnered almost 5 million hits on Youtube.

While social media channels are great for generating brand awareness, this doesn’t mean that we should underestimate Search Channels. According to a Pew Internet Survey, 91% of Americans are searching for information online, compared to 66% using social media channels. Ranking high on searches through SEO remains a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site. Of course, social media will remain a huge influence in driving higher rankings on searches.

4. CONVERSION OF CUSTOMERS MEANS LISTENING, TESTING AND RE-TESTING

Getting page views does not always translate into sales. Rand tells us that optimizing conversion of interested eyeballs into paying consumers depends on listening to consumers, and then using that information to refine your product. Once they hit your landing page, understand what makes them buy, or more importantly not buy your product.

Rand’s team listened to customers of SEOmoz and tried to figure out what made them move further down the sales funnel upon hitting the landing page, and what put them off. By listening, reformatting and constantly testing their landing page, they achieved over $1million more in subscribers per year.

5. BUILD TRUST BY KEEPING IT REAL

So now we know that inbound marketing is powerful stuff, it’s centred on engaging content, works well on social media (but don’t neglect search!) and that conversion is key. But perhaps the most important takeaway that we got is to “keep it real.”

As Rand puts it, “Instead of thinking about what will make my page rank higher, what will get me more followers, I really like thinking about it from the other way. What are the things I can produce that people will wanna share, love, make them trust me. That’s gonna be much more powerful and much more successful.” (see 29:30).

FINALLY, HAVE FUN!

We couldn’t agree more that ultimately, it’s about building trust and being genuine with potential customers that see your content and your brand by creating content you love. This way, you’ll not only build brand awareness and loyalty that lasts, but you’ll have much more fun while you’re doing it.

Tell us below about your attempts, successes and failures in creating inbound marketing content. We want to hear from you!

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Tag Archives: Marketing

Which Golden Globe Star Represents Your Ecommerce Marketing Style?

Writing Persuasive Messages: Tips from a Nobel Laureate

How Many Online Stores are there in the U.S.?