We have been working more than 5 years to launch the Iranian edition! The launch of the magazine in Iran carried strategic significance for the organization and is considered a huge achievement for us, especially given the tense political relations between US and Iran, as well as the fact that NG is the first and only foreign magazine published in that country. My next goal is Vietnam. After many years of work in Patker agency, Yulia again began to collaborate with Ruben Mangasaryan.
Rouben licensed National Geographic Traveler in Armenia. Unfortunately, only a few editions have been published: Yulia and Ruben were looking for alternative ways of financing but in the very midst of these attempts Ruben passed away… Eric and I have two kids - Robert, 11 and Nika, 8. Robert is the only member of our family who was born in Yerevan smiling.
The thing is that my mother comes from Moscow and although my parents lived in Yerevan, I was born in Moscow. They brought me to Yerevan only when I was 2 weeks old. Eric now works in a consulting firm working with US Government on various environmental sustainability projects around the globe, primarily in East Africa and Asia. My mother moved to Washington from Yerevan and is in charge of running and managing our household. I have very close ties with my motherland and try to follow the developments in Armenia.
Due to work and family responsibilities cannot visit too often. Although I have very few relatives left in Armenia, I have a lot of close and dear friends and many unforgetable and unique memories. Available for download now. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs.
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Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. How do shoppers choose one product over another on your site? What content, information piece closes the sale for your product? Is that a self-generating parts diagram or an outfit combination? A price or free shipping? Once you found it, display it prominently to encourage conversion.
Event tracking also can add some insights on what is going on your pages. Why do people come back to buy from your site? This is my favorite question. It does remind the 1, but it opens more information on the experience shoppers had with your site and can shed light on your strong and weak parts. Is it a service or a one-click buy that keeps customers coming back? Or is it mostly for the cash their reward program provides that makes them tolerate your 7 step checkout process which should not be that long in any case in at least?
Knowing the answers to those questions helps crafting compelling messaging for your offsite ads and onsite branding. In addition, visitor recency and loyalty reports that show latent conversions can help you identify the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns. Your top 25 keywords might also give some insight on how they come about your store. Or visits to purchase ratio, days to purchase can uncover what it takes to convince people to buy on your site.
Focusing on your converting traffic only can assist you in seeing what makes them buy. Another good one that might open the gate to consumption patterns of your audience that you can use as opportunities for increasing average order size. Impulse buy based on 3 rd party reference, powered by reviews, efficient product description and free shipping makes Amazon Books profitable for 5 years from my own behavior. It is always the same pattern, automatic and easy that if the frequency of marketing is dialed up, makes me transact more often without much thought.
What makes your customers delighted to share their site experience with their friends and more? The answer to this question taps into a fountain of potential free marketing that you can dig into. Does your site make your heavy users so happy that they volunteer to spread the wealth? What are the scenarios when they would benefit more out of sharing? Most of these questions come from marketing or business strategy framework and seem to get lost in the process when we plug in ourselves deeply into the operations data and speak in metrics terms only.
These business questions should drive your metrics drilldown and up and sideways, while also painting a holistic picture of complex, but functioning organism your site! Do internet technologies shape our behavior or our online patterns allow for their emergence? Similar to chicken-and-egg argument which was recently resolved , there are new developments in how companies interact with customers or how our web habits and all the accumulated data reform they way we do things. The top 5 evolving trends worth noting and expanding on are as follows:.
Today, it is pretty much expected, not shocking to social savvy online audience to have the ability to integrate with their favorite brands online. Amazon recently launched its product reviews feature with Facebook, providing a new social shopping experience that allows people see what their friends are looking for, buying, wishlisting and indulging into.
That makes us all so much more connected and closer to each other! If that functionality catches on, it can truly change how we associate with each other, in regards to how fast we can screen each other in and out, or get to know as social human beings. It also has a potential to enrich our relationships since all that info will be available and easily accessible.
That site feature makes it easy for us to accomplish our tasks, get what we are searching for. So many intrinsic benefits are interwoven into the experience! Game element is also very much a must and present there. It works perfectly to keep the interest alive for a while, which is also backed up with tangible rewards and providing users the ability to feel important, accepted and happily justified about their purchases. Popularity of Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt and similar applications exemplify this trend.
It is a win-win situation for both marketers and consumers. Hot Potato now trains us openly into sharing our statuses beyond consumed services and attended events. It allows us being more social and expressive within our micro worlds in real time! Here, we are experiencing exponential social engagement that definitely transcends our physical reality of engaging with only a limited number of folks at a time. No need to login to Facebook now. It could very much spread into the adoption by consumers of a specific kind, i.
Mobile web and apps are becoming a traditional, a given channel for many stores, sites, networks. Sending postcards goes mobile too with an element of game with SwingVine a Seattle start-up! Yay for the city! Our all times favorite Old Spice campaign actively engaged its audience with personalized videos and tweets. It did have two other success variables: But, clearly, the biggest contributor to its success was the interactive element that allowed its audience to experience being personally addressed within the campaign.
Customers and prospects now could become part of the campaign, not through the contest of touting the product, but through being in the spotlight, with a personal attention from the brand! All that is based on the data tracked throughout the checkout process that also becomes useful to the other side of the IM to deliver personalized service when your converting customers need it! Integration of clickstream analytics into the CRM tool, which also automates the creation of lead profiles, will surely scare off some of us. From the potential customer perspective, how pleasant would it be to get approached by the company which seems to be capable to sense your emerging needs?
Groupon also lately launched the functionality to choose your deals of the day content based on your interests, which will definitely skyrocket its conversion based on all the relevancy and condition us, users to consume our favorite products more often and sometimes in a good company! The old fashioned technique of a good sales person, transformed into the online world, is gaining momentum with both the consumers and the merchants.
It is becoming as convenient to rely on this personalization widget as typing phone numbers into our phones and never bothering to remember the actual digits. Coupled with the product reviews, it drove me to add one or two items to the cart.
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This feature adds 3 or 4 books to my shelf every time I shop on Amazon for a specific topic of interest. No need to look at the crystal ball, you will have all the analytics clearly telling you the purchasing behaviors. Your customers have already done all the thinking and justifying on why it is a good mix, why not offer it to the similar buyers?
User-generated cross-sell is the official name of this feature in the industry. Wet Seal does a great job on utilizing user-generated cross-sell by offering entire outfits made by its customers via social contests and fan related initiatives. Any customer, or a human being, for that matter, will appreciate this white glove escorting into the world of similar satisfying consumption.
Plus, it is automated for you as a merchant, but appears as a personal touch to your customers granted you have a good technology behind to deliver relevant options.
The industry is buzzing about mobile again; your team is open to try the new channel. However, before you embark on a mobile marketing journey, here are top 10 things you should check against to make a better decision whether to add a mobile campaign to your marketing mix or develop a mobile app store. Is your audience mobile-savvy?
Does your research support the fact that your customers interact with any other brands, using their phones? If your audience is there, and savvy enough to have access to mobile web and is used to some opt-in interaction, you have a first pass checkmark. Alternatively, if your customer is also open to education in this area and does have mobile phones with data plans in possession most of the time; you can still have a chance of introducing this method of engagement. You know your customers and how they interact with your product or might interact if it is new , when they buy and how they arrive at those purchasing decisions.
Is mobile a good way to speed up their buyer cycle? Can your customer make a decision based on very limited information at that point while on the go? What is the value you can provide to your customers? You cannot simply throw your message at your customers. Mobile is a very personal channel as your audience is virtually available to you most of the time. It must be either of each:. What are the legal implications, conditions that I should be aware of? This also logically leads to point 5 below. Other precautions include all other familiar suspects: You cannot buy mobile phone lists and start marketing.
Particularly, due to the anti spam law above and the issue of privacy. Thus, you will have to build those from scratch and invite your customers to participate via other channels, gradually but surely. You will have no benchmarks. Mobile marketing is still emerging and only a few players already tasted its benefits and pitfalls.
In addition, there are a lot of variables to make those benchmarks comparable if they were to exist a. You must integrate your mobile advertising or commerce into other channels for it to succeed. Yes, you need to promote this new channel and tell your customers about this option elsewhere: Plenty of decisions here, since no matter where you go, the experience might not be the same for all users due to differences in how various devices and carriers render the code.
Mobile search experience is different from the desktop. Mostly due to differences in what users choose to use to do the search: More coverage on mobile SEO can be found here. The new channel comes with a pleasant assortment of tools that you can consider: Once you discover what works for your product, do not forget to integrate your mobile marketing into other channels to start enjoy its benefits! Or review some of the best practices shared by Cindi Krum in her freshly released mobile marketing book I got my copy today! Also, if you are more inclined to consume the latest developments in mobile anything from the technical perspective, there is mobiForge for that too!
Error messages may run havoc on your customer engagement strategy whether you are running an ecommerce site or launching online promotions. You can lose leads and sales easily if you do not account for them. Or you can find ways to make them work for you by closely watching their occurrence and customer behavior that follows. Try to explain the reason of this message in a human language and communicate it succinctly.
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Please do…[ whatever you want them to do ].. I know I would give up at that point. Thus, construct your forms and functional errors accordingly — by making them appear inline with the filling out process, or adding interactive elements when possible. Linda Bustos, has a great post on inline validation within the shopping carts. This happened to me a month ago. DSW email marketing folks appeared to have planned for this contingency. How lucky can you get if the site is down? I was happy to continue shopping at DSW and share the story with my friends. So, follow the DSW example of using web analytics to track your potential errors, especially if you know the limitations of your systems.
They will pay you with feedback! Without mistakes, how would we know what we had to work on? So, do not fret if you find a few in your current app. Category pages are like aisles in the store — are to guide us through the shopping process. But online shopping differs from the on-site experience: First time online shopping on a particular site — i. Remember your confusion when you go to the same brand grocery store in a new city…even in your own city, but a different store: So what are the ways to display your products effectively? There are 4 common practices that are easily observable, used mostly as a mix of all or some:.
Hence the main goal for you as a site manager, is to provide clues to your shoppers to locate the products, group them into sets and narrow down by various product variables. The narrowing down part is the most crucial functionality of category pages — not the amount of information on the page. My favorite sites that do a great job in helping shoppers decide are: The trick is to make the process as efficient and fast to help us decide which one of those items to spend our hard or smart earned money on! Not only it provides shoppers with shortcuts, but also shifts the inventory based on demand.
Do not let them give up on you and move to another store! Personalized product recommendations consistently increas e revenue, conversion rates, average order value and impact customer loyalty significantly.
And this is not an exhausted list either. Mobile shopping has yet a long way to go to become mainstream, but mobile programs gain momentum fast to make Internet retailers pay close attention to their influence on ecommerce. Ongoing gradual customer adoption of mobile phones into everyday life has touched consumer behavior in a number of ways that are to be watched and utilized by online merchants. Some of the scenarios might not directly involve making a purchase through the phone or convert online after using a phone.
Thus, having an m-site for a major brand manufacturer that sells online and offline or even a web-only retailer, becomes a competitive advantage. Consider the following scenarios recently observed by buyer behavior experts:. Shoppers, while in brick-n-mortar stores access ratings and reviews more often through their phones to get a closer look at the item in consideration.
Shoppers, while in stores or away somewhere still pondering on the item of potential purchase, use their time and a mobile device in hand to conduct product research through texting using a text message service RetrevoQ that spits out the needed info in a text message, why not build this mobile program in addition to an m-site or in lieu of it at the moment? Shoppers, while in stores, take pictures of products of interest and conduct their search on mobile devices right on the spot. Why not offer this visual search functionality on your site, make sure it is integrated with visual search app, etc.
How much does an m-site cost?
It is ironic how things in life come back to you in a spiral manner sometimes. Which is exactly the same thought that tortured me for about a week till I discovered work by Steve Jackson so generously shared with all of us in his Cult of Analytics book. His 4 attributes on p. This advice is not new and has been declared many times to anyone who faced data analysis.
At the same time, it is also not very much followed. Similar to the exercise prescription in addition to the diet, data segmentation gets a lower follow through. But, if you do it once, you will never take data any other way! By segmenting, you are able to find trends since you put data in a context. In this respect, you view your KPIs as predictable subjects. Avinash Kaushik has a great insight on how to do just that — use the statistical tools of upper and lower controls to define the normal playfield for your data.
Some suggest to use 3 standard deviations to calculate controls, some make sense to use just 1 as in Visits per Page as a Lower Limit possible. If I use 3, I will be expanding a range of behavior too wide if my data fluctuates frequently. If I use 1, it creates a too narrow field. I hope to get the answer very soon and for now I plan to watch all three scenarios.
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When tasked with optimizing ecommerce site, many of efforts will be included in the entire project. So what are the basics to adhere to or run a diagnostics on? Shopping cart as an icon - must be visible at all times to help users go smoothly throughout the shopping experience. It should provide the customers with options to make a decision at any moment they are ready, at a search page, at a product page and more.
Action to add t o cart — must be visible too. Usually, AJAX allows that to happen.
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It also helps to somehow visibly note that the addition just took place and it was successful. Always disclose costs — as those are the key information a shopper needs throughout the evaluation process of other items to add. You do not want that, do you? You can even add options of color change, functionality upgrade right at that moment. It would also pay off if you enable them with multiple shipping and billing functions, email the order confirmation themselves, split the order into multiple shipment groups and on. Show any loyalty programs benefits and build the relationship.
Re-assure your shoppers on the future benefits they will get while buying from you. Who would ever want to leave your cart after that? Explain within the UI ability to hover over as an example the shipping charges and return policies. Be generous with service and information upfront. Throughou t the checkout experience, make sure your customers know at all times where they are — make sure the visual cues are consistent in the main navigation and in the checkout pages.
Make the online experience thrilling and enjoyable when users see that they can save and get a deal. Promotions are highly effective in driving order completion. Place those properly at various points. Make them easily visible above the fold. Make sure that users can also go back and change the coupon codes. Do not deactivate that option once they added one coupon and it appeared incorrect. This pet peeve of mine sent me away from the sale so many times! Use conventional user-friendly icons and nomenclature — make it easy for us to shop.
Do not teach us a new way of online shopping even if you have the coolest site built on the latest technology. Welcome new users without getting personal upfront — if you able to fulfill the sales without registration, please do so. First time and casual shoppers will be more inclined to complete a sale if you make it fast and low commitment for them right there. You can still capture their email openly by communicating future incentives if the cart was abandoned. Wish to go beyond the top 10? Both are very worthwhile reads! Online reviews for apartments, furniture and local area services and neighborhood amenities very much influenced my choice of the zip code to live, an apartment complex to choose to shortlist and large furniture items to consider.
It is all good and fancy on the perfect website — the pictures are stellar, the web copy is all flattery and a price seems to be within the range. But, I still have a cold feet feeling. And, I did have to ask for those twice, because on my first request, I got the same photos I had seen on all websites where this product was shown. The lesson was to remain beware and careful. So, I went digging and searched for reviews, not just on those sites — but everywhere online. And, this is where the bits of true customer experiences started to come out, warning me about some features that I would not even think of or confirming my prior research.
But, it would be not wise not to utilize this time and experience-tested well of information. I asked and I got my questions resolved. Imagine of there were an app that would advise my friends on the things in Dallas I would be interested in — as a fresh local? Could some piece be triggered in Facebook settings that noticed the change from Seattle to Dallas and prompted my friends on either side to recommend new places, granted that most people enjoy giving recommendations? Still psyched about Facebook and all it has to offer? So, what are you waiting for?
Go ahead and replicate! It does, if you think of the value of speed when it comes to online sales. Simultaneously, the speeding comes in different flavors:. Regardless of this double sword situation, online retailers become resourceful and find new ways to accelerate site performance by:.
Even Amazon, the online giant, recently started providing same day delivery. And if this offer becomes standard, imagine its effect on bricks-and-mortar stores.
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The instant gratification need is very much solved by this move and more companies will emulate this strategy in the near future. So in sum, this is illustrated by:. Will that make you buy today and now? This is especially critical in current times, when carriers stopped providing best rates based on volume.
Making shopping online more fun for people and profitable for businesses
The last tactic is very much enjoyed by smaller retailers that shine in creativity when it comes to promotions run to beat the big dog. Examples of the most common ones are:. Stimulates come backs loyalty! Indeed, online coupons and groupons make it easier for us, expense-conscious consumers, get to enjoy the luxuries we used to afford effortlessly before.
Thus, all in all, speed rules the online shopping today. So go ahead and speed up your site, your delivery or the purchase decision of your customers! What makes a site an ecommerce site? What makes one successful selling online? Those kinds of questions ran back and forth in my head all month, which brought me to come up with a simple framework. Every piece of this simple summation should function well to make the entire body, in our case, a site, work. Thus, favoring one over the other two can lead to imbalance and performance issues.
So care and pamper each ingredient specifically and pay attention to overall combination. Persistence, most of the times, pays off in life. The same applies to advertising. Your audience might be at various points of consideration for your product and it is only natural that it can lose its attention for some time due to other events happening simultaneously. In the industry, re-marketing is also known as re-targeting or re-messaging.
Remind them about the benefits they receive, provide them with appealing discount offers and your efforts will pay off in repeat business — Amen! If you are responding to either one reason above, you should revisit your online advertising budget to find a spot to drive return conversions. And the industry is opening up with opportunities for easy implementation. Though, re-targeting is a growing trend in online advertising, there are a number of well-established players that provide specifically this service.
At the same time, most online advertising platforms started to work on providing this solution or already doing so. Simultaneously, web analytics industry players are also getting into the space. This, all in all, creates a healthy competition and a number of quality choices for online marketers, like you and I!
People are not spending as much regardless quite appealing discounts, but online business is still doing well according to Forrester report for Can you believe, if I say, it is good marketing, in the form of rich media ads or experiences, well-targeted email marketing, paid search and enabling mobile shopping opportunities? At the same time, it is not quite as odd as it seems — without marketing and advertising your online business might lose its running fuel and vanish.
So what are the secrets of steady online business? Through browsing the latest ecommerce guides , I distinguish the following factors contributing to present online success:. Examples of using rich media are: And there are more of those!